Three of us, an Indigenous Elder, Cheryl Potts, a Diviner, Sharon Simone, and I, a writer, have been meeting regularly for many, many years, since 2012 at the very least, asking a fundamental question which has become increasingly urgent: how do we meet these times? Covid didn’t stop us though its presence intensified our focus. Some of what we came to over the years, you can see by reading my work over that time, increasingly influenced by these conversations. When the 19 Ways to a Viable Future for All Beings was transmitted in 2012, it confirmed the world view we were carrying and our conviction that the survival of our species and planet depended upon stepping out of the aggressive, acquisitive, violent, imperial, dominating, increasingly brutal, money and power hungry world view that is Western mind, but no longer, because of global competition, limited to the West.
In 2017, A Rain of Night Birds, was published, chronicling the shock wave that occurred when the UN IPCC report on Climate Change finally recognized the effects of the Anthropocene and simultaneously cited TEK, Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, for the first time. So we began to consider a Literature of Restoration that would not lead inadvertently, as so much conventional writing does, to extinction.
The trajectory we followed led us toward deeper and deeper relationships with the natural world and spirit as the two are inextricably related. We were recognizing the danger to the natural world, to the beloved planet, to all life by human activity at the same time that we were listening to and being guided by the invisible energies, seeking ways to protect creation, as in La Vieja: A Journal of Fire where the solitary old woman found herself engaging with Bear in the old ways that Indigenous people across the planet knew before Euro-American mind, fueled by Judeo-Christianity /Monotheism, forbid such alliances.
Well, today is Halloween and as I fell asleep after midnight, aware we had reached the time when the veil is very thin, I prayed for guidance in writing this essay as I found myself yesterday unable to make a mark on the blank page.
I don’t know how the spirits speak to you, but I know for myself, one thing leads to another, unanticipated associations gather, and suddenly something unforeseen manifests. In and of themselves, the various events do not necessarily lead anywhere, though they are of concern, and then they merge of their own energies and a path opens with a magnetic force that cannot be ignored.
Well then, a few occurrences lead us here which is unexpected and once again, I feel awe and gratitude for what is emerging. If you’re lucky, being a writer means taking dictation from the great mystery, or as my friend and colleague, the Zimbabwean Nganga Mandaza Kandemwa often said, “I am God’s hands.”
Last June, obligatory circumstances required Sharon Simone to relocate to the East coast and Cheryl and I feared we would not sit with her in actuality again. We continued our relationship on Zoom but it was not the same, the three of us agreed with sadness. Though we understood that such disconnection has become a global issue, intensified by the contradictions between the isolation imposed by Covid and the extremities of a mobile world, as well as between the possibilities and the limitations imposed by computer culture, still we hadn’t made any progress in solving the separation for ourselves or others. Then an entirely unpredicted medical condition transformed into a blessing and brought Sharon back to Los Angeles and so, last Wednesday, to Topanga again.
Remembering an earlier conversation, Sharon asked me if I had gained any insight into what I was to offer in these last years of my life, whatever they will turn out to be? Though I have wanted to be certain to concentrate my time and effort appropriately, I answered that nothing new had come to me outside of helping community meet these times. “That’s always your quest,” Sharon said and I agreed, unhappily, that I had not found the new edge I was to walk at this time. “For myself,” Sharon continued, “especially, as I am living on the other coast, I want to learn how I am to continue to support the Village Sanctuary for All Beings,” which is the way we refer to the community, human and more than human, which has gathered here on this land since April 1, 1981.
Cheryl, immediately aware that this is our common devotion, suggested we three do an I Ching reading, based on Stephen Karcher’s remarkable Total I Ching: Myths for Change, asking for a single response for the three of us. For those of you who follow the Yi, the most ancient form of divination, the Book of Changes, the response was 42 Augmenting/ The Blessing. The changing line 6 in the second, leading to the relating 61 figure, Centering and Connecting to the Spirits. The answer was clearly not to be discouraged and to offer everything we could on behalf of the Village, and the future.
These two concerns then, how to meet these times and how to serve the Village Sanctuary have been much on my mind when considering it was time to write an essay for Substack, and no direction appeared before me. Dismayed, I turned to a gift – or is it a burden? – that had been given to me by my spirit daughter, the writer and landscaper, Pami Ozaki. Knowing my alarm, about AI, she had sent me the Audible version of Karen Hao’s Empire of AI. While only having heard a few chapters so far, I found a synchronicity that needed to be attended – the presentation of this book now, and the rising level of my concern about AI, since just beginning to read Elizer Yudowsky and Nate Soares’, If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, a book which verifies all my intuitions and fears. I had asked some AI engineers I knew if Earth centered ethics like the 19 Ways, or a foundational principle protecting the natural world could be inserted into AI, and, especially, GAI? Actually, I had asked them to begin to do it or to research the way, but it has not come to be. Rather, yesterday, I came to a section in Empire of AI, where a spokesperson for OpenAI is gleefully imagining the entire globe covered everywhere with data centers because GAI will be so compelling. to everyone he claims. He did not realize the extent of this nightmare as he spoke, so entranced was he with his own illusion. Later, Hao speaks of the elitist fantasy behind GAI.
