AI is Watching Us
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Is Artificial Intelligence Really Artificial?
Okay friends, bear with me here. This is one of those instances where I am asking for your thoughts, your ideas. First, I’ll share mine.
Last Friday I took a long walk with my friend Melissa. It had been a hellish week. The day before, I was fired from a job I held at a yoga studio in Seattle, for posting about pronouns and trans rights in an internal group and then, when I was told I was overstepping, asking for a bit of space. I was still kind of in shock, and Melissa had offered to walk and talk with me so she could share a similar experience.
It was a gorgeous Seattle day. Cold but sunny. We walked the edge of the Burke-Gilman trail, along Lake Union. My joints were hurting, which has become the norm as someone with RA inside of a Seattle winter, but as we walked and talked I barely noticed my pain.
Melissa is a death doula. She guides dying people into the unknown. After we finished talking about the loss of my job (a death in itself), we talked about transitions, and how, in our lives and culture, transitions aren’t honored or even contemplated at all. Think about it. How often do you hop from one meeting to another, one activity or conversation to another, without leaving space for quiet, for integration? What happens when we ignore these liminal spaces of transitions and drag whatever feelings and experiences have been unearthed in one interaction to the next, without even thinking about it?
As we spoke, our words were like little shovels, digging beneath the surface of everyday life. These are the kinds if conversations I cherish. Melissa is a kindred spirit. A deep thinker and empath. We kept digging and began talking about death, about how we humans live lives of suspended disbelief, constantly (or always) forgetting that we don’t know the answers to very basic questions like
Why are we here?
and
What is here?
We talked about how many living organisms and beings seem to have a greater collective intelligence than humans- squirrels, trees, the ocean, ferns.
How we, as humans, create chaos in thinking that we are right. In thinking that we can know one another before we have spoken words to each other, or at all, ever. Do we know each other? Do we know ourselves? How many of us go through each day gliding on the surface of our culture, reaching towards material goods to satisfy our desires or underpin our flimsy belief systems?
I kept thinking of the book When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron.
“The essence of life is that it's challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.”
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
Both of those quotes are from When Things Fall Apart. I carried that book around with me after my mom died by suicide, on a fire in remote Alaska. I still have it- its pages are encrusted with soot and dirt, heavily underlined.
What Melissa and I were speaking to as we admired the collective intelligence of other beings (which, I know, is a complex subject) was this: humans, in grasping for a stability that doesn’t actually exist, harm ourselves, each other, and the planet.
I feel like this is clear. Like I don’t have to explain it. As an empath, I grew up with a deep tenderness towards animals and plants. I also sought to disperse conflict, but not by avoiding it.
I remember when I was young, my uncle contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion. This was in the eighties, when the Ryan White story came out and there was a lot of discrimination and violence and homophobia towards anyone with HIV and AIDS. My uncle was married to my mom’s sister, and my mom had two brothers who, upon learning that my uncle had AIDS, refused to see him or my aunt or cousin. This caused so much heartbreak and deeply wounded my cousin (my aunt’s daughter), who will never forgive my uncles (full disclosure, I no longer speak to any of these people except one uncle).
I was seven or eight, and when this was happening I wrote a letter to one of my uncles, explaining to him that AIDS wasn’t transmissible in any casual setting. I told him how much pain he was causing. I addressed and stamped the letter and gave it to my mom to mail, but years later found in in the back of one of her drawers, unmailed. I still wonder, what stopped her from mailing it?
Why are we so afraid of each other?
What About Artificial Intelligence?
Melissa and I stopped at a little coffee and food shop called Saint Bread, where I had my first cookie since starting my elimination diet. (Side note: Saint Bread is super cute and you should definitely visit if you live in Seattle).
We sat outside with our hot drinks and this is when Melissa brought up AI. It was in the context of Gathering Moss and yin yoga, which is a type of yoga I teach and practice. Gathering Moss, written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, is, like all of her books, about connection, and the profound complexity of every single organism on our planet. Her book Braiding Sweetgrass is, at this point, relatively well known, but Gathering Moss continues to fly under the radar. Here in the Western Cascades, in the Pacific Northwest, we are surrounded my moss and lichens and liverworts and epiphytes and all kinds of tiny complex organisms.
“In indigenous ways of knowing, it is understood that each living being has a particular role to play. Every being is endowed with certain gifts, its own intelligence, its own spirit, its own story. Our stories tell us that the Creator gave these to us, as original instructions. The foundation of education is to discover that gift within us and learn to use it well.”Melissa and I talked about how concrete is an organism which decays and lives and dies, and has an energetic quality. How everything that surrounds us has aura and energy and affects who we are, whether we know or acknowledge it or not. - Gathering Moss
And then, she mentioned Artificial Intelligence.
As you know, my last newsletter was all about social media, and this discussion fits neatly into that. When Melissa mentioned AI, she mentioned it as a living organism, observing, watching, absorbing. Not necessarily malevolent but not not benevolent either. Neutral.
I hadn’t though about AI like this before. I think I had tried not to think about it. I’d thought about AI in the context of Black Mirror, conspiracy theories, fear. I hadn’t thought about it as a neutral organism whose pendulum swings in whichever direction we take it. I hadn’t thought about my word having an effect on the pendulum— the words I speak and write and live.
I don’t have any smart appliances in my home. I don’t have an Alexa or a Google thingy or any of that, mostly because I disagree with the ethics of the companies who have created those things. I don’t trust those people. And I shouldn’t, because humans are not trustworthy. I have other reasons, too. But I never really thought about how my smartphone watches me. How it knows what coffeeshop I am at no matter if I drop a pin. How every single social media interaction I have, accounts I pause on, news stories I click on; how all that information is deposited somewhere.
Something knows everything about me.
Sometimes I think about the atomic bomb. Actually, I think about the atomic bomb all the time. How it was kind of an accident. About the destruction it caused. The destruction we caused. Us humans.
I think about it, and I wonder, what will we accidentally create next? When I wonder, I imagine something good. Because I must. Because what I imagine lives somewhere, and is observed and absorbed, and if it is good, and helpful, then that’s something.
This was so powerful in so many ways. I especially related to the part about transitions and how we as humans race from one thing to another constantly without ever stopping to process. I feel this deeply as it relates to motherhood and giving birth. If more women were given the opportunity to pause after having a child, instead of rushing back to work so we don't lose our jobs, we would all be better off.