Human vs. artificial vs. plant intelligence | Sternstunde Philosophie | SRF Kultur

duplicate [Music] foreign uh no which is probably why I've written a book that's all about how categories don't really work anymore um and that they're a poor method for thinking about the world um I've always found myself in places where I don't quite fit kind of between disciplines whether that's studying computer science while still mostly having an interest in literature or working in book publishing while actually thinking that maybe the internet and computers were kind of interesting and weren't here to destroy us and I think that probably is the biggest characteristic of my work is that I like to kind of jump between disciplines because that's where all the interesting conversations seem to happen um [Music] um I don't know I've it's often there's this idea that this stuff is born quite deep in childhood but um I think a lot of my life has been shaped by my childhood but I don't think that's a particular characteristic of it I mean the strongest influence on my work I think is being part of that particular cohort that came of age the same time as the internet right that's kind of what I think about as as someone you know and there's quite a narrow band of people born around the same time as I was born between sort of 1975 and 1985 but we're not magic or special but we just happen to grow up really with the internet and that the internet arrived at kind of critical point of adolescence for us that we were able to see a little bit of life before it see see the early internet as it existed see the way that it changed and and the effect that it had on our lives and so I consider myself part of a kind of cohort as I said I had that effect and that I think and again it didn't have the same effect on everyone but for me it um gave me a kind of totally different perspective on the world as something that I could explore and find out more about in those you know basic simple way and I think I've carried that attitude with me throughout while also really kind of transferring it to other things to understand that like a new thing a new way of seeing a new ways of thinking can Arise at any time and very from very unexpected places and that it's possible to seek those things out in London house and odds on them is foreign program uh yeah Greece can absolutely use the income unfortunately which is why these battles are happening um there's been a pretty much unanimous position from the last several Greek governments on both sides of the political Spectrum as much as they differ um that they want oil and gas and not just from the Opus region but also from the Mediterranean Sea um so there's drilling going on all the way down the coast and also around kind of Cyprus and these places um which is not Greek but it's closely tied to it um and uh yeah and this is the disaster that we're in in the present moment right because we all know that every drop of oil and gas that is extracted from the earth is is damaging Earth and other prospects of survival for us and every other creature on it and it you know for me a lot of my work comes out of finding myself in particular places where those issues become very real and aprilus was one of those places um I'd heard that this was happening up there and it was a place that I'd spent some time and that I love deeply it's and kind of a beautiful place and so understanding um what was happening there you know I went up to meet people who were more actively engaged in the fight against against the oil and gas exploration uh it was kind of campaigning against it and unfortunately not very effectively because that's not easy to do in Greece the government's very um pretty powerful and and the companies have a lot of support um uh I just want to understand more and spend time in the place but by being in in the place I understood also some of the mechanics around it as you know from reading the book one of those things was to discover the ways in which oil and gas companies are using artificial intelligence to um to identify sites for oil and gas extraction and to make that extraction more efficient essentially to kill us and everything that else that lives on the planet more effectively intelligence is um yeah I think so I mean I I would suggest that anything that there's a fundamental lack of intelligence in anything that destroys itself um I don't I I guess I would struggle to assign the idea of intelligence to anything that is dedicated to its own destruction um I wouldn't that's not the definition of intelligence that I would use I think that they may be successful at being dictators or sadists but I I I'm not sure I would call them intelligent and that's that doesn't that's not my we maybe should step back and explore a little bit about what we mean what we're talking about intelligence because really this was the question I you know faced up to into um uh and try to write this book because I decided that I try and write a book about intelligence not knowing very much about what I meant by that of course but that's the lovely place to start a process like this and what I discovered you know going back into other writings and thinkings about intelligence is that historically what we mean by intelligence or what we're always secretly saying when we use the word intelligence we just mean like what humans do like you can get into all these other kind of questions around do you narrow it down to all these categories of things like making plans um self-awareness uh like various kind of abilities you can take these kind of lists of different categories you jumble them together but there's no like single solid definition of what intelligence is it's a malleable concept and therefore a useful one and one that's under debate um so you might consider those things you just mentioned to be forms of intelligence um I don't want to use that definition because I think it's useful to create other types of definitions which is why they use artificial intelligence for things that I consider to be fundamentally stupid I'm choosing my definition of intelligence because it's the one I think is productive and useful to use which is why I don't want to use it for those other things and that is also tied to my idea of what intelligence itself is which is something that is active that's something that is actually a verb rather than a noun right it's not a static fixed concept it's something that emerges out of relationships and so intelligence itself is something