Transformative Intelligences
How can we reframe our collective mind to leverage new forms of intelligence for the betterment of all life?
Do you ever feel like the scaffolding of your worldview limits your ideas of what’s possible? That tension is something I grapple with a lot and I find myself wondering:
What grooves in my thinking are limiting my imagination?
What societal norms baked into me make it impossible to see new ways of being?
In this moment of technological and societal upheaval, a dread sits heavy in my chest — a recognition that the motivations of those in power and the existing systemic structures not only limit the possibility of innovations, like artificial intelligence (A.I.), but they are directing us down extinction-level paths.
Note: I use the phrase “A.I.” or “artificial intelligence” to represent forms of artificial intelligence, automation, and generative A.I.
As an alternative to current approaches, I wonder, how can we reframe our collective mind to leverage new forms of intelligence for the betterment of all life? The ways we transform ourselves shapes the ways we transform the systems around us. This question isn’t just about technology or policy. It’s about how we, as individuals and as a species, learn to reimagine what’s possible.
I received an opening to an answer at the EPIC People conference in Helsinki, when, in a discussion titled, “Ethnography in the age of automation and AI,” one of the presenters, Cato Hunt, asked the question, “What are we creating the conditions for?”
Within our current structures, new intelligences are being used to accelerate and strengthen approaches that have proven to create deadly conditions for most of the world. And the latest technological innovations are amplifying global capitalism’s ability to exploit people and nature to convert love, natural resources, and human life into capital.
The issue is that business interests are leading the application and adoption of new technology. Therefore, A.I.’s innovations, which could be used to support human thriving and address climate change, are being used to accelerate the concentration of power and wealth.
If there’s any possibility that we’ll apply A.I. in support of all of society, and not just improve the lives of a few rich guys, we have to transform our intelligence to create the conditions we want for our future.
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We find ourselves in a moment of incredible uncertainty. While some might suggest that they know what the future of A.I. will bring, they don’t. No one does. In fact, at this point, our application of the technology is wildly limited. For the most part, artifical intelligence is being used as a tool to increase productivity and efficiency to increase the profitability of corporations — an illustration of the limited imagination of capitalism.
Peter Sarlin, of SiloAI, an artificial intelligence lab based in Finland, suggests that we need to rethink everything when considering the implications of A.I.. Speaking at EPIC, he shared his sense that “we’re approaching value creation in the wrong way.” Sarlin asserts that it’s difficult to transform traditional companies using artificial intelligence, and that “to enable true innovation, we must rethink the structure of institutions altogether.” To set out this new technology in truly innovative ways, we cannot rely on the past or present to inform our future.
The philosopher L.A. Paul has useful insights for our situation. In her book, Transformative Experience, she addresses the conundrum of embarking on unfamiliar futures. She starts the book my examining the choice to become a vampire. As a human, no matter how much research you do, one simply cannot make an informed choice to become a vampire, because we’ve never been one. Just as we, as a society, have never lived in a world with generative A.I. and so using our historic frameworks and knowledge is not only insufficient but it crudely limits the possibilities for the integration of a technology of this nature into our lives.
As she says,
“In cases of transformative choice, the rationality of the approach to life where we authoritatively control our choices by attempting to subjectively project ourselves forward and consider possible futures is undermined by our epistemic limitation on knowing what our future experiences and preferences will be like.”
We must transform our intelligence.
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Present, Western intelligence is shaped by the growth imperative and organized by categorization, classification, and borders. These constraints significantly limit our imagination on how we organize ourselves, how we move, and the activities and behaviors we participate in. We need to expand our conceptual frameworks.
Approaches to look to are indigenous practices and some of the work already being done to consider and prioritize the other-than-human life that surrounds us. For instance, mycelial networks or lives of water. Taking inspiration from these forms of life could expand our minds to allow for a move from the growth and classification mindset to an expansive and collaborative mindset.
In her ethnography of the globalized commodity chains of matsutake mushrooms, Anna Tsing suggests that non-linear mushroom networks offer inspiration for an agnostic point of view about where we are going or what the future holds. This opens up the possibility of seeing what has been ignored because it didn’t fit the narrative of progress or serve the needs of capital. With this mindset, we might be open to ideas like handing power over to nature.
In Robert Macfarlane’s new book, Is a River Alive?, he discusses the community leader and legal pioneer in Australia, Anne Poelina, a Nyikina Warrwa scholar activist, leading the recognition of the rights of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River in Australia. Quoted in the book, she says, “The law is being used creatively to train human beings to listen, pay attention to, and learn from rivers.” The idea of rivers as lawmakers, as well as imagination shapers, affords them power and allows us to expand our future to include the natural world in a new way.
Broadening our imaginations in this way can transform our thinking about the future and our ideas of how we bring artificial intelligence into the world to benefit all living things, not just the centralized and concentrated powers of corporations and the state. If we designed and applied A.I. guided by ecological intelligence, we might have communities that can better understand and work with the natural world for the betterment of all life. Systems that prioritize the redistribution of abundance, and algorithms that value reciprocity and diversity might become possible.
In the face of the unknown, how can we move forward in favor of life?
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Paul uses a common experience to illustrate what it is to not know or be able to predict the future: becoming a parent. If you haven’t been a parent, it’s impossible to know what it will be like. Therefore, you can’t rationalize becoming one. Me and millions of other people can relate to this.
When I decided that I wanted to have a kid, I knew that it wasn’t a rational choice. I was about to embark on an experience that was going to change my life in ways that I couldn’t predict. My understanding of time, relationships, money, and who I am would be irrelevant once I brought a child into the world. My approach was to try and release my attachment to the conceptual understandings of these things and instead focus on the conditions that my husband and I wanted to create as we embarked on this journey — conditions of love, human thriving, and space for flexibility and evolution.
For example, I had no idea what the first few months of motherhood were going to be like, but I knew that work and social commitments would conflict with the experience, and so I eliminated all work and social commitments for four months. No Christmas celebrations (my son was born on December 16), no work email, meetings, or other commitments for the entire four months. I also understood that my past career, as the CEO of a marketing services firm, was not going to be sustainable as I became a mother, and so I stepped away with plans to embark on a new career. Years before becoming parents, my husband and I also strategized to ensure that we had the resources required to support another human in our lives. All of these moves created space, support, and established a more sustainable environment for becoming a parent.
In hindsight, what we were doing was redesigning the conditions of our lives — creating the space for something new to emerge without knowing exactly what it would be. That kind of preparation, not prediction, feels like the kind of thinking we need as we navigate the era of artificial intelligence.
I suggest a similar approach to futures-thinkers, civic designers, policymakers, and the broader public. Release your understanding and the constraints of the world as we know it. As we enter this new era, shift the focus to the conditions we want to create so that we can shape the innovations in front of us, not with the purpose of profit, but instead in pursuit of ecological and human flourishing so that advances can be shaped in service of life instead of capital.
Just as we might create the conditions to bring new life into the world, we must create the conditions for technologies to evolve in the service of all life. Our task is not to predict the future of A.I., but to prepare the soil for it to grow into something that enhances life. If we can transform our understanding of the world, we can transform what our technologies can understand, and together, we expand the horizon of what’s possible.