Let’s begin this way: I am heartbroken. And grateful for it.
Outside my window, in the upper branches of a self-seeded Oak tree, now 40 feet high, an adolescent Raven is singing his liquid call which is so exquisite I assume it is a mating song for any creature hearing it will want to respond. I answer him with a heartbroken apology for threatening his life and his future. These are the Days of Awe when we are called to scrutinize our lives and make amends to all those we have offended. Amends to Spirit, amends to humans and, certainly, since the Industrial Revolution (1760) and then the beginning of the Anthropocene (1945), amends to Earth.
Today, I was forwarded a video in which a group of musicians on a boat off the coast of Chile play music which is also piped into the ocean. A whale, hears the music and sounds back in harmony, then breaches. [The video was posted by TikTok user @Davidmaiden].
Master Storyteller, Laura Simms, responded this way to the human whale, call and response:
“Oh my.. I cannot stop weeping. All the joy and the terrible sadness for what we are missing, destroying, ignoring. Every answer is in this video.”
On the one hand, Whale song and Raven song, and the wonder of life and Creation of which we are—or were—a part, and on the other hand, we are personally, liking it or not, submerged through the rapid, advancement of AI in an artificial environment manipulated by algorithms, standardized, limited and banal responses, themselves devised by special interests, so that our personal and cultural lives are significantly less original, organic, vibrant and vital.
Perhaps you too have noticed the increased interest, uncritical acceptance, the unabashed enthusiasm in the press and media for conversational and chat bots even for mental health, though incapable of original, thoughtful responses, feelings, connections, insight or spiritual understanding, but still presuming to simulate human beings and, the similar fascination with, acceptance of similarly reductive and potentially far more dangerous humanoid robots. Not that we want or need to create feeling or sensate robots—there are 7.98 billion people on the planet all capable of feeling, responses, compassion and ethical conduct. This is, isn’t it, a desire for slaves?
Perhaps you have chafed as I have with the pretense that AI and creativity are aligned through the new A.I. platforms DALL-E 2 , Midjourney, and Poem Generator which are now available to anyone. Maybe you have started wondering what art is really, or poetry? Can a profound and beautiful creation come from a bot that has no heart? Shall we ask the Tin Man what he thinks? Are not poetry and art the particular expression of humans deeply engaged in creating or illuminating meaning, connection and beauty? Isn’t the engagement itself an essential aspect of any form of art?
Or maybe you have wondered how your life might be changed by the robot Elon Musk is promising you by the end of the decade and only for $20,000—“less than a car,”— that will take care of all your needs, including, not only sexual, but relational, why not? It will change your life, he promises, and so it will, but in ways we seem naively, stubbornly, stupidly not to be considering in the torture rack we are on between the real and the manufactured, the living and the mechanical, the imaginative and the catatonic.
Last summer, I entered into dialogue with mathematician, writer, visionary thinker, Ralph Abraham, in an effort to call together a small council on artificial intelligence and ethics. After much disheartened discussion, I had to accept the conclusion that the subject was moot—the requirement to create such autonomous beings from an ethical foundation and to embed them with ethical minds was not intrinsic to their manufacture and was not likely. How clear it became to me that a society driven to the extreme by money, power and privilege was not going to shape its inventions according to social principles or to ideals of earth and social justice.
“For years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk warned people about the dangers of AI-powered robots, even predicting “scary outcomes” like in “The Terminator.” Now, he seems to be taking matters into his own hands before humanity is overrun. …The electric vehicle company will develop a humanoid robot prototype dubbed the “Tesla Bot,” Musk announced at Tesla’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Day on Thursday, September 29.”
A further announcement can be read here.
There was no ethical discussion nor, likely, will there be. We have been inundated without any serious public discussion. To the contrary, the ‘concerned’ response seems merely to be whether it will happen in the timeline announced or for the anticipated cost, or if it will quickly enough do what is predicted. I have seen no general discussion in the media about the enormous threat to all life this presages, but observe only a reflexive fascination with a new technology.
