All posts by Said E. Dawlabani

President & CEO of The MEMEnomics Group

Take My Job Please; AI and the Anthropocene

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Published on Medium July 10, 2023.

If the Anthropocene Epoch that we have entered is about creating policies that keep us within the bounds of planetary systems, then a global unifying goal that seeks the systemic reduction of growth has to be our new North Star. The debate about the future of AI is part and parcel of that monumental shift in thinking. This long-awaited discussion about the role AI should play in our future has just begun, but unlike any other debate in the past, the voices that want to regulate it are much louder that those who want to advance it. Aside from the potential danger it presents to our mental health, democracy and global security, the biggest fear we have is that AI will render obsolete what remains of our professions. In other words, it has the potential to take away the endless number of jobs the capitalist system justifies and continues to create as an automatic extension of its ethos. The obsolescence of most of these jobs should be considered a good thing if we are to take seriously our new strategies of degrowth aimed at reducing our carbon footprint and the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources.

Having AI do everything for us — in the words of historian and anthropologist Yuval Harari — will bring an end to human history as we known it. While this may sound apocalyptic to many, it is a needed catalyst for the change we need. The end of history is the beginning of a future unbiased by it. It is one of the ways to bypass the inherently toxic aspects of our past that have defined the evolution of our mind and brought us into the climate predicament we’re in today. By transforming past quantifiable human endeavors into what will become the largest algorithmic utility, AI will play a crucial role in helping us survive our immediate future. This is a perspective that is currently missing from our conscious awareness that will free us from the biases of the past and focus us on a future based in Anthropogenic awareness.

The next phase of our human journey will be an extremely difficult one to navigate. As climate catastrophes increase in size and frequency, we will come to realize that we are helplessly at the mercy of Mother Nature that has become less merciful towards our species due to our actions that have forced the collapse of her different systems. What we’re coming into is a crucible of unbelievable meaning that we must cross if our species is to survive. Our future will barely resemble our past and we will go through decades of adjustemnts that are existential in nature. It is our collective passage through the dark night of the soul, a necessary metamorphosis that will bring us face to face with our past actions. It is our entire species being swallowed into the belly of the whale that brings us to our inner temple where we must die to our old selves before we can be born again. Without this painful transformation we won’t be empowered to jump into the next part of our human journey where we learn to live within our planetary limits.

It is on the other side of that transformational journey that we begin to replace the mandates of growth with the virtues of de-growth. It is on that other side that we begin to place human exceptionalism in the proper perspective that nests it in natural exceptionalism that strips way its frivolous reductionist nature. It is on the other side that we return to being one with nature and end the madness that made us think we’re superior to her or separate from her. It is on that other side where we replace monotheism with deep ecology and where planetary survival will not be subject to the naiveté of the democratic process. And yes, it is on the other side of the darkness that we will come to realize the capitalist system unconsciously spawns the seeds of its own destruction while its newly anointed captains of industry, the AI engineers continue to falsely believe that their narrow focus on power and wealth is as an ecosystem onto to itself.

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Reflecting on 2022, Remembering 2016, and Predicting the Unpredictable

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In May of this year, our community lost one of its founding pillars, my friend and mentor Don Edward Beck, the genius who brought forth the work of Clare Graves that made all this possible. Don’s work in applying Spiral Dynamics and the Gravesian framework to issues of geopolitics, global inequality, and climate change are unmatched among his peers. It is the passion with which he approached these issues that have made me a believer in the possibility that Spiral Dynamics and Graves’ seminal work can change the world. This entry is dedicated to Don’s memory and the gift he gave the world which keeps on giving.

I haven’ t had the time this year to write my full end-of-year Gravesian assessment of macroeconomic and geopolitical issues. As I take a break from working on my next book, I wanted to share some of the topics I’m writing about which make for an executive summary of the year in review. Most of these pressing issues have been with us for a while, and seem to have either gotten worse in 2022, or have reached an inflection point from which there seems to be no return to the old normal. Most of these matters are existential in nature and we will continue to face them well into 2023 and beyond.

To me 2022, was a toss-up between these five major existential forces that behave like complex systems and are moving at different speeds and in different forms with different content that will continue to threaten our future for years to come: 

  1. The continued decline of the virtues of democracy around the world and the rise of autocratic leadership.

2. The continued realignment of the global economy based on value system congruence and compatibility as we experience more stress with supply chain issues, recession, inflation, sovereign debt defaults, asset devaluation and untenable levels of debt in Western economies.

3. The acceleration of planetary destruction due to the effects of climate change that continue unabated.

  4. Putin’s war with Ukraine that now seems to be at an inflection point that could involve NATO and a wider engagement as the US and Europe commit to providing the Ukrainians with more sophisticated weaponry. 

