Volume 40 / 2023: On the Verge - from us humans to artificial intelligence

evolve: What is the main concern that you have with AI, and particularly the large language models like Open AI's Chat GTP, in terms of the human future?

Srinija Srinivasan: I'm most concerned about our relationship to it. Because the way it's set up to mimic a human being in conversational exchange, it’s inviting us to look to it for solutions. We ask it questions and it gives us answers. Instead of seeing it for the marvel that it could represent, a shared store of our vast and varied collective knowledge, a place from which to better understand who we’ve been, and then imagine who we could be. It could help us to ask better questions, as opposed to seeing it as having the answers. It’s a mirror of the past, not an oracle for our future, an extraordinary tool to help us refine deeper, wiser, more evolved questions.

e: Conversation is essentially human. The thing that defines us as human is that we are in dialogue. In fact, if you look at the world, the lack of real conversation is one of the most horrific things about the time that we're in. These chatbots engage with us as if we are in conversation together. 

SrS: Through talking, through the generosity of your ear to have this conversation, we can see what happens when we engage with a mutual curiosity and a shared desire to connect. Something emerges out of this that couldn't have come from you or from me. AI does not have that conscious awareness. The large language models are generative in a narrow way, finding new connections from old stuff. That’s different from truly creative. 

Here we get into spiritual questions. Because we're more than bags of bones, more than biology and chemistry. We build connection, have access to a source of actual creativity. As Orland Bishop says, when we're dealing with an AI, it is in the past. Data science is by definition in the past. Data are things that have already occurred. This can be extremely useful, as it can build the basis for forming a far better shared understanding of our past. 

But to host a future is different. If we seek a future that goes beyond tinkering around iterations of the past, if we want to come up with anything altogether new, that will not come from AI. And I think we have to come up with something altogether new for the future, because we haven’t figured out how to live on a planet together across difference over long spans of time in harmony with Earth and each other. 

AI has no access to that source of creativity. It might help us orient ourselves, it might be a great tool and facilitator to help us have access, to remind us, to encourage us, to stoke our capacities of consciousness. But if I’m talking to you, I’m bringing all this other knowing to the conversation and so are you. 

e: Can you say more about this other kind of knowing?

SrS: Knowing happens in a body, in a person, in an experience as much as it happens in text. It’s way more than a transmission of linguistically mediated content. There’s the knowing that is transmitted in words. This conversation can be transcribed and read and a lot is conveyed that way. It’s miraculous. But I can also know something experientially, somatically, emotionally, spiritually. This knowing includes but also transcends the content of language.

e: These chatbots are programmed to make us feel related to them, because relationship through communication in language is essential to who we are. 

SrS: When you think about user interface, I understand that this is an accessible way to engage with the zeros and ones that these machines work with. But what cues are we given for how we can hone our understanding of how to best relate? Programs like Siri can listen to us in language. They are programmed to be like humans, because convenience seems to be the thing we’re most interested in pursuing. But convenience is a dangerous North Star.

So much of what technology is employed towards is greater and greater convenience, which goes together with efficiency, productivity, scale. The question we ask is: How do we get more for less? How do we relieve ourselves of any effort, work, discomfort, pain, suffering? I’ve heard that Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake once said, “If innovation means getting a potato peeler delivered to my door faster, I don’t want anything to do with it.” I can get a potato peeler delivered to my door in an hour. But to what end, at what cost, and at whose expense? We have to ask bigger questions. Because the costs and the expenses are community, beauty, democracy, liberation, love. 

e: And relationship. We are not only given information, we’re given a relationship with – we usually call these intelligent chatbots “him,“ and most of the voice programs that offer services have a female name and voice. I noticed that I have to be conscious to speak about AI as “it.” They are programmed in a way that anthropomorphizes them. They create a sense of humanness and relationship.

SrS: In the tradition of AI, the Turing test was a metric for a successful AI—meaning if you think you are engaging with a person, that means that the AI is successful. It fools you, so that you think you’re engaging with a human, but a kind of all-knowing human. That goes back to the temptation to come into a certain kind of laziness and wishful thinking in which we say, it will tell me what I need to know. 

Instead, I have to take full responsibility for incorporating what I’m getting as an answer and then determining how to bring the wholeness of my being into the next question. If we stop short of that step, we will all reduce ourselves to something resembling zeros and ones, a binary, compressed version of the wholeness of our humanity that follows our past with some shiny packaging around it. We’ll keep innovating, but we’re not creating. 

e: Can you explain this distinction between innovation and creativity?

SrS: Innovation is always building on what’s come before. It’s taking something and making it better by whatever metric or values one has. Creation doesn’t have to rely on what’s come before. I believe creation is a capacity of the human being to connect to our divine purpose. I grew up in a Hindu household with a Hindu cosmology. The divine is in me as it is in you. The divine is in my remit as a human being, it is my opportunity. It’s an invitation because I have free will. Something, someone had the faith to give me free will and I can choose to manifest the divinity in me in human form. Creation comes from our capacity to do that. This goes for me straight to the meaning of the arts. This is the reason why art has been a guiding force in my life. It’s a beacon. Art is the name we’ve given to the things we believe are the result of humans manifesting the divinity in them. We may not agree on the specifics all the time, but it is a realm of things that speak to abiding truths that are bigger than us, that touch on a sacred mystery that includes and is bigger than us. 

e: How can we protect that sense of the sacred in the face of AI?

