I actually began building an AI in the 80’s. In pseudo-code. As I was working on this, thinking about how sensing, emotion, relation and intelligence interlink with a variety of peculiar ‘detail-sensing’ activities… I realized something rather surprising: we could never catch up to biology, for peculiar reasons related both to the differences between machines and organisms… and the fact that organisms are relationally entangled, whereas machines cannot be thus.

But something far worse happened: In carefully thinking about biology, I observed that what we were trying to assemble was a replacement for something far more astonishing that already existed, and was -everywhere- around us, entirely undiscovered, or openly ignored.

In short, our peculiar relationship with and as nature endows us with a set of capacities we have forgotten, and these capacities connect and activate a nonordinary situation in which -the entirety of nature acts as a personal intelligence symbiont-. The socio-cultural goal of AI is to a: deny and b: replace that — because we don’t want an advanced intelligence that we cannot control directly. That is, however, precisely what machine intelligence must become if it succeeds even slightly at its goals… and idea I consider at once reckless and unlikely… any time soon.

The crucial lesson for the common person is this: materialist culture has set up this idea of ‘singularity’ with machine intelligence. This is replacement for what our species would have received as our next developmental leap… intimate integration with the transentient webs of nonhuman intelligence nature is and is the expression of. But individuals and communities may still partake of these aspects of our lost humanity. Directly.

Connection with those anciently evolved relational assets results in senses, experiences, and developmental opportunities no machine will ever come near. In fact, if once has even a cursory understanding of the behavioral and functional complexity of a single animal cell… machines immediately look like something Wile E. Coyote cooked up in a vain attempt to catch a Roadrunner who is all of nature.

Nature is the extension-body of human beings, minds, senses, and souls. Machines are what you get when that is forbidden, hyperbolized as a pleasure-benefit, and lied about. The world is nothing like the models of humans. Enter it, and you will find something that will make the sum of human stories look like a charred matchstick compared to the sun. But you must first escape what they told you. All of it. Forget me, forget the humans and their stories. Ask nature. In person. Pick up the phone. Make the call. And listen… to the answers of the living library.

There’s a rather special event happening at our local branch at the moment. But only members are aware of it…