AI and Ancestors in Training

tl;dr/ My goal is not to repeat all of the things that have been said on AI. But to instead turn towards it. To return to the idea of “One Path, Two Tracks.” Track One involves addressing immediate dangers and challenges through the tools we have at hand. Track Two is about: Who do we choose to be? Right now. Facing unprecedented disruption. This long piece is an invitation to come together and focus on a long-term generational project. On becoming ancestors in training. Cultivating self-sovereignty. Deepening connections with ourselves, each other, and the natural world. Emphasizing the importance of being deeply human together. 

None of us, NOT ONE of us, actually knows or understands AI. Even those who are at the wheel. Even those pretending to know.

Tyler Cowen nails it:

“The reality is that no one at the beginning of the printing press had any real idea of the changes it would bring. No one at the beginning of the fossil fuel era had much of an idea of the changes it would bring. No one is good at predicting the [...] outcomes of these radical technological changes. No one. Not you, not Eliezer, not Sam Altman, and not your next-door neighbor.” (There is No Turning Back on AI)

What we can say with conviction is that we are witnessing the birth of something new. Something that will change the very course of human history.

But even this is an assertion that we should be holding lightly.

Freddie deBoer offers perspective:

"Homo sapiens is about 300,000 years old, give or take 50,000… Despite the incredibly long odds against this coincidence, what are the chances that the period of your lifespan does in fact happen to overlap with the most important era in human history?" (The Bet You are Making)

It is good to stay humble. It is essential to keep perspective. We breathe and live somewhere between ancestors and descendants. “We are in the Middle of Forever.” (Title of the book on Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, Jamail and Rushworth)

What is true is that in the words of David Brooks:

“We’re living in the first stages of what my colleague... called ‘the age of acceleration,’ an age of both stunning advances and horrific dislocations. This is a period of radical uncertainty, a period in which predictions are likely to be wrong and midrange plans are likely to become obsolete.” (The Second Phase to the Biden Presidency)

VUCA is Only Getting More Real

Those of you who have been part of my work know that I always begin with VUCA. We are living in times of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity.

And VUCA is only accelerating.

My focus is always on “how do we learn to surf the waves of VUCA,” never on how we stop VUCA. Because VUCA is an unstoppable force. Yes. Humanity knows periods of stability and peace. But in the arc of human history, these are few, and far between.  And they are never truly global.

By this I do not mean that we throw our arms in the air. We must not let the robots turn us into batteries for their post-apocalyptic world. I certainly do not mean that we stop standing for a different, truer, form of democracy. And for an economy of living systems. A regenerative economy. Not a self-terminating economy of extraction and extreme inequality.

One Path, Two Tracks

We are called to become people of “One Path, Two Tracks.”

Track One:

We participate in whatever process might help to bring the madness to a stop. Or at least to ease the suffering of sentient beings. The living and the dying during this sixth great extinction. Processes that includes our teetering democracy, our skills for strategy, organizing and mobilizing. Innovation, technology (yes, technology), narrative and communication. The tools that we have at hand.

Track Two:

We take the long view. Like the Freemen of Arrakis (Dune reference). We engage in a multi-generational project that will take hundreds of years. We do not only focus on how to protect our own transient lives, and the well-being of our own children. But we also learn to focus on the protection and preservation of what is best and essential, what is beautiful and true, about the things that make us human.

This protection, this reclamation, is a return. It is coming back into right relationship to an ailing planet. A planet that birthed and holds us. That takes all that decays and turns it back into life.

This is Track 2: We learn to understand ourselves as ancestors in training.

We cultivate what Viktor Frankl called Tragic Optimism. We cultivate a clear-eyed view of the danger and the tragedy. And we make an unshakable commitment to the dignity of our humanness.  We commit to hold ourselves as self-sovereign beings. As people capable of kindness and love through the worst darkness of it all. We become the few that will not forget what it is that makes us good.

I have less faith in Brook's proposal that:

“We’re going to need governments that are able to pivot quickly and throw tidal waves of money at suddenly emerging problems, from technologically driven mass unemployment to war in the Pacific.”

We’ve pulled it off a couple of times, but our system of governance is sclerotic. It is breaking at the seams. Our media and information systems now left the realms of facts and truth. The worst of populist and elitist. We have not shown the maturity that it will take to pull through.

