Millions of people around the world now use AI companions — for friendship, emotional support, mental health counselling and romantic interactions. This includes 72 per cent of adolescents, according to one study from the United States.

Meanwhile, human-caused climate change has already led to widespread impacts and rising risks, some of them irreversible. Yet emissions remain high.

As a professor of finance, I see these phenomena as different expressions of the same underlying bias: we apply too high a discount rate to the future.

The idea of a discount rate is straightforward. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. The discount rate tells us by how much. Set that rate too high, and you systematically undervalue what lies ahead. Set it too low, and you over-invest in distant outcomes.

In many parts of life, we set this rate too high. Behavioural economist David Laibson showed that people place disproportionate weight on immediate rewards, even when this leads to worse outcomes over time.

In finance, we understand that valuation depends critically on the discount rate applied to future cash flows. In life, we continue to apply a discount rate that is too high, marking down the future to the point where it no longer meaningfully constrains the present.

What feels good now

Psychologist Hal Hershfield’s research on the future self helps explain why. People often perceive their future selves more as another person than as a continuation of who they are now. This makes it easier for the self that benefits today to shift costs onto the self that must bear them tomorrow.

Looking at this through a finance lens, it resembles a “principal-agent problem,” where managers may prioritize short-term incentives over the long-term interests of shareholders.

In both cases, the person making the decision does not fully bear the long-term cost. But the future does not disappear. It simply becomes easier to ignore.

Investment in relationships

This logic becomes easier to see if we look at how we build relationships. Strong relationships require time and a willingness to tolerate discomfort.

Trust and intimacy involve immediate effort but the benefits accumulate gradually. By contrast, autonomy and flexibility offer immediate rewards. They preserve options and reduce constraints, making it easy to defer relational investment.

But relationships, like other forms of capital, depend on sustained investment, and delayed investment is often hard to recover later.

The same logic can also be seen in family structures and broader social connections. Strong ties in families, friendships and communities depend on time and repeated interaction. Without it, those ties weaken.

As those ties weaken, loneliness becomes more likely. Research shows that loneliness and social isolation are associated with significant health risks. In this sense, loneliness can be understood as the long-term consequence of insufficient investment in connection when it was easier to build.

These patterns are not only individual. They also reflect the way modern life is increasingly organized around immediacy and convenience. Technology makes interaction faster, easier and more responsive, but many of the things that matter most in the long run still require time, patience and discomfort. The result is a social environment that increasingly rewards responsiveness over endurance.

Immediate benefits

Seen in this light, AI companions are not an anomaly. They are emerging in an era of widespread loneliness, where many people are seeking connection that feels reliable and low in emotional cost.

Back in 2002, pioneering research by Clifford Nass and Youngme Moon showed that people apply social rules to computers even when they know they’re not human. Almost 25 years later, research now suggests AI can provide emotional support and a real sense of companionship in the short term. From today’s perspective, this is an efficient solution: the benefits are immediate and reliable.

The concern is not that AI companionship fails. It’s that it succeeds too well in the present. By reducing effort, uncertainty and emotional risk, AI companions make connection easier to access but may also shift expectations in ways that are harder to sustain over time in human relationships. In that sense, they reflect the same trade-off: immediate comfort at the expense of longer-term relational depth.

The same logic extends beyond individual life and helps explain how societies respond to long-term problems.

Climate change is perhaps the clearest example. The impacts of our warming planet are already very evident and yet we’re slow to act. This is, in part, because the economic benefits of extraction and consumption are immediate, while many of the costs are delayed and dispersed across time.

A voiceless future

Across many human domains, from AI and personal relationships to climate change, the structure is the same: The present is immediate and rewarded; the future is abstract, distant and silent. So, decisions skew toward today.

This is not simply a matter of awareness or intention. It is structural. The future has no meaningful representation in present decision-making. It has no voice, no urgency and no direct claim. And so it’s discounted.

This is what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the “tragedy of the horizon.” Whether in the climate crisis or the loneliness epidemic, the catastrophic impacts will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of investment cycles and political terms.

Because the future has no seat at the board table, it is treated as an externality — a cost we don’t have to account for today, but one that is compounding at an unsustainable rate.

Until we find ways to give the future a real stake in present decisions, we will continue to choose what is easier now and pay for it later.

The tendency to discount the future is deeply human. But in a world increasingly shaped by AI systems, weakening social ties and accelerating climate risk, the costs of doing so are becoming harder to ignore.

