Musings on Sacred Planetarity [AI, Computation, Earthcare]

In 2014, I founded a company, Filisia, that makes interactive software and hardware games that re-imagine play and therapy. Early on, we carried out user testing with a child with autism (non verbal). His needs and abilities were quite complex, and he could not provide us with verbal feedback, but he was visibly excited! As the session concluded, his mother was moved and nearly in tears. She told us that she had never seen her son sustain a combination of skills - such as maintaining eye contact, concentrating, and hand-eye coordination - for such an extended period. She interpreted his response to our session and said “I think he didn’t know he was able to do this, and your product made him realise he was! He discovered a skill he didn’t know he had!”

I’m fundamentally interested in the Human Project and how we create technologies and systems that not only augment our existing capabilities but also create new ones; either latent capabilities, completely novel ones or capabilities that exist at the interfaces of different scales of understanding. This is the reason I’m fascinated by neurotechnologies too (including psychedelics and meditation), how the mind is spread across brains and bodies and how collectivity is moderating our interiorities and vice versa.

We are not, however, passive agents; Our minds do not simply represent what exists in the world. The mind co-creates the world it perceives by engaging with the environment. We enact worlds. Technologies and interactions that help us understand ourselves also help us understand the world in ways that can bring more wonder. The more wonder we are able to see in the [inner ∩ outer], the more wondrous things we will build. This is one of the reasons I worked on AI; I thought that by understanding the wondrous complexity of the world — be it natural or engineered systems— we could see more complexity, understand negative externalities, induce more positive externalities and bring more beauty to this world.

The eco-technopolitical project of reciprocity requires that we not only create symbiosis but also create more life and generativity in our environments as well as heal internally and heal our environments too. For this project, we will need planetary-scale AI. AI should go beyond mere vacuous abstractions and toward helping us metabolise and embrace the interconnectedness and interdependence between all living things.

This is the real use of the Computer, not to expedite marketing or solve technical problems. And this is far from a modernist project; it’s a project of sanctification of Gaia, Logos, and the Collective. I hope that the synthetic intelligence we are building, i.e. the conjoined human and nonhuman cognition that leads to increasing planetary self-awareness, will lead to a “sacred planetarity”, a re-enchantment of the Earth and eventually a more just orchestration of terrestrial--and galactic--environments and energies. These emancipatory technologies will have to be open and private by default.

This will not be achieved via one method, practice or actor; the more I ask these questions, the more I explore different conditions and ways of doing this; working with complexity requires many levers: from money flows to ventures, culture, art, policy, incentives and different collaborations.

So, folks…we got work to do! We got beautiful things to discover.