Kirsten

Saved this in 2020….

Mentioning machines understanding us better than we understand ourselves. Maybe that is because we do not understand ourselves very well and we have relied too much on machines for that understanding. We increasingly do. Tell me how many steps I took, how deep I have been sleeping…what to do if I am not sleeping. Not saying there cannot be very valuable knowledge gained this way, but if we ignore the other ways that we come to know things of course we will lag behind and will be easily manipulated. One of the big spriritual questions often asked as a form of inquiry is ‘Who am I’, and right now when we ask that question we often turn to machines to answer it. What do I do instead you might say? Humans managed to survive (with fewer comforts you might argue, but also more content in many ways) for a long time without machines. If there isn’t a machine when you ask ‘Who am I’, what comes up? What do your emotions tell you about this? What do the trees say? What do the bugs say? What does your skin say? There are so many answers that have nothing to do with machines and this is a form of intelligence. To have any chance at not being hollowed out by machines we need to turn to this other intelligence and start giving it the value it has in our lives. It comes before machines. It is older and wiser and we would not be here without it. 

Thoughts: like we are adding new elements to our perception, but still using old frameworks, rigid and resistant to change, and so instead of the new elements (eg AI) falling into place within a restructured mental map they exercise undue impact on the structure, basically contorting it - north is no longer north metaphorically speaking - the mental map is distorted by these elements that don’t fit into it, because the element we are trying to fit into the map affects the map itself. Picture a magnet with a too large gravitational field (in terms of meaning) pulling everything into a different shape - and so it isn’t a question of how we talk about the new element only, it’s a question of how we talk about everything under the influence of the new element. Like being intoxicated? Seeing through a looking-glass? 

Second thought: now more NB who is saying what, the context, as the article says…..what would orient us otherwise? Earth, senses, agency. Have we given these away bit by bit, in the name of choice and opportunity and potential and possibility, so that we are focussed on guidance outside ourselves, or we just took the guidance outside such as religion, parents etc and replaced it with pseudo-choice and are therefore happy to place our power in someone out there, still believing this is our choice we are freely-making and to see the power we have given away we would have to see the whole context - all the micro give-aways of our power.