A Closer Look at What AI and High-Tech Lives Cost Us

Smart people on smart devices

I’m a bit obsessed with Yuval Harai.

He often warns about the dangers of AI. Vast amounts of collected data monitor our emotions and physical behaviors. It spies on us. It will further divide us into tribes of haves and have-nots. For example, how would you unconsciously be affected by knowing the politics, and/or sex or gender bias, religion, etc. of your allies and enemies?

Do you tweet, post, check in, and/or rage out? Do you align with those in your silo, tribe, or in-group? It is hard not to, today as AI and algorithms pull our attention from us.

Another question one might ask is, who has access to knowledge about getting the good stuff: food, loans, jobs, and housing? Not everybody has access to technology or even all the knowledge one needs to have a voice, an influence, or even an in-road to comfortable security.

For Harai, he fears that as data access becomes more and more powerful for some — without any real consciousness or compunction — data becomes a currency as destructive as money motives are in our present systems.

Out of sight, out of our minds

We have seen what becomes of the world when one-half extracts, pollutes, uses up, and then discards most resources. Many people in poverty, or in remote locations, have waste dumped upon them. This comes in the form of polluted air, water, fast fashion, and plastic.

The marginalized people of any place and time tend to have extraction economies that exploit, extract, pollute, and then abandon them — and the land, in the aftermath.

The worst examples in history include mining, logging, railroads, sugar, cotton, tobacco, and rubber plantations. Such an economy usually requires the raw land itself, and the servitude of willing (and sometimes unwilling) workers.

Add toxic industry and tech, and you have accelerated the pace.

What is different today is that we have normalized extraction, we have largely hidden it from view (along with its workers), and added technology that includes online shopping and overnight delivery. Without knowing of, or seeing, what places and people contribute to each meal or device that appears on the porch another level of disconnection occurs.

We are living artificial lives, but extracting them from a real biosphere.

Getting back to nature

You knew where this was going.

It’s all I ever talk about nature. Your nature, my nature, human nature, sexual nature, lost nature, social inclusion nature, blah, blah, blah.

I’m Christyl Rivers, an ecopsychologist. It’s natural.

We evolved with nature to have consciousness and intelligence acting as a kind of balancing act. We use our awareness, including our ability to suffer pain, guilt, empathy, and more to assess how much intelligence comes to bear on any given choice (or imagined choice.)

Much of our intuition and instinct comes from our evolving nature, not from mere knowledge. An algorithm has no insight, intuition, or consciousness. It is basically looking for patterns to exploit in order to enrich and empower some while excluding others.

Electronically manipulating ones and zeros to sell things is brilliant, but it is definitely not the only world we need.

The artificial aspect of AI is not its lack of knowledge, which is considerable. It’s its lack of feeling that is worrisome. It is artificial in the sense that our world has never encountered anything like it with this many human beings tapping in. We created it through the stories we tell ourselves about what we value.

Except to obtain food, water, and fuel in unsustainable ways, we have increasingly left the physical world. However, in far-off parts of the world, the few remaining people who live in, and value nature’s gifts, wish to preserve diminishing ways of life even as they wish to have their fair share of resources.

In fact, we are exploiting nature to such a degree that people are suffering famine, fires, floods, and ever more hopelessness which is fatal for our species. Not just people of course. All living beings, ecosystems, and some reefs, rocks and minerals too, are over-exploited.

Equilibrium is upset and hard to set right when we are not in touch with our connected and internal/ external sensory awareness.

At least one answer is to reconnect to reality. At least acknowledge that we need the support systems of Earth and each other to get past this hyper-tech teen individuation phase of our techie teen awkward stage.

Decades ago, Dr. Carl Sagan called it our “technological adolescence.”

Can we reconnect to the real world in order to save ourselves? Or is this whole story plagiarized by some cold and calculating AI computer somewhere. One of the problems is that it is getting harder to tell.

If you have to guess — or even ponder it — it’s time to go into the woods.

Let the forest be with you.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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