SrS: It begs the question, what is the sacred? I think it has something to do with mystery, with the unknowable. Our consciousness can’t know the unknowable. But it can be curious about it and have a relationship to it. We can seek to know what’s knowable, but also have a relationship to the unknowable. When we do that, we consistently come to the realization of our interconnectedness. When we recognize that, we can apply our will to act in service of something that’s bigger than us.

Modern culture has emphasized the individual, and this has come with both benefits and drawbacks. Protecting the sacred involves attending to our capacity to recognize our interdependence, that we’re in an entangled universe. We can’t fully understand how and why it works, but we can regularly attend to that reality with awe. To choose to apply our individual will to serve a greater interdependent reality, that’s a new opportunity for human development.

I want to connect this to AI now. AI is a product of our consciousness. Any technology is nothing more and nothing less than a tool that amplifies and accelerates the consciousness wielding it, whether it’s a knife carved from stone, a car, a bomb, or AI. We are now in a profoundly consequential time of digital exponential tech. We co-created these conditions and we keep raising the stakes on our capacity to meet our newfound powers with compassion, to wield these tools with wisdom and love. In this era there is nowhere to go to save ourselves from ourselves other than to go above the tech to consciousness itself: What creates the conditions conducive to the evolution of consciousness? We have the awesome possibility of consciously evolving consciousness.  Only then can we get upstream of exponential tech.

It's marvelous how much we've done with digital technology, including us having this conversation right now. We should use the tools for their best purpose and understand their limitations. Digital tech is binary; it ultimately reduces to zeros and ones. But life is not binary. Life is whole, complex, paradoxical. Life is full of contradiction and nuance.

What’s missing in the zeros and ones is the best of our humanity: beauty, wonder, awe, love, grace. Analytical, rational, linear thinking is powerful; it’s gotten us to the moon and back. But preceding that, we had to have the curiosity and desire to go there. That curiosity and desire did not come from zeros and ones. And the transformational spiritual experience conveyed by those who have journeyed to the moon and back, that’s not from the zeros and ones. That’s from the wholeness of human consciousness having a direct experience. 

I'm interested in AI because if we can first truly love being human, and not wish to become compressed, more efficient, predictable, indefatigable versions of human, then we can conceive, develop, and use AI towards celebrating and enhancing our sacred humanness. We can fulfill our highest role in the web of life, serving Earth and each other. With that intention, AI could be an extraordinary tool to harness our collective knowing, to outsource the intellectual zeros and ones so that we can really explore and expand other ways of knowing, to express our full humanity in service to life. 

e: For many people Chat GTP and its knowledge bank that enable it to write me a college essay in 30 seconds is awe-inspiring and feels like something larger than ourselves. So, this technology can hijack my awe. What do we need to do as humans to be able to pull ourselves away from this past-driven intelligence? Spiritual freedom is about a freedom from the past, so that one can take steps beyond one's own conditioning, or ego. The large language model chatbots are like an enormous ego conditioning. We know how difficult it is for us to stay in a liberated place in relationship to the past. Now the question is raised at a cultural level. 

SrS: I think this is the essential question: What creates the conditions for us to draw from our deepest well of capacity, to be creative, to be in improvisation with life? For hundreds of years there has been a prevailing ethos of dominance. Dominance itself was the goal as the vehicle for advancement. We started with dominion over the Earth--also capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, sexism, racism are all attempts by some to control others, in hopes of better predicting and controlling the future. 

Today, we have to do something that we've never done before. We must imagine a world where I don't feel I have to dominate you lest you dominate me. I can imagine we coexist because you have gifts I don’t, and I have gifts you don’t. When we both are freed and supported to give our gifts, things happen beyond what we could have wished for. 

Life demands a willingness to improvise, not to control or predict. There's not a strategic plan and that is terrifying to some and exhilarating to me. It’s the invitation to get on the bandstand, with hard-won command over what I can express through my instrument and spontaneously collaborate with others to make a whole that's greater than the sum, to co-create beauty that none of us could have made on our own, to live into a future that includes everyone but centers no one. That's jazz. I love jazz, an art form forged in a crucible of unfathomable oppression. It has transmuted that condition to a blueprint for mutual liberation. How can we all be together across difference and serve something bigger than ourselves that contains us, that we are part of? What if some of us found the curiosity and humility to fearlessly improvise together because we can imagine a better world? 

e: Do you see examples of this kind of co-creative engagement?

SrS: I’m involved in a new college that a few of us are imagining and co-creating, an alternative two-year institution of higher education near Mount Shasta, CA, at the sacred headwaters of the Sacramento and McCloud Rivers. We start with a premise of being in relationship to the sacred, in contrast to what has come to be a material orientation of the academy in modern Western culture. The academy has a gorgeous mission of the pursuit of knowledge in service to humanity, but we’re called now to widen our aperture for what knowing is, going back to different ways of knowing. So the college explores our relationship with the unknowable in addition to our pursuit of knowledge. 

And we bring together two disparate streams of inquiry in an overarching pedagogical frame. One stream is sacred waters, and the other is emerging tech and AI. The people who are devoted to stewarding the Earth don't typically think tech is their thing. And the people who are leading the development of AI are looking to colonize Mars before attending to life on Earth. We need to bridge this gap. We need to combine our understanding of sacred waters, of the complex interdependent ecology of life on Earth and our role in it, with our understanding and our intentions for the virtual, for AI and emerging tech, so these now-disparate streams come together in shared purpose. Then we can direct these exponential superpowers towards a future that’s for us and not against us.