In March 2026, Confluence Philanthropy and our subsidiary, Overview Effect, launched a call to action. Metaphorically, our message was contextualized in a call to “protect the moon”. Five months later, tech space junk cratered our moon, the first man-made catastrophe of this kind. When I introduced the call to action in March, I may have sounded a bit like a lunatic – how does the moon relate to setting investment safeguards for the tech and AI industries?
Mining the moon is projected to become a multi-hundred-billion industry within a decade. These activities are aimed at producing helium-3, water ice, rare earth minerals, and titanium, all of which are needed to feed and cool data centers and AI. Moreover, a moon-based station shortens the trip to Mars by four days, by some projections.
The point is simple: these industries are out of control and nothing – not even our most sacred celestial body – is off limits. Consider that every Earthly being, for all of our planet’s history, has experienced the moon as a fundamental part of their existence. Perhaps less poetically, the moon governs our tides and womens' bodies. We have no understanding about what altering it in any way will do to our planet.
Lunar mining grossly exemplifies the lack of respect, care, and caution integral to the ‘vision’ of some architects determining our future.
On the surface, this positioning may sound like a Luddite response to tech and AI. But our perspectives are not completely oppositional. What we highlight are the real impacts of the current AI vision without safeguards or any form of precautionary planning.
While AI is already contributing to significant advances in medicine, business, communication, and other areas, the fact remains that these advances are already exacerbating and creating new crises on Earth and beyond, due to impacts on communities, personal privacy, mental health, workers’ rights, democratic practices, the environment, and – literally – space.
To be truly groundbreaking, AI must protect our world and beyond. AI ethicists understand that the true potential of AI is in its ability to uplift humanity, while safeguarding and empowering future generations. To achieve this, AI must be guided by shared human values and the protection of human rights. Similarly, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI, underscores that AI must serve humanity, rather than concentrating immense power in the hands of a few.
Perhaps most importantly, AI must hold sacred organic life and the protection of our solar system if we are to live long and prosper alongside our synthetic intellectual offspring.
That’s why we are asking every values-driven institution to outline their approach to technology and AI holdings in their investment policy statement.
Prioritizing and Protecting Organic Life
Technology safeguards must ensure that technology and AI are in service to organic life, instead of advancing technology at the cost of our collective biological future. To ensure this outcome, we must achieve the vision of the biocentric economy, an economic system that places organic life at its center, rather than the advancement of technological business interests and profit margins.
A biocentric economic model emphasizes that true economic prosperity is not just about human wealth accumulation and metrics such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – it must be rooted in ecological wellbeing, cultural biodiversity, and the overall flourishing of organic life.
We wonder: what if we trained large language models to create a biocentric economy with the thinking that they may co-exist only by protecting organic life? How does AI die? By harming life.
Then, perhaps, AI might prioritize an end to the ecological crisis, even if only to preserve its own future. Maybe it might learn to communicate with marine mammals in the depths of the seas to understand ocean health. Or discover how redwoods manage to live for centuries by nourishing entire forests. How does Mother Nature tirelessly engineer the fragile regulation and balance of our inextricably interwoven biological lives? Answer that, AI. It’s systems and pattern. You’re the expert.
Technology and AI used in partnership with our planet would redefine how we understand ourselves as just one form of intelligent life interdependent with all other organisms on Earth, the Moon, and beyond.
Tackling the Planetary Crisis
As one of the earliest impact investing networks to confront the environmental crisis with a membership centered in science, Confluence knows that we won't live well past the mid-century without technology to protect humans from uncontrollable climate impacts. In exploring the depth of climate solutions, we know that real solutions lie at the intersections of ecology, technology, and AI, and that false solutions will only harm all of us more deeply.
Many scientists might even argue that we can't solve climate change without the aid of untested, large-scale technologies. Some think that geoengineering, carbon capture, and other invasively dangerous technologies are the only solutions. But as we learn more with the help of AI, we can better understand our Earth and solve ecological crises in partnership with nature. There is vast potential for AI to develop datasets to advance environmental solutions, track melting icebergs, map deforestation, predict weather patterns and climate disasters, tackle ocean pollution, support decarbonization, and promote more effective material resource management.
Confluence members are already at the vanguard of real solutions. For example, Humanity AI, a collaborative philanthropic initiative sponsored by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and supported by the MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, and other partners, is dedicated to ensuring AI serves the public good. The initiative recently announced $18 million in new grants. Moreover, an initiative led by Elemental Impact and backed by several tech giants is applying cleantech solutions to data centers. There can be so much more to come if we just decide that protecting organic life, above synthetic life, is fundamental to our futures.
At Confluence, we are not opposed to tech and AI. We challenge the weaponization of these unimaginably powerful tools at a time when we don’t have a moment to waste to stop the ecological crisis and to protect life as we know it. We oppose the unethical use of technology and AI exclusively for financial gain. And we do not accept leaders who have already given up on humanity and the future of our Earth.
At the heart of ethical investing is our understanding that technological evolution must fundamentally respect and coexist alongside all other life.