7 Comments

Now - yes!

"We need to have a different conversation, with different rhythms, sentences and languages"

Thank you for making this offering!

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I just watched the whole video from Centre for Humane Technology and was discussing with my husband what saying NO! might look like when your post arrived. Thank you Spirit and thank you Deena

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Apr 17, 2023·edited Apr 17, 2023

YES to: AI: NO!

For a month I have been thinking about Hannah Arendt and what she valued deeply which is "public discourse." I long for such a discourse. This essay and the one prior Deena Metzger wrote on AI must be a part of a public discourse...linchpin of democracy. It has nearly LEFT us. I follow the Hannah Arendt Center (Bard College) dispatches weekly. I was about to send Roger Berkowitz, Director of the HAC, a letter to ask IF the Center was going to take up the AI dilemma facing us all when, today, his essay appeared: "AI and the Human Condition "the latter of course Arendt's masterful treatise on the "Human Condition." The last two essays here of Metzger, I will make sure get to Professor Berkowitz...cobbling together a discourse-like response from the edges here. THANK YOU DEENA. If you want to see Berkowitz's essay from today here is the link...maybe we just need to grow a PUBLIC Discourse together! https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/artificial-intelligence-and-the-human-condition-2023-04-16 Sharon Simone

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So poignant!

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Yes.

And thankyou to the other commenters. I've been avoiding AI news, but braved this one. We'll, it's Deena. And the timing. The conversation here, seen and unseen. Language activism and deep ecology and indigenous listening has been my workshop world for nearly 20 years, and I've been working on deepening/opening the work now to match the world need. On my knees, ears to the ground and wind. So I'm trying the newsletter path to try and both reach more people (extend the conversation) and focus and still my own courage. Deep thanks again to everyone here.

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We’ve grown so arrogantly in love with our own devices, spending so much more time staring into them, becoming enamored of our own reflection and what it says back to us, like a technological Narcissus ever in love in a feedback loop of self-adoration. Since our institutions, our religions, our politics have become essentially godless, AI fits right in with a limited and materialistic view of humanity, reducing us to a view only of ourselves. This is indeed a spiritual issue about what we value, and how we make sense of the world around us. What of symbolic logic that’s embedded in our dreams? What of synchronicity and mystery, which are deeply integral to the way energy moves, not only in the subatomic realm but in our lives as well? There are levels of understanding that AI cannot fathom, the deepest of which is the significance of the sacredness of all life.

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