TOO often, we portray climate change and its consequences as a nightmare. But people don’t like listening to nightmares. They don’t want to believe in nightmares; they want to believe in hope. They want to believe in something different, something better. We need to articulate the debates and discussion around climate change in that context.

Policy-makers don’t make the environment and climate change real for people, mattering to their everyday lives and their everyday experience. We are too generalist in the way in which we talk about it. Mention the environment or climate change, and people’s eyes tend to glaze over.

But talk to them about their own little patch of environment – about the river at the bottom of their village, or the landscape that surrounds where they live, or the urban streetscape and the way in which it is fashioned – and they become really passionate. They are committed to it. They worry about it. They hope for it. They know what they want to change.

Can we link that passion for the local environment with the general principles that surround its management? The public are concerned. They are keen to see progress, and politicians would be mistaken to think that the public don’t care. I believe that while voters don’t see the environment as an overt national priority, they do see it as an underlying sine qua non – something that has to be looked after, that has to underpin everything else.

So there is hope in this field; it’s not just about going to hell in a handcart. The environment in the UK has been improving over the last 10 or 15 years – I’m thinking about air and water quality and looking after our land. Part of that is down to the hard work of the Environment Agency. Look at the major successes: the dramatic reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions; reductions in nitrogen oxide levels; reduction in the discharge of pollutants to rivers; and improved water quality, which has seen fish return to rivers from the Thames to the Mersey. There are otters in every county in England, which couldn’t have been said a few years ago.

So we have made cleaner, better places here in the UK, and we have done that through a mixture of action, hard work, regulation and by bringing pressure to bear on polluters. That’s a success story; it’s something that can be done. Beyond that, there’s a huge economic opportunity in environmental improvement and tackling climate change, by saving money on existing processes and products. In addition, there are new products and services to be brought to market.

And it can be done around the world. Look at the amount China is investing in renewable energy such as wind power. It is doing so because it is concerned about its environment: the air quality in its cities, the water it is dependent on from the melting glaciers of the Himalayas. We have seen progress in the US, too, under Barack Obama. Even in Russia, a majority of business leaders are saying that they feel they need to take climate change seriously. So there is scope out there for alliances, for getting countries around the world to agree and do things together.

At the personal level, there’s a temptation to think, “What can I as an individual do? If I recycle a bit more, if I make some energy efficiency, if I travel less, if I try to generate less carbon – what is the use of that when China is building another coal-fired power station next week?” But that way lies disaster. If we all thought more positively – “Yes, we can each do a tiny bit” – then it adds up.

Over the past 20 years, for example, householders in Germany have embraced renewable energy initiatives, adding them to their properties: there are solar panels and wind turbines everywhere. This was helped by feed-in tariffs, of course, but there was also a real surge in individual effort to embrace renewable energy. That has made a big difference to Germany’s carbon footprint – all thanks to millions of individuals doing their own thing.

Individual action doesn’t just make people think about themselves, but it reminds them why all of this is important. And that in itself is a good thing.

To watch Chris Smith’s speech in full, including his 12-point plan for policy-makers, visit . Read more on sustainable living in our in-depth article “We can build a sustainable world – if you want it“

This article appeared in print under the headline “Brighter shades of green”

In the follow-up film, 2010, this process is reversed as HAL is brought
back to life. But why would HAL have been taught the song in the first place?
Why would a computer assigned the task of running a space station ever need
to know a silly, simple song? Why, for that matter, do children need to
know nursery rhymes?

The answer is that knowledge has to be extensively interlinked for us
to function as well as we do, and that the human brain is built the way
it is in order to cope with the vast amount of knowledge which we accumulate.
Each of the 100 billion neurons in the brain is connected to up to 1000
others. This means that items of knowledge are interdependent and that newly
acquired knowledge is integrated with existing knowledge, so that learning
becomes a process of learning that which you almost know. This, in turn,
means that the knowledge an adult possesses is to an extent dependent upon
and integrated with the knowledge acquired during childhood. However, the
brain is not merely a passive receptacle for knowledge. It is a powerful
editor and organiser of its contents, and childhood is the time for acquiring
many of the most basic strategies for handling the steady accumulation of
knowledge. The strategies and the knowledge are also mutually interdependent:
no knowledge means no strategies; no strategies means no more knowledge.

HAL was, therefore, programmed correctly. Its knowledge accumulation
had to begin with rudimentary information, a certain amount of which was
needed to trigger the earliest and simplest processes of reorganisation
and strategy acquisition, which would eventually become self-generating
and dependent only upon the provision of information. In time it could far
surpass humans and arrive at what the film calls ‘its foolproof and gigantic
intellect’, acquiring apparent, and perhaps actual, consciousness along
the way. It had been programmed to develop its own artificial intelligence
from the information it was provided with, but this information had to be
suitable for the particular stage its intellect had reached. A song was
its starting point. Children, on the other hand, start with more rudimentary
tasks such as acquiring the basic rules and concepts of language.

Computers today are not programmed for artificial intelligence as HAL
was. They are provided with adult-level information and, hopefully, adult-level
strategies for using it. There have been some successes. Expert systems,
for example, outperform humans in many areas such as the diagnosis of infectious
diseases and the interpretation of geological data. Chess-playing computers
can defeat all but the grandest of grand masters. Computers are potentially
superior in any area which involves quantifiable information in amounts
which are too large for humans to handle reliably. But there are limitations.
Each expert system, for example, works in only one domain of knowledge,
which it searches each time it is faced with a query. Scaling up such a
system to cope with the breadth and amount of knowledge possessed by, say,
a seven-year-old child would be impossible.

And there have been failures. Attempts to persuade computers to understand
and produce human language, for example, have progressed no further than
slow systems with small vocabularies and very limited conversational powers.
Although such a system may be able to respond sensibly and accurately to
a very specific question – about the times of planes between two cities,
for example, if airline travel is the system’s forte – it will be totally
thrown by questions about today’s weather, the likely cup winners or how
the second verse of Daisy, Daisy goes. Again, the problem is the system’s
tiny amount of knowledge and its inability to absorb more knowledge without
a fatal loss of speed.

Artificial vision systems remain myopic because their attempts to compute
what, say, a bicycle made for two looks like from the angles, dimensions
and shadings of the parts of the contraption are so complex that Daisy and
her suitor would have long since sped off into the distance before the system’s
attempts were complete. Lacking the concept of a tandem, the vision system
has no knowledge on to which to map its input, as a human does in achieving
recognition. And if such a system could be taught such a concept, what would
it do with it other than rapidly recognise tandems? A human, on the other
hand, is likely to have multiple associations between tandems, bicycles
and other forms of transport, and may, perhaps, have a personal equivalent
of Daisy.

Human intelligence is, therefore, dependent upon a vast and integrated
database of knowledge with a sophisticated management system to operate,
monitor and modify it – and artificial intelligence will have to be dependent
upon equivalents to these. The human system is largely acquired through
experience of and interaction with the world, and a successful artificial
intelligence system will need a similar ‘upbringing’. A child comes equipped
with the most sophisticated piece of hardware yet devised – its brain –
which has an operating system, but no software. Childhood, therefore, is
necessary for the development of the knowledge base and its management system.
It is a necessary cause of adult intelligence. Computers, too, need a childhood,
if they are to become truly intelligent.

‘My instructor,’ says HAL just before its final chorus, ‘was Mr Langley
and he taught me to sing a song.’ The fictional programmer of HAL was right
to treat his baby like a child.

Chris Smith is a lecturer in psychology at Lancashire Polytechnic.