Becoming more human in an AI world: A lecture for the Royal Society of the Arts

I recently completed a series I’d been leading for the Royal Society of the Arts. It was titled AI and the Planet. Our focus was to highlight the various ways in which this current, genuinely unprecedented wave of investment in a very specific type of sociotechnical system (foundation models, LLMs, generative AI, agents AI etc.), was actually a multi-polar trap in the form of an arms race. This is a process where certain actors engage in what they feel is ‘rational’ optimisation that benefits them, yet in doing so (in a highly competitive and frankly thoughtless way), they harm the whole.

Throughout the course of the session I highlighted many of the significant risks associated with these systems, including risks to our cognition, skill, and even our sense of reality, which is of course in addition to outrageous impacts on our environment during a time when our planetary system has reached, and in some cases, surpassed, critical tipping points.

I did, however, attempt to transition out of the doom and gloom—all of which is entirely merited and necessary—and move towards a more hopeful sense that, even amidst all this, we might be able to work on ourselves, work together, and find pathways forward.

Through this I introduced the importance of our work at ioēs. I did this because of the limitations our wounds and conditioning often place on us. They inhibit certain forms of free, values oriented action. They can, in a certain way, keep us stuck in a very particular way of being that is genuinely not of our choosing. This, without meaningful intervention, can perpetuate the cycle of the wounded wounding.

I hope that the lecture and the Q&A are useful for you, not just informationally but perhaps also inspirationally.

You can watch the full lecture here (the lecture notes contain 44 references to studies that relate to points I made during the lecture itself).

With φιλία (philía) as always,

Nate