malleable and changeable and so what we consider to be intelligent and value as intelligence can be changed with that as well foreign the Hunts this is yeah I mean the the drawings from a study where they they basically tested the intelligent they decided whether Gibbons were intelligent based on whether they could find things that were hidden under little cups and given don't like picking up cups because they've got really long fingers and it's really hard and also Plus on top of that we're keeping them in cages and they don't like being in cages and the whole setup of this system is an absolutely terrible way of evaluating something as meaningful and deep as as the intelligence um of another living being um the the the sticks example you gave is is kind of a better more favorite one of mine um because the other experiment another type of experiment that's supposed to reveal the intelligence of other beings is yeah tool use can given some kind of particular tool can a creature work out how to use it and to fulfill some kind of task like reach for a treat that's Out Of Reach and for years Gibbons were not understood by the dominant science to um uh to be intelligent because they wouldn't use these sticks that they were given and people were giving them sticks for years and they wouldn't use them why won't the Givens these mistakes um like and finally someone redesigned the experiment in such a way they hung these sticks from the top of their enclosures and immediately the Gibbons just went oh thanks like this and and like oh magically they become intelligent within the lens of our understanding of intelligence right of course like being intelligent all along and they're just intelligent in a different way to us and some of those ways of being intelligent or rather what some of those ways of doing intelligence overlap with some of the ways that we do intelligence some of them totally radically different many of them in ways that we will probably never see or understand but intelligence is not yeah intelligence is not something that exists solely within the head it's something that exists both through the body embodied in the way the Gibbons embodiment includes the kind of long fingers and the reaching upwards because they live in the trees and also it exists between bodies as a relationship because it's something that's enacted in touch with the world cloud [Music] there are some examples I think of um that I've heard about where there has been like direct kind of inspiration from the modern human world into the technological fairly few and far between um what seems to happen more often is kind of an interesting process of co-evolution uh kind of unconsciously similar patterns arise within both because they're kind of found to be practical and successful in these various ways um for me the the you know the really the greatest example or one of the most fascinating examples of this kind of commonality between um uh kind of patterns essentially of various forms within nature and within our Technologies is is what you see happening in our kind of gradual awareness of um uh natural fungal networks that have been found in kind of forests in the last decades or so not just in first left they are a global thing but people suddenly realized certain scientists working very carefully uh realized that the the fungal systems systems of fungi connecting the roots of various trees were actually completely entangled with them and formed a Communications Network and information and nutrient sharing Network where you know different species of tree could share food with each other but also share information they could warn about predators and so on and so forth the system exists in almost all forests around the planet in fact in almost all soil around the planet um and it's something that the the dominant science was kind of completely unaware of um and when it was first published the first findings about this was published in nature they famously chose the title wood wide webs as the as the title for this this issue of nature the scientific journal um because they knew that people had a model of communication networks in their heads already because of the existence of the World Wide Web right but also the scientists who discovered it they were also some of the first people to be connected to the nascent internet back in the 1970s and 80s because they were because academic institutions were some of the first places to be connected to the internet and so they too were kind of given a model of the world in the form of networks by this technology that had been created kind of separately and that flipped over in turn again when when information scientists started to study the the internet in the 1990s they realized that the the network mathematics at the time wasn't really sufficient to cover it and they had to invent a new kind of form of topology called Network Theory to describe what they called scale-free networks which is how the internet works though where you have many many nodes connected in many many different ways and you can kind of bring them in and take them out and it doesn't damage the overall Network it turns out that that mathematics is directly applicable to the forest networks as well they're not the same thing very importantly they differ in very very important ways but at the level of kind of metaphor they have a huge amount in common and there's a danger there as well because of course we start to think of these things as being computers and they're not but there is definitely a kind of commonality of patterns between things that we consider to be natural things we consider to be artificial things that we make and things that Evolution has made that can teach us something very very important about the nature of the world and what we make cambiando foreign foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] to say plants look for solution is a human thing to say because we're saying it in human language you know I mean like like we can't we can't not understand things to a human lens because we are embodied as humans um that shouldn't be a that should never be used to deny like the intelligence and embodiment of other beings um I have no problem with the idea of plant intelligence it makes complete sense to me uh in part as I said because I don't think intelligence is a is an interior quality it's something that emerges but because I believe in the being hood of all beings um uh and uh and therefore these kind of arguments over um uh the