In this compelling work, Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading public intellectual,^B and Robert Pollin, a renowned progressive economist, map out the catastrophic consequences of unrestricted climate change – and present a realistic blueprint for change: the Green New Deal.

Together, Chomsky and Pollin show how the forecasts for a hotter planet strain the imagination: vast stretches of the Earth will become uninhabitable, plagued by extreme weather, drought, rising seas, and crop failure. Arguing against the misplaced fear of economic disaster^A and unemployment arising from the transition to a green economy,^C they show how this bogus concern encourages climate denialism.

Humanity must stop burning fossil fuels within the next thirty years and do so in a way that improves living standards^D and opportunities for working people.^E This is the goal of the Green New Deal and, as the authors make clear, it is entirely feasible. Climate change is an emergency that cannot be ignored, and it can be overcome both politically and economically.

(https://www.amazon.com.br/ Climate-Crisis-Global-Green-Deal/dp/178873985X. Adaptado)

Noam Chomsky, the revered and reviled genius once famously described^A as “the most important intellectual alive”, turned^B 95 on December 6, 2023. He is a monumental figure in modern linguistics, and only a slightly lesser deity in psychology, philosophy and political activism.

His work establishing cognitive science as a discipline is so fundamental to the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that it’s rarely acknowledged anymore. Amid the ongoing alarm that language-simulating machines could become a net negative for humanity, one wonders whether that keeps him up at night.

His stardom came in 1959 with his legendary review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour. Skinner, a psychologist and behaviorist, was enjoying the limelight in psychology circles with his theory of “operant conditioning” to encourage certain behaviours. For instance, a gold star awarded by a teacher for good behavior will encourage more of it from students. He tried^C to expand this idea into linguistics by breaking language down into components that are supposedly acquired via operant conditioning.

Chomsky completely disagreed^D with the idea and showed how useful it could be to examine the mind instead of just behavior in language-related areas like anthropology, psychology and neuroscience.

It’s not hard to see how Chomsky’s ideas of generative grammar and deep structure go hand in hand with today’s generative AI and deep learning. Without them, experts couldn’t have delved so deeply into neural networks. They wouldn’t have understood language well enough to even begin. His approach is a thread that has connected^E generations of AI researchers.

Still, about language-simulating machines becoming a threat, that does not keep him up at night. He seems to regard AI as a secondary worry compared with climate change.

(theconversation.com. Adaptado)