5. This one is a bit more detailed due to its ubiquitous and stealthy nature. The digital world that seems to be the largest technological catalyst of the Green system, continues to disrupt the non-digital world in a stealthy way and at an exponential rate. It is removing the filters and the editorial scrutiny that was housed in the hierarchal structures of the non-digital world. It continues to be a catalyst that spreads misinformation and radicalization with utter indifference to institutions and the rule of law.

Meanwhile the creators of Green technologies in Silicon Valley have shown no sign of letting up in their contempt towards the non-digital world as they continue their march to fully disrupt it. As they do that, they continue to line their pockets by selling our personal data, allowing hate speech and misinformation to go unchecked while thumbing their noses at our clueless regulators and our weak and obsolescent institutions. 

My call for a Smart Government, one that is designed from the Second Tier of values has not changed in over a decade of writing these assessments. Only Yellow systemic intelligence can address these issues, but sadly these calls continue to fall on deaf ears.    

Geopolitics on the Spiral – Six Years Later

I wrote this piece before Donald Trump took office six years ago as the 2016 end-of-year assessment of geopolitics. It offers a Spiral Dynamics analysis of the value systems that were present in our geopolitical alliances and institutions and the people who led them. While I overestimated Trump’s Red stamina and his competence for full Alpha Red leadership, Putin has proven to be exactly the Red Alpha leader I describe in the piece. 

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Would Our Developmental Models Withstand the Anthropocene?

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This post began as a response to comments made on the above image I posted which depicts the Spiral Dynamics model with the words: Burn your old ways of thinking. I had initially posted the image many years ago to my social media profile and decided to bring it back again today. In my opinion the tagline has become more relevant now in light of the planetary and societal collapse that only seems to accelerate with every passing day.

Meanwhile our community of practitioners continues to busy itself with the philosophical and intellectual underpinning of what our gurus taught us from the comfort of their air-conditioned, flood-and-fire-resistant bygone era called the Holocene ignoring any and all sense of urgency that defines our new reality. Most of the comments ask what happened to “transcend and include”? My question back to our community is “What if our sense of transcendence is way off?” Most of us, beginning with Wilber practice what I call “Transcend and ignore.” We have become an intolerant, elitist bunch with exclusionary behavior that can’t give a damn about inclusion unless those seeking it buy our seminars, come to our conferences, or speak our cultist language. 99.99% of the world has no clue as to what we do or how to use what we teach to affect real change.

Nowhere is this behavior of exclusion and ignorance more apparent than at the very top when Wilber in a reluctant way eulogized Beck a few months ago in a four-line statement, where he twice repeated “let’s not forget that his contribution was only to a values line”. The bruised and fragile ego of a far smaller man who couldn’t transcend the Red stage of being the Wyatt Earp of consciousness going all the way back to 2006. Where’s the transcendence, where’s the inclusion? Beck wasn’t much better in transcending and including much of what fell outside his worldview as well. This might sound like a harsh criticism for those who we admire, but their pre-occupation with their models that “explained everything”, left out that which requires a far greater degree of explaining; how to train our minds and our species to become an immutable part of nature again, and be in awe of her superior intelligence.

Our challenge TODAY is this: Can we transcend our teachers, add our own take on what they taught us, learn new existential models that factor in our new reality in order to help humanity NOW. Neither Wilber nor Beck spoke about how our models behave in the Anthropocene. Hint: We’re at the mercy of Mother Nature and her evolutionary process happens unconsciously and with utter moral indifference towards all species including the one that has been the most destructive, us. This reality will never fit on the Spiral or the AQAL models. Homo sapiens will become extinct as a function of Mother Nature adapting to a far greater system in collapse and as an automatic, unconscious way for her to reach balance. No Transcendence. No Inclusion. Sorry.

The idea for the word “burn” first came to me from Eastern philosophy. Rumi’s poem “I want burning” has more wisdom in it than anything Beck and Wilber ever wrote. It has everything to do with learning to die in order to live, an Eastern concept that is the polar opposite of what Western Civilization stands for. Are we ever going to start thinking for ourselves, or be in awe of the greater forces of existence, the mystery of life itself beyond any model the brightest human minds can create? Or will we always reduce existential challenges to whether we can fit them into our own unique understanding of our elitist models?

We are in an existential crisis and if we had “transcended and included” we wouldn’t be here in the middle of the Sixth Extinction. The dominant narrative that has defined who we are for the last 500 years is in collapse Will we ever create our own narrative that gives humanity a chance at surviving that collapse or will we remain wanna be armchair philosophers wondering if the next flood or fire will spare us because we’re special. Like Mother Nature I have an utter moral indifference about how special we are.

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