Tag Archives: Anthropocene

Take My Job Please; AI and the Anthropocene

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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Would Our Developmental Models Withstand the Anthropocene?

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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Paradise Lost, The Sequel: Nature’s Tipping Point

This article was published Spring 2019 in Kosmos Quarterly 

John Milton’s epic poem about the fall of Man from heaven and his ultimate expulsion from the Garden of Eden has so many parallels to the story we seem to be writing for ourselves. His is of a biblical nature that chronicles the frailty and temptation of mankind, while ours is about us blindly destroying; piece-by-piece the heaven on earth Mother Nature has given us. Our paradise is an era which started about 11,000 years ago called the Holocene which has enabled life on earth to thrive the way it has for as long as it has. Click here to read the original piece .

You can download a PDF version here

 

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