World in Peril
What grand intelligence is required
to stop collaborating
with things that are trying to destroy you?
A leading AI safety researcher departs
leaving behind an open letter declaring the
world in peril
*
No shit.
But do you really think it started with AI
and not ancient Rome?
Since In hoc signo vinces
when Constantine saw the Chi Rho in the ether
painted it on his soldier’s shields
before the battle at Milvian Bridge
this shit has been underway.
*
Long before that even.
Humans stood up seven million years ago,
but it doesn’t seem our center left
the ground until
the Neolithic Revolution.
We’ve been on a migration northward in the body since.
Exchanging the horizontal for the vertical.
Exchanging interbeing for control.
Sumerian land ownership.
Right angles.
The Enclosure Acts in Britain.
Terra Nullius.
AI merely the most abstracted
of the abstracting.
Heads on sticks untethered
ketamine-addled
musk
*
domination
trumped
the old gods of place
Christ
decontextualized, unmoored, ungrounded by politicians
in ancient rome
we’ve seen all this before/
the Emperor is always a cunning linguist
*
There is a craft of being.
Conditions and preconditions required to become a real human being.
I can’t even say this properly in english–
the word for human doesn’t contain enough
ontologically of what I want to say.
I have to reach east to find a language
capable of resonating the notion of a human craft
toward which I point.
It starts with an unstressed mother.
That’s the center around which you build a society
of real human beings.
You center the mother-infant dyad
so the baby is properly nested
in salutogenic neurochemistry.
*
*
everyone congratulates me on linkedin
but I know they cannot even read what I have become
or to whom I owe allegiance–
and as much as I am trying to change the world
I’d be happy if I could just throw a party good enough to
get my teenage daughter off of Tiktok.
Gabriel! Thank you for this. I am so touched. We've corresponded before, about the centrality of relationship in autonomic regulation. This poem speaks to what has always been most important to me - beginnings, conditions, the nest in which we have to be nurtured (with a nod to Darcia Narvaez) if we are to become true citizens in relationship with all beings. And the enormity of what we are up against - in ourselves, with our children, with AI. I saw one sweet quotation the other day that pointed to a growing awareness that focusing on GDP as a sign of a healthy economy is part of the disaster unfolding. The Secretary General of the UN said we need instead a sustainability index, one grounded in our relationship with sacred Earth. Then there was also another aritcle, can't remember by whom, saying the same thing. It's a small thing, but to say the words aloud - that the whole system needs to change - that eased my heart just a notch. So much seems necessary to create a nest for mothers so they can nestle their little ones into healthy connectedness to all. So you and I will both continue to speak of this, small but determined voices in this vast Cosmos that continues to unfold, in the biggest picture, along the arc of love and creativity. I suspect we'll never know for sure what happens to our eyeblink of a contribution in this vast geological unfolding, but it sure does feel good to be doing something. Again, thank you for this. I will share it widely.