Are human beings crazy? Here we are, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, and what we’ve seen are a series of tragedies, mostly arising from human conflicts. From Sept 11, 2001 through to the current war in Iran, and everything in between: the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Oct 7 attack on Israel, and Israel’s genocidal response,… Read more →
Category: AI
Accelerating the Development of Planetary Intelligence
If we listen to what the leaders of major AI companies are now saying, we need to accelerate our capacity to respond to the extraordinary technological revolution underway. We are in a race, not for “superintelligence” or “AI dominance,” but to protect humanity from the adverse consequences of its own devising. How are we going to do this? If we… Read more →
The Urgency and Importance of Developing Greater Planetary Intelligence
Looking at https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace and https://darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology, along with Nate Hagen’s https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/122-a-country-of-geniuses, what should we conclude about the urgency and importance of developing greater planetary intelligence? Taken together, these three long-form pieces – Machines of Loving Grace (Dario Amodei’s essay), The Adolescence of Technology (Amodei follow‑up), and A Country of Geniuses (Nate Hagens) – point to a compelling case for urgent expansion… Read more →
Creating a Regenerative News Network
I want to discuss whether it’s possible to create a Regenerative News Network, which would comb the web for, say, one new story a day that shows a regenerative community initiative working to counteract the destructive effects of modern corporate/colonial capitalism, and offers that story in an appealing format. Visitors should be able to subscribe to a daily story, preferably… Read more →
Developing Greater Planetary Intelligence
We’re still in the early, heady days of AI development, looking for breakthroughs in the capacity of machines with software brains to understand us and the world around us. This is truly remarkable technology—which may not, in the end, be seen as so remarkable by our descendants—but which at this point seems likely to awaken the intelligence that is already… Read more →
AI and the Ecology of Relationships
Artificial Intelligence is not just a technology problem. It is an ecological force acting on the ecosystem of human relationships. Every civilization is held together by an invisible ecology. Not only forests and watersheds, but bonds of attention, trust, obligation, and care. Families, friendships, mentorships, disagreements, reconciliations—these form a living network through which meaning flows. This is the ecology of… Read more →
Sydney Harvey Griffith’s Planetary Party
Review and Evaluation of Sydney Harvey Griffith’s “The Field Is Ready” — and its relationship to the development of Planetary Intelligence Ref: https://substack.com/home/post/p-186228343 What Sydney is arguing Sydney’s essay uses her time at World Economic Forum in Davos not as an endorsement or critique of elites per se, but as a contrast lens. Davos becomes diagnostic. It reveals two worlds… Read more →
Personifying AI
One of my growing concerns is with the extent to which humans are personifying AI. It’s one thing to do that intentionally, to create artificial personas who can respond in certain ways. It’s anothing thing to start imputing personalities to AI agents and then treating them as quasi-spirits. Humans have a long history of misidentifying realities by personaifying them, and… Read more →
Sense-Making
One of the most surprising things about AI is that it is quite good at sense-making. But we don’t yet understand how. Is intellectual coherence simply a function of complexity? How is AI capable of sense-making? How do we know what makes sense? This question sits at the intersection of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, complexity theory, and AI systems… Read more →
Design School Session on AI and Bioregional Intelligence
Thanks to all who attended! Here’s my Fathom recording: https://fathom.video/calls/542184867 And the saved Chat file, with links to items mentioned during the discussion. themed-dialogue-meeting_saved_new_chat And the slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yHdEb4yoC8DzEmDA3pyo3RsodvpGmtDuz6h0G4KpGME/edit?usp=sharing The official recording: Read more →