the precise nature of what particular intelligence is of is involved here and how we should describe it in human language is is you know endlessly fascinating But ultimately bunk because the question is is you know it's it's the the interesting question is never as like how much are you like me but like what is it like to be you right like what what is what is the strangeness and difference that animates the world not what is the thing that makes it all the same and I think when we you know when we talk about the intelligence of other beings that is so evident anywhere you look at the activity going on and around world around us um like the the the the constant desire to kind of nail it down to a specific set of qualities is um you know it's kind of is so fundamentally reductive um and it is a you know it's connected to a lot of our other ideas about how we should shape and build the world wipe website is foreign Tribune [Music] foreign here is that we're struggling with the language that is acceptable within the dominant system of science that is capable of describing the world according to a certain set of circumstances that is incredibly powerful and has allowed us to understand a huge amount about the world in a particular way and I have no particular problem with that but it is not the only way of understanding the world the world does not exist Prime exist only for its categorization within human knowledge systems that is not the only way of experiencing the world as as you say as anyone who has walked in a forest can tell you and frankly as most scientists will tell you as well and this is not should never be framed as some kind of science versus hippie debate around who gets to call the shots on this because that's ridiculous scientists most of the scientists that I know are some of the most um you know inquisitive and kind of awe-inspired people people that you could imagine I think you know the the the the ones who I find particularly interesting are those who are able to hold these ideas conceptually within multiple kind of spheres of comprehension multiple ways of knowing at the same time a particular example of this I wrote about in the book is the work of Monica Galliano um plant scientists who did the work that was mentioned in that clip on Mimosa plants and their capabil their ability to remember amongst many other interesting experiments Emma and Galliano writes very openly about having a shamanic practice a practice in which she talks directly to plant Spirits um and this really upsets a lot of scientists as you can imagine which is brilliant not that they get upset but that these things get troubled um and the thing is it doesn't matter whether you ascribe value or Merit to her um her claims about not only that she communicates with plant spirits but those plants help her design her experiments because her experiments as constituted conform to all the directives of the scientific method they are reproducible they appear in journals they are peer reviewed they are good science whatever you think about how she the language that she uses foreign those who are a variance with the conventional wisdom those are the ideas the explanation the expert opinion the everyone the majority accept us to be true are still getting burnt maybe not at the stake but certainly on the job market and they're still feeling the heat of those Flames potentially burning down their careers so the real question would be so why do it why taking the risk and well because not doing it is actually far more dangerous we will stop imagining other possibility we will stop making other worlds possible yeah absolutely um but you know what I what I most enjoy about her work is is the extent to which it troubles me as well to the extent to which it makes me realize my own scientific the way in which I've been conditioned into the Western Dominic scientific worldview that even though I too have spoken with plant Spirits using not dissimilar methods I still struggle to reconcile those two things that I I still instinctively cling to the scientific description of things it's the one I still use primarily when I want to convince other people for example because I assume they have the same scientific conditioning as I do and I still value that scientific thing even though I have also had Direct experience that doesn't counteract it but is completely inexplicable within its system and that's a very powerful thing and it's it's it's for me the the most powerful thing when we're capable of really deeply um uh interrogating recognizing when we are hitting the limits not just of our own biases but the actual systems we have to think with and how prepared we are to push Beyond those explanations that we currently rely on not as I say to disregard them but to recognize that there are simply other ways of doing this that are right here waiting for us all along and crying out for our attention content [Music] yeah absolutely um as you know as as I described earlier this way in which um the the way in which we've constructed you know the technologies that we use every day shape the things the ways in which we can think and consider the world uh and and you know the more we tie ourselves to particular systems of thinking well that's what I've been past I've called computational thinking which is thinking through computers um like thinking everything is is possibly modelable and processable through ones and zeros and bits and pieces or whether we restrict ourselves only to the scientific method as soon as you you know you make these these Frameworks there are things that will fall outside those Frameworks and therefore we will miss out on them and that is a form of violence that is being continuously done to the world that that doesn't fit into those boxes that happens within our societies it happens at the edges of them towards other species and it happens across the universe as well um and so the yeah the work is always constantly being to um to push against those Frameworks as I say not to not to destroy them but to um to make it evident that there are alternatives that actually one can find kind of within the shadows and the edges of them whole other worlds to explore Holland [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] um yeah yeah so these are these are magic um I first met them in Greece um uh in aprilus the same region we were talking about before um and yeah as you describe that they're hyperaccumulators so they belong to this class of plants not all of which