IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020 - 63

and factual interpretations with perceived social
norms [29], [30].
Some bots specifically aim to achieve greater influence Bots are capable of achieving influence in real life
networks by aggregating followers and expanding their
social circles. They do this by identifying and attracting
the attention of influential people in the networks, inserting into popular discussions and calling attention to
themselves by sending inquiries to the most popular and
influential people. Using keyword searches online, they
can generate topically appropriate and even possibly
interesting content [28, p. 99].
The so-called Oregon petition campaign against climate policy that reached tens of thousands in the 1990s
is a clumsy prelude to how new AI-supported technologies increase the power to shape public factual understandings and opinions. "Conjuring science" [31] by
falsely appearing sanctioned by peer-reviewed science,
the discredited 1998 petition still has life on social
media, where it was the most circulated climate story in
2016 [32]. And such misinformation has great persuasive
power, when some three-quarters of adult Americans are
prone to believe fake news [24, p. 9]. Use of bots in such
influence campaigns are growing cheaper and therefore
much more accessible and plentiful. Using misappropriated data from millions of Facebook profiles, narrow AI
methods have helped Donald Trump, Jaír Bolsonaro, and
other authoritarian political leaders win power in countries holding the key to conservation of global biodiversity and carbon stocks. (Instead, these leaders are
dismantling already insufficient environmental controls
and other safeguards for public and environmental safety
and health.) As The Guardian noted in the wake of news
of spikes in deforestation and withdrawal of support for
climate change, "the planet can't take many more Bolsonaros" [33]. Sowing confusion and disorientation is a
deliberate strategy witnessed among populist leaders.
According to one of Donald Trump's former campaign
executives, Trump's deliberate strategy was to "keep
things moving so fast, to talk so loudly - literally and
metaphorically - that the media, and the people, can't
keep up" [24, p. 6]
Narrow AI has thus already proved to be astonishingly dangerous for democracy, human well-being, and sustainability prospects [28]. Already driving major
decisions of corporations in Silicon Valley and in Wall
Street firms [2], narrow AI is developing with such speed
and consequences that some foresee that the significance of its impact will be analogous to the Cambrian
explosion in the evolution of life, when organisms
changed from single-cell to multiple-cell organisms over
500 million years ago [34]. This suite of persuasive technologies are likely to increase socio-economic inequality - and spread doubt about climate change - unless
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deliberately and intentionally governed now, democratically, wisely, and urgently [20].

Current Media Structures and AI Shape Public
Values, Society, and Our Common Future
Scholars acknowledge the need for misinformation
campaigns to be blocked, proposing political and
technical - including AI - means of doing so [25,
35]. Even so, a foundational assumption in mainstream
environmental research is that, barring such campaigns, current information environments are neutral,
or at least adequate for necessary changes to take
place in coming years. Scientific ideals of staying

Prominent "transformative" policy
frameworks need to harness
AI-steeped information and
communications technologies
to foster positive changes in
understanding, care, and mass action.
above the fray of politics, as well as cultural preconceptions, may also feed positions to this effect. Depoliticized understandings of communication systems as
neutral, and of "the communication challenge" as a
mere problem of choosing the right words and framings, continue to prevail among climate scientists and
other public-policy scholars [9], as do suggestions that
media don't really matter because of people's cognitive resistance, ignoring media's role in the deeper
conditioning of subjectivities [36].
Current, predominantly corporate commercial
media systems are largely accepted as benevolent or at
least "natural," especially in the United States [37, p.
493]. Historian Fred Turner traces deeper historical
roots of this depoliticized conception of mass media,
and a pervasive assumption that they should be governed and structured without central state control. He
documents a general distrust and aversion to the use
of mass media to shape public values, partly a
response to fascism in 1930s and 1940s Germany. An
ambivalence about using mass media was "resolved"
by opting for a fragmented, largely private, decentralized communications system as the best way to
improve public life while avoiding the danger of

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020

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