At the heart of Native American culture is a counter concern for the welfare of the children and Earth until, at the very least, the seventh generation. Western, Euro-American, Imperial cultures are failing entirely to consider and act protectively regarding the consequences of technology even now when we see what has already occurred. Even now, as we watch a nuclear threat arise for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962. Even now, when it is clear that every war we wage will be resolved only by the lethal power of a nation’s weaponry and finances. The good guys, if there are any, which I doubt, must develop such brute power, as we have done, and so are negatively transformed as is everyone engaged in these battles. I contemplate the interview I read with a Ukrainian soldier trained to direct drones to kill the enemy. How unnerved he was by his own response when the drone hit the mark, which meant the target, a Russian fighter, was killed and he, inadvertently, uttered, “Yay.” The tired justification that technology is not worse or better than the user—or inventor—is another failure to account for our seeming inability to live and act in ethical, compassionate and inter-related ways. Even now, when the future is endangered. Even now, when Earth is inherently threatened.
As many of you reading this know, 23 years ago, I was invited into a non-verbal conversation and relationship by an Elephant patriarch who was acting on behalf of his people who are being assaulted by my species. The Elephant acted intentionally—he verified that animals are, like humans, capable of intent. I had just finished co-editing Intimate Nature: Women’s Bond With Animals with Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson in which we established through the contributions of numerous writers, scientists, researchers, story tellers, that animals are intelligent, sentient, feeling and responsive, and that they carry profound qualities upon which life depends. 20 years later, it is being revealed that animals and plants live in ecologically engaged relationships, while, tragically, the human species is entrained by violence and domination. But now that we have created crises on many different fronts are we not required to do what Native American peoples have done consistently: think ahead seven generations?
What will these protohumans become when we cannot program them to live from the heart? When they are not ethically centered? When they do not love Earth? When they are not intrinsically wise? Shall we not be concerned by the implicit consequences to the humans, animals and plants of this planet who still wish to live real, spiritual, emotionally rich, Earth based lives? When will we see that without our counsel or consent, artificial beings designed to serve us are now in production? Soon, however, they will reproduce themselves and dominate without the range of qualities, many invisible, intrinsic to life. Shall we not be concerned?
How do we meet this critical threshold in Earthlife?
Is it not to articulate, value and enhance those qualities that are innate to the conscious human? Is it not to be as fully human, as fully engaged and entangled in the best ways in the natural world? Is it not to value and protect the natural world with fierce dedication?
Let us feel the heartbreak. Let us set our heartminds to discovering the reality of what it means to be human and let us set our intentions to live these ways fully as antidote to the technical and mechanical. Let this fecund and generous knowing provide a fertile field to engage all that seeks life.
Two increasingly different groups of H. sapiens, one with a high degree of technological competence, the other far less able to manage psychologically in this realm, might come to represent distinct populations, not because they are separated by geographic space, once a requirement for speciation, but because they are divided by electronic space: they will have ceased to communicate effectively with each other. The psychological space between them might rapidly become too great to bridge, leaving both groups isolated on either side of a chasm and neither group in a superior position.
Of course, such a scenario might never develop. Viral pandemics, nuclear war, crumbling national infrastructures, economic catastrophe, genetic mutation as a result of exposure to toxic substances—any of these might take Homo in some other direction. It is not possible to say anything definitive here except perhaps that dramatic change in the near future seems to be in the offing and if the species is to achieve its aspiration for justice, reduced suffering, and transcendent life, and if it is to prevent the triumph of machinery that it so clearly fears, an unprecedented level of imagination is required. 2
Barry Lopez, Horizon, Alfred A Knopf, 2019, p. 350.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/24/elon-musk-warned-of-ai-apocalypsenow-hes-building-a-tesla-robot.html
Thank you to Sharon Simone for reminding me of this essential passage from Barry Lopez
Why doesn't everyone think this way? Thank you for reaffirming me. Thank you for witnessing.
Thank you for your unfettered mind, born to reach beyond asumed limits. Thank you for bothering, because those of us who are like you might perish spiritually without you.
Thank you for embodying what (beloved) Barry Lopez knew.
Thank you Deena for this beautiful piece and for continuing to ask the questions that have no right to go away, so we just might live ethically into answers that benefit all life.