I vote for regulation, redistribution, and vast government spending. I support coordinated global action focused at the hyper-local levels. Action for an entirely new paradigm of education and a regenerative economy. We must pay the true costs of extraction. 

But that’s all part of Track 1. And I’m having a hard time counting on it. I’m grateful to those of you who devote breath and life to this all important work. We have to play on Track 1.

However, this work of Track 2. This work of becoming an ancestor in training, this work is not just personal work. It's not just about your healing and about personal growth. But these and more are demanded. 

This most courageous work on ourselves is not something we get to skip. We need self-sovereign individuals. We need people doing the work of evolutionary growth. Moving us from trauma to healing, to liberation.

Self-Sovereignty is different from “lone wolf-ness.” Self-Sovereignty is your capacity to take radical responsibility. It means you give up the path of blame. You give up the role of victim. You develop the capacity to bring yourself back to coherence when you are triggered.

It means you stop demanding that the world shape itself around your wound. Whether you are at a conference, or a meeting. Dealing with a terrible boss, the “friendship” that’s not quite so or the unhealthy relationship where you might find yourself stuck. 

Self-Sovereignty is a well-honed skill. It is an embodied state of being. It is what allows you to be part of a collective without losing sight of who you are, what you are here to do, and where you truly belong.

It is something we build together. And something we work on when we are alone. You, earth and sky. You and your Gods.

We will Adapt by Becoming More Human

Euvie Ivanova and Mike Gilliland of Future Thinkers name the next part especially well:

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AI is eating the world.

Whether you think that's bad, good, or a third more complex position, one thing is clear:

Humans won't adapt by becoming more machine-like.

We will adapt by becoming more human.

Deepening our humanity as we become more connected to ourselves and our innate capacity for sensing our environment, feeling our feelings, our intuition, our embodied wisdom.

We will adapt by cultivating an intimacy with ourselves and each other.

By becoming more connected to one another and our communities.

More connected to nature, to all the nonhuman beings surrounding us, and the inorganic forces and elements that comprise and permeate everything.

More connected to the current of Life that runs through each and every one of us.

We will adapt by cultivating an intimacy with Life itself.

This is called  Collective Sapience - the [spiritual and non-spiritual] practices for being deeply human together, especially in this age of AI and exponential technology, as we stand at the precipice of systems collapse and mass extinction.

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Self-Sovereignty, Sense Making & Ritual

This is the intersection where I will continue to work. I will continue the coaching and healing work that develops individual Self-Sovereignty.

And I will continue the collective work of bringing people together. Of making meaning together. I will continue to move through this project of forward facing remembering. I will continue to hold space that supports our individual development and that forges a new, deeper, kind of community and connectivity.

It is time to bring community together, both virtually and in real life, at a larger scale and a regular cadence.

I want to be part of something that helps us grow out of our worst habits of coming together. The habit of showing up with a transaction in mind. 

Out of the habit of playing the role of aggrieved victim in order to earn some sort of perverse leverage. I want us to grow out of the tropes of performative wokeness. Tropes that feign the search for justice in ways that assert “our” goodness, only by declaring “their” badness. 

I want us to grow away from the self-referential  moves that say “look at me! I’m a healer, I’m spiritual.” Because it’s not how we’ll earn significance. 

We are in the habit of declaring our significance because we don’t trust our own worth enough to love our own presence.  But the fact is that we are already good and worthy and significant, and it’s time to be in spaces where this is both assumed and given.  

I want us to create spaces where we allow each other to know less, to be more open and more curious. 

We are conditioned to interact with each other at the level of “propositional knowing.” Your facts (which are actually mostly opinions) against their facts (which are ALSO mostly opinions). We are polarized and stuck in a fight of propositions. While new media and old media mint their money out of our outrage.

But we are learning (and remembering!) how to hold spaces for “participatory knowing.” Spaces where you change the space and are changed by the space. These are spaces that call for ritual. They call for the engagement of not just your head, but of your heart, body and being.

It is from here that we are more likely to approach that “emergent inter-being.” A way of being together that is less about the interpersonal. Less about your story or my story. And more about the intelligence, the aliveness, the collective consciousness that is vibrant in the space between us. We learn to listen, to speak, to dance, to sing and to move from there. The place where everything is emergent. And our main role is to meet it.