Rahul Ravi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Canada geese are real-life gangsters. They are large, bold, highly adaptable and thrive in urban landscapes. Wherever they go, they leave their distinctive signature: cigar-shaped green feces.

The population of Canada geese has expanded rapidly in many North American cities, thanks to favourable urban environments — with abundant food from lawns, safe nesting sites and few predators — and supportive conservation actions over the past three decades.

These geese are indeed adorable, but in large numbers they can become a nuisance. They damage crops and compete with other water birds. They produce feces that are unpleasant to step on and carry pathogens — contaminating lawns and leading to the ecological collapse of water bodies.

A single goose can defecate every 20 minutes. Now, imagine how much fecal matter is produced every day by hundreds or thousands of geese in a city. There have been almost no efforts to explore beneficial uses for this waste.

Our research findings, published in the Journal of Environmental Management, suggest that goose poop could be used to create both a source of protein for animal feed and an agricultural fertilizer — using one of nature’s recycling powerhouses, the black soldier fly.

Goose feces to create poultry feed

The larvae of the black soldier fly are known for their remarkable ability to consume and break down organic waste, including animal waste from farms. They have never before been tested on Canada goose feces.

In our study, we fed black soldier fly larvae three different food diets: a standard nutrient-rich feed mixture of corn, wheat and alfalfa (the control), a mix of this feed and goose feces and finally a diet of only goose feces.

We also added another variable, sterilizing some of the feces. This was to help us understand whether fecal microorganisms have any effect on digestion.

The results were surprising: the insect was able to complete its full life cycle on Canada goose feces alone. In fact, it was able to consume a little more than half of this waste. The trade-off was a reduced body size and shorter lifespan, but this was not an issue because it did the job.

The larvae grew faster and gained a higher body weight when the feces were not sterilized, which suggests that microbes in the feces do provide some kind of benefit for insect development. Notably, the larvae that consumed the mixture of goose poop and nutrient-rich feed grew even better than those fed with the nutrient-rich feed alone, and they achieved similar fitness as adults.

These results suggest that black soldier fly larvae and goose poop could be used to power a large-scale organic waste treatment system. Goose feces could be collected from city parks and green spaces and transported to a facility where larvae could be reared on the waste.

These larvae could then be used as protein to feed poultry and in aquaculture, in a circular, “upcycling” approach to urban waste management.

Nutrient-rich fertilizer

Larval digestion also produces a residue known as frass. Black soldier fly frass has been tested in several studies, mainly on terrestrial crops where it has improved plant growth and yield.

We decided to test the potential of frass produced using Canada goose feces — as a fertilizer for duckweed, a fast-growing aquatic plant with high protein content used in animal feed, biofuel production and wastewater treatment.

For this experiment, we tested three different potential duckweed fertilizers. The first (the control) was an ideal solution containing the nutrients necessary for duckweed growth. The second was untreated Canada goose feces. The third was frass from the digestion of Canada goose feces by the black soldier fly larvae.

Duckweed growth increased by 30 per cent when the frass was applied, compared to the control fertilizer. We also found that duckweed roots grown in frass from feces were smaller than those grown in untreated feces — a typical response to a more nutrient-rich environment, where roots can readily access the nutrients.

A sustainable circular economy

Insect-based waste treatment facilities already exist at industrial scale. Entosystem, a company in Québec that produces insect proteins for feeding farm and domestic animals, uses black soldier fly larvae to convert food and organic waste into protein and fertilizer.

Biotechnology company Oberland Agriscience in Nova Scotia also uses black soldier fly larvae, combined with technologies like AI and robotics to transform organic waste into animal feed and soil products. NRGene in Saskatchewan is a research and demonstration centre also testing the black soldier fly for optimizing large-scale conversion of waste to protein.

Similar systems could be used for upcycling goose feces by the black soldier fly, rather than directing this waste to traditional waste facilities or landfills.

In this way, waste is converted into valuable resources for the agri-food industry: larvae can be used as feed for poultry or in aquaculture, frass can be applied as an organic fertilizer for various crops.

This eco-friendly approach reframes an urban wildlife conflict as an opportunity. It contributes to a sustainable circular economy where waste materials are reused, recycled or transformed into new resources.

Rassim Khelifa receives funding from NSERC CRC Tier 2 (CRC-2022-00134) and NSERC Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2024- 04564). Rassim Khelifa is a member of The Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science and The Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution.

Carlos Antonio Lopez Manzano receives funding from Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT) through the Merit Scholarship for Foreign Students (PBEEE). Member of the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science (QCBS) and the Aquatic Resources Quebec (RAQ).