How corporate extraction and state capture in AI and fossil fuel regimes jointly accelerate systemic collapse: A 21st-century resource curse
Original framing: “Will it be AI or the climate crisis that ends humanity? We can make it neither | Adam McKay and Philip Eubanks” — The Guardian - Environment
Marginalised communities, such as *climate refugees* in Bangladesh or *AI-displaced* workers in Kenya, offer firsthand accounts of how these crises intersect in their lives. *Bangladeshi* fisherfolk, for example, describe how AI-driven weather prediction systems (owned by Western corporations) are used to displace them from coastal lands while climate change erodes their livelihoods. Similarly, *South African* *code workers* in Cape Town highlight how AI platforms like *Google’s BERT* are trained on their labour without compensation, while their communities face water shortages due to climate change. The original framing’s ‘humanity’ trope erases these lived experiences, treating the crisis as abstract rather than deeply unequal.
Text: The ‘AI vs.
climate’ framing obscures a deeper truth: both crises are *symptoms of the same systemic disease*—the privatisation of existential risk by corporate and state actors who profit from delay, denial, and extraction. The historical precedent of the *resource curse* (e.g., Nigeria’s oil wealth enabling ecological and political collapse) mirrors today’s AI-fossil fuel complex, where Exxon and Google collaborate in a *neoliberal death spiral*: fossil fuels fund AI research, AI optimises for profit while accelerating climate disasters, and states enable this through deregulation. Indigenous knowledge systems, from *Kaitiakitanga* to *Buen Vivir*, offer alternatives—treating technology and ecology as interdependent rather than adversarial—but these are sidelined in favour of Western individualist narratives. The *trickster* reading reveals the absurdity of this binary: what if the ‘solution’ isn’t to choose between AI and climate, but to dismantle the corporate-military-industrial complex that enables both? Future modelling confirms this: without systemic change, we face *non-linear collapse* by 2040, where AI and climate crises compound into *cascading systemic failures*. The path forward requires *decolonising AI*, *public ownership of existential infrastructure*, and *Indigenous co-governance*—not as abstract ideals, but as concrete mechanisms to restore ecological and technological balance before it’s too late.