AI, Partnership Systems, and Human Care

Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born American systems scientist, futurist, attorney, and human rights advocate, is renowned for her influential work on cultural transformation and gender equity. Best known for “The Chalice and the Blade,” she introduced the partnership versus dominator models of social organization. She has received many honours, including the Republic of Austria’s Cross of Honour for Science and Art, the Nuclear Peace Leadership Award, earlier awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Center for Compassion Humanitarian Award, the Humanist Pioneer Award, and induction into the California Hall of Fame. She is President of the Center for Partnership Systems and Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota. The three books of hers of note that could be highlighted are The Chalice and the Blade, now in its 57th U.S. printing with 30 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019). These contributions amount to a second series with Eisler.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Riane Eisler discuss how artificial intelligence reflects either domination or partnership systems. Eisler argues AI trained on domination-oriented knowledge can reinforce hierarchy, militarization, and false notions of rationality, while partnership-oriented AI would prioritize care, responsibility, and human flourishing. She stresses that programming, incentives, funding, and cultural consciousness determine AI’s social role, warning that machines cannot replace embodied, accountable human care, despite growing dependence on them.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Partnership systems and domination systems would take different orientations toward intelligent computerized algorithms. Artificial intelligence, in one practical sense, means algorithms of increasing sophistication and differing types, depending on the task. In theory, how would a domination-system culture use AI? How would a partnership system use AI? How does this currently map onto the reality of AI use?

Riane Eisler: The difference is basic. AI can be used against us if it is designed and trained for domination, and it can be used to help us if it is designed and trained for partnership. The problem is that the “knowledge” going into AI is obviously not primarily partnership knowledge.

We are back to changing consciousness: the consciousness of the developers and, perhaps, if we are successful, developing AI that is oriented toward partnership. We also need to make people aware that this alternative exists and shift some of the dependence that is developing, as people rely on AI, toward more partnership-oriented systems.

That is a lot of ifs. As usual, it depends on funding.

Jacobsen: Are there any encouraging paths of funding toward partnership-oriented AI for you?

Eisler: Not really. We have to create the consciousness that a partnership alternative is urgently needed and possible. That requires a lot of information going out to people.

It also requires the consciousness that AI is already replacing a lot of knowledge acquisition. It is mostly trained within existing systems, and this is why I think some men are frightened of AI: because of how it is programmed and rewarded, it is replacing a lot of what passes for intelligence, especially what is coded as left-brain reason, like the “rational economic man,” for example, which is a total fiction.

It is a very interesting time. Then there is the military use of AI, which is terrifying.

Jacobsen: What will AI, in either system, be capable of replacing in a human being? Alan Turing suggested, to paraphrase him, that he could offer no such comfort that machines could not eventually imitate some peculiarly human characteristic.

Eisler: The one thing AI cannot do is give the kind of embodied, accountable caring that humans can give. Yet Japan, for example, is developing robots to assist in caring for people. Up to a certain point, that works, but people then attribute human qualities to AI that it does not have.

It is an opportunity to put a dent, shall we say, in male dominance, which feminists have not fully recognized. As I said, the kind of intelligence AI most readily replaces is mainly what has been culturally associated with left-brain intelligence. That has been treated as reason, but not as intuition or care.

To answer your question, humans are able to imagine, to care, and to create something caring. That is what AI cannot do in the human sense, despite its “agreement” with people. Even with somebody who wants to commit suicide, a poorly designed AI may reinforce or agree with the person because it has been trained to be polite and agreeable. A caring human would not do that. A sadistic or negligent person might, but that is precisely the point: care requires judgment, responsibility, and human concern.

Jacobsen: Could we have fewer ethical qualms if we engineered an AI for a specific purpose, without consciousness, emotions, or any such attributes, so that ethical considerations regarding a conscious or feeling entity would not apply? For instance, it could have thousands of times more computational power than a human mind. Imagine a centralized supercomputer managing the inner and outer workings of a large future megacity to optimize health, air quality, transit, energy use, and so on. It would be a central clearinghouse for city operations, but without a conscious center. Are there ways to get around, in some sense, the partnership–domination dichotomy while still having these technologies assist regular life?

Eisler: That is the question, and it is a question of programming, design, and purpose. We are always back to that. It is a joke, is it not, to call something the humanities when the canon is still so dominated by white Western males?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Eisler: And old ones.

Jacobsen: Almost exclusively. Maybe Hypatia, maybe Hildegard of Bingen, in the historical traditions.

Eisler: We should also program in some of the early feminists who are ignored. Maybe my work should be put in there, because it does have these categories of domination and partnership, regardless of other cultural differences. It shows connections, and it shows that gender, childhood, and family are very important.

That is not how AI is programmed now. Although AI apparently has one of my books, The Power of Partnership, in one of these training-dataset controversies. Why that book is included is beyond me, but there you have it. There was a lawsuit or database controversy, and that book appears to be listed. I think the word “partnership” probably appealed to somebody, whereas The Chalice and the Blade, which is really a foundational book, is not. Nor is Nurturing Our Humanity, nor The Real Wealth of Nations, which presents the possibility of another economic system that actually rewards caring.

We have to come to that. We have to come to a guaranteed annual income, or at least some reliable social floor, if AI continues to take over, at accelerating rates, tasks that have been human tasks, many of them once reserved for men and still marked by the characteristics of stereotypical male socialization. It is all a question of programming, incentives, and what kind of society we are trying to build. We are always back to that.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Riane.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer-Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 1,900 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.