Proposing AI and GAI will help the entire world population, tech companies exploit unskilled workers outside the US in ways Hao compares to the self serving assumptions of common good that accompanied the cotton gin while increasing the reliance on and horrific circumstances of slavery. Time magazine asserts, that “OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic. This was done by outsourcing through the SF firm, Sama, which provides similar services for Google, Meta and Microsoft with barely paid workers in Kenya, Uganda and India. The entire Global South is victimized so this potential economic dream might be realized essentially for the billionaire class.
Meanwhile Open AI and Microsoft have just been given the greenlight for their not for profit company to become also a For-Profit in a $500 Billion deal. No surprise for a field where AI has been defined by such as John McCarthy of Stanford U who writing about AI in 2007 defined intelligence as “the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world.” And OpenAI which has historically defined it as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”
Grave fears about AI have been with me since I listened to The AI Dilemma and wrote on April 3, 2023, “Other Ways of Knowing: Challenging AI.” “Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of Center for Humane Technology…said the speed that Microsoft was working to deploy AI was ‘frantic.’ While concurrently ‘50% of AI researchers believe there is a 10% or greater chance that humans will go extinct from our inability to control AI.’ The goal, clearly among technicians to consolidate money and power despite the clear and present danger to all life.”
What had intrigued me about the Harris and Raskin talk is that they used the image of the Golem gone wild that Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague had created to protect his people and from whose mouth he had had to extract the code in order to prevent harm to the world. Since then, I have been wondering how we undo – extract– the billions and trillians of codes which threaten all life.
The Empire of AI, investigates the dreams, nightmares, competitiveness and extreme ambitions of Sam Altman’s OpenAI and ChatGPT. I begin reading it as Trump makes a chip deal with China about which Zvi Moshowitz just wrote Please Do Not Sell B30A Chips to China.
Meanwhile 972, the Guardian and Local Call are investigating leaked Israeli Finance Ministry documents stating that the $1.2 billion contract to provide Israel’s government advanced cloud computing and AI services, Project Nimbus is linked to a highly unorthodox agreement that allows Israel to transfer vast quantities of data onto the cloud servers of the tech giants despite potential legal challenges regarding the use of their technology in the occupied, West Bank and Gaza, without prohibiting them from restricting Israel’s use of their products even if it breaches their terms of service. It also obliges them to secretly notify Israel if foreign courts order them to hand over data stored on their cloud platforms, in the event of claims that Israel has used the technology to violate the human rights of Palestinians. In contrast, Microsoft revoked the Israeli military’s access to part of its Azure platform after it had stored a trove of intercepted Palestinian phone calls in violation of its terms of service.
All of this consisted of separate bits of information until this morning when I sat down at the computer, -(yes, aware of the contradiction and the way technology is not neutral but dominant)- actually without hope of finding the essay I was to write, but thinking about the Village Sanctuary and the I Ching and the need to center and connect the heart to the spirits, and the love the three of us have for this piece of land and the beings and spirits who live here. Then it was that the title of this piece sprang unexpectedly in my mind and I saw the play between the words and the call – as AI is moved toward an anti-human conclusion – everyone will die – to do all one can on behalf of all life.
As this writing of this essay concluded, I was led to a little bit of hope that humans could control their own destiny as I had wished for when reading Harris and Raskin and now by coming upon Zvi Moshowitz’ essay, New Statement Calls for Not Building Superintelligence Now.
While it is not a huge action, we are at least offered the possibility of doing something, which in this case, is taking a public stand on behalf of human survival and Gaia.
https://superintelligence-statement.org
You can join me and with more than 65.000 (now [11/1/] 66.000+) signators, including Geoffrey Hinton, the first one, by going to this website and signing:
Thank you Cheryl Potts, Sharon Simone and Pami Ozaki for your inspiration.
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I have been freely offering my writing to the community for 60 years and posting essays on Substack since January 2022. If you can support the work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation and / or recommend it to your friends and colleagues, it will be greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate if you share or leave a comment and check ‘like,’ when you do.)
The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.