There we find a different kind of wisdom. An entirely different way of experiencing each other. And our own essence, the verity of our being.

I don’t know everything about this. But I have given decades of my life force, spiritual devotion, care and intellectual effort to this aim. I have practiced, made mistake after mistake, fallen on my face and picked myself up again to thread this clear call and serve this very purpose.

The Places I Get Stuck

But here is another fact. And here is where I keep getting stuck: This is not something I can do alone.

Don’t get me wrong! I have allies and co-conspirators, I have teachers, and I have friends. I know other people willing and trying to go all the way in. I have Tuesday, my truest partner, the woman I love and would die for. I am aware of a network of hundreds of fires that seem to be aiming for the same thing.

I am not alone.

But something in me is still trying to do too much of it on my own.

There is something that I am personally being called to do that I have found neither the bandwidth nor the budget for.

And, to speak most vulnerably: I have not quite learned how to be helped. How to receive what folks want to bring. 

I have not learned how to harness the energy of the people who also want to be an active part of this coming together. This ongoing, regular, gathering of our songs and of our forces. Those who email me and seek more of  this work, those who show up for prayer and ceremony, and the events I hold online. The people who after an integration circle say “yes, Gibrán, this is it, this is it!” These folks that are saying “YES,” “me,” “I want to be a part of this.”

The coordination alone seems to be beyond me and my capacity. I have Jade Madrone, my dear friend and long-time work partner. And God do we get a lot done! But there has to be a better way for us to allow ourselves to be helped.

To keep this honest, personal, authentic and definitely vulnerable. I know in my heart of hearts that the obstacle is not just structural. The obstacle is not just that I have not found a client, funder, patron or investor that says: 

“Here you go Gibrán, what you and your friends are up to is exactly. This that you see is most important, this is what we are setting you free to do.”

No. That is not the only obstacle. Not even the main one.

There is an obstacle in me. A still-healing part of me that has not yet figured out how to receive. How to fully trust that there are more of us out there. That others “get” and more importantly “sense” what it is we are trying to do.

There is an obstacle in me. And there is another obstacle outside of me. A big obstacle I see. A convoluted and widely shared belief in my circles. Too many of us are conflicted about leadership. Collective work still needs people to lead it.  

The clear-minded part of me knows this and has now run out of patience with ideas of “collective” that do not understand the role of leadership. Designated leadership is not an obstacle, it is NOT domination. It is a condition of success, and denying this slows our work down.

But it does not matter how hard it is. It does not matter what the obstacles are or where they stem from. This is the only game we get to play. It is a play for our lifetime, it is the hope for our descendants. 

So I remain bowing down in prayer. Painfully aware of my shortcomings and imperfections. Still quaking with fear of my own fallibility and weakness. My body memories of past mistakes. Beautiful projects blown up. Knowing, knowing, knowing, KNOWING that our imperfection is undeniably  true. That it cannot be designed away. That we are just humans trying to do the work of gods.

If You’re Down…

(HERE is that invitation)

I’m out here collecting names. You are already someone special if you have bothered to read this far. Something is resonating inside you. There is something living in you that is already part of this “us.”

Send me your name, your response, who else should I be talking to? Who else are you talking to? We only need a few of us to move this. What are you yourself willing to do? How do we continue to move, each of us doing what we are meant to do, as a decentralized network? But a network that knows how to gather, to do so frequently and do it when and how it matters.

I do not know what will come next. I imagine that we’ll eventually reach a number of humans that will make sense to convene. Over-designing defeats the purpose. But when we reach that number of people we’ll bend the laws of the universe to make time to get together, to dialogue, dream, and be led. Led by a force greater than any of us. By the call of life itself.

Write me back. Send me a video of yourself speaking, or maybe an audio file. Whatever is the best way for you to get your point across (though direct text messages and phone calls do not work well for me, not at this scale).

Let’s see where this takes us.

And let’s be patient, we are feeling our way into this. We are living into organic time. We have reached the upper limits of acceleration. We have to stop trying to move faster and faster. It.is.NOT.working. 

We are carbon-based, we are not AI. It is time to try something else out.

As always, if you know someone who would be touched by these words, forward the newsletter to them. Text them with your own words of care and endorsement. Email them. Let them hear from you directly. Peer-to-peer. Friend-to-friend. That’s the way the good stuff spreads.