are related that perform this amazing work of drawing certain substances out of the earth um uh and yeah there's they were first researched heavily in the 1990s by mining companies um who uh were looking if they could deliberately plant them on polluted old mining sites because they would essentially remediate the soil and clean the soil and they're really good at that so they we can collaborate with them in this way and invite them into places that we've despoiled and poisoned and saying beg them to please could you help us to clean this Earth and they they they they're quite good and they like to do that which is lovely and we need to be very grateful to them for that um uh there's also this newer movement which is what I was working with in Greece which is called phyto mining which is growing these plants on naturally occurring metallic soils so in in northern Greece and Albania and in a lot of other a few other sites around Europe and in North America there's places where there's a lot of nickel in the soil and these are very poor agricultural soils but these certain types of plants have evolved over Millennia to thrive in these places by becoming hyper accumulators by instead of being poisoned by the nickel storing it in their stalks and leaves um and uh there's the the site that I worked with in Greece the the scientists there they were working with three uh three types of plant they were working with um Alison morale they're working with bunmuela imaginata this one and then a third type born well at inferior um and it's worth like understanding like how and where are those those people because we can talk about creatures as people um uh live Alison occurs mostly around the Mediterranean region umuela imaginata only grows is only found in um the northern Greece Albanian on the serpentine nickel Rich soils um and born where Tim Faye is named for Mount timphe which is one of the highest peaks of the the mountain range there and it only grows within about 50 kilometers of the mountain itself so they're all endemics uh locally occurring plants of increasingly smaller ranges those are their homes and they know their homes better than we do because we've they've lived there longer than us and they have a form of knowledge of how to live well in those places it's very interesting to know that we could grow and harvest them and we could even do that quite sustainably um in that you chop them off close to the root they continue to sequester carbon um they grow again that's wonderful we can be very grateful to them for that um but it would be an absolute disaster to presume that we could somehow keep up with our contemporary industrial life relying on their help to do that because the volume we know from things like palm oil that as soon as you industrialize a process like this even if it appears green at the outset the scale at which it is required to do that for modern industrial civilization will destroy everything and so unfortunately like we will not be able to exploit them in that way but then even those words coming out of my mouth being like of course we shouldn't exclude them in that way because that would be a bad thing to do we can learn from them the main thing being to learn is that plants have knowledge and that if we pay attention to might allow us to live differently with less resources on the surface of the Earth but they're never going to they're certainly not going to help us and we shouldn't ask them to recreate the current kind of explosive extractive needs that we have in the present moment tickets is foreign [Music] [Music] you can be foreign flagellates that Lim magula studied um and that you know the other basis for her you know the first things that margulis was studying that that gave the basis for her once much maligned and rejected and now overwhelmingly accepted theories of symbogenesis um this idea that we basically became who we are that everything became what it was through through processes of kind of cooperation and coming together rather than from competition and splitting apart um you know she was working with with cell less cell with nucleus Less sales she was working with the tiniest organisms uh that uh that exist um but the you know and the understanding expands from from those tiny tiny tiny imperceptible specs of Life all the way up to the complete ecosystem of the Earth that and a way of understanding the Earth and everything on it and probably actually the whole universe as as a as a system of organisms that are relating to one another and twitch it's kind of really impossible to draw lines between um this is starting to become I think quite well known and recognized now but it was Bears restating there was a famous paper that was published in I think nature one of the big science papers 10 years ago now that simply said there is no such thing as the individual and what they meant was that the you know microbiological study had reached the point where they couldn't find where the edges of a person were because we're walking around with like two to three kilograms of other creatures on and inside us at all times Well we shouldn't ignore it because it's incredibly important and the the mass extinction of species that is currently happening is happening inside our own bodies as well we're losing some of our microbes and those are microbes that make us healthy and alive that part of who we are and so the the sixth mass extinction already in process is happening within our own bodies as well those microbes they are part of us in ways that make them Inseparable from us that don't allow us to draw a line between us and other species um the the um the neurons that work in your the brain you read that allow you to think that make you as we mostly understand it who we are those neurons are made by processes that involve those gut bacteria and effectively changed the makeup of the gut people score differently on IQ tests so we we don't the brainstormers so it's it's very important but it's also really important to stress that gut health is is the health of the organism and as I've said it's organisms all the way down your gut health is the health of the world your gut health is influenced by the world around you and your environment there is no boundary between the human and the everything else that lives on this planet not at a molecular level not a biological level not at the level of intelligence not at the level of psychology one of my favorite writers Gregory Bateson who always talks about the eco-mental model where he talks about the fact that we're that when we drive he talks about pollution as a form of driving the environment mad in a sense in in a way that ultimately drives us mad as well because we are part of the same system just as we are support the same biological system in the way that um you know the the behavior of different organisms in our gut who aren't us but are very intimately connected with us affects the way we perceive and think the world that affects our lives in all these incredibly deep ways so the way that we treat the world affects our own health which which as soon as you say it sounds incredibly obvious because of course we know that by polluting the world we damage our own health but but it's at the level of biology itself we are made of the world we are inseparable from it and so the way we treat ourselves and the way we treat the world mirror each other just as the way we we think the world and the world thinks mirror each other foreign [Music] [Music] foreign if we had a laptop in front of us I'd say that this laptop is made from the bodies of dead sea creatures who left billions of years ago whose bodies have been melted down fused together to make the Technologies we make every day and it's animated by electrons that are probably also still being fired by the by the burning bodies of their compatriots or at least directed by the Sun or the wind or everything else nothing that lives upon the Earth is separate from the earth in any way that has any meaning and that's true of us and it's true of the things that we make um I believe from the same structures the foreign we have to kind of stop using the word natural because it has no meaning there is no there is no there is no state of nature from which anything is or can be separated as a rhetorical device in the 18th and 19th centuries um it was done for reasons it allowed a certain kind of thinking to emerge but is an entirely false distinction there is there is no this this idea that there is some separation between that there is a nature that one can stand above or away from is is inconsistent and incoherent and and and does not apply um there is nothing there is nothing between us and nature and so there is nothing that can be unnatural um there's no there is no outside to this system it is a system of relationships and we are all in constant relationships with everything around us all the time they matter to our health to our thinking to the ways in which we perceive the world they are our living being we share especially intelligence intelligence is I mean I'm very resistant to setting myself up as the Arbiter of what is or is not intelligent or what particular type of intelligence any particular thing is but I do feel very strongly that there is no such thing as artificial intelligence because intelligence is not like a product in a test tube um or like uh you know a thing locked in the brain it's not a consistent quality it's a performance um it's a thing that is done and therefore anything that is doing intelligence um is intelligent like and again it can't be artificial because nothing is artificial nothing is natural nothing is fake in that way um uh the the you know the in the ways that we're discussing um so the the more interesting questions regards possibly about like um why that intelligence is the way that it is right what role that intelligence is performing in the world what are the systematic forces um that that shape that intelligence that direct it what are the structures that we have constructed in the world that both allow that intelligence to exist in the first place that that give it impetus and Power in the present what in short are the power structures that elevate one form of intelligence over another or choose to recognize one form of intelligence over another that to me is what is revealed by discussions of intelligence not the the the level or the type of any particular intelligence but the fact that intelligence operates through you know so much larger existing systems of power and relationship um that um you know on the one hand lead us to consider one thing as being artificial or unnatural or one thing as as real and natural that you know those these words have long political histories and that's really what we're I think possibly edging towards here is understanding that you know anytime something is designated As Natural or unnatural or a number of other related terms a very serious value judgment is being made in the language of power and that allows certain things to be done to with that that that intelligence um and that that's you know that's that's what's being done with artificial intelligence in the present moment um that's very different to um to a question of whether something is intelligent or not foreign foreign attempts to I mean you said to it's a desire to Define these words I don't I don't think it's it's a it's never a matter of nailing down language in particular forms but it is to try and be as clear as possible what we're talking about and to try and and try and try and make it obvious that anyone I think as well can can see and think about these things I think it's very easy in these discussions for this to become to become a language game in which we're constantly trying to define something a bit more clearly or a bit more thing when actually you know what one of the things I take from Berger particularly is a very strong belief that that anyone can do this kind of thinking and and this kind of looking at the world because that's what Berger did in in ways of seeing you know he was he was taking the television medium in particular extended back to the history of up is you using the tool of Television to teach people how to see um and that has like a deeply Democratic impulse behind it which is that like you know you too can look at Art and think about it and get what you know you hear people getting from it or what you hear you see people writing about and talk about it in this way anyone can do that that these these experiences really are for anyone and you know it does I think what I'm trying to do in this is just to communicate primarily experiences that I have had myself in thinking about these things and increasingly meeting these beings and all the other fun and exciting things that have happened um uh because so much of this particularly the technology stuff happens within like very specialized domains and in this case within scientific domains um it's a real joy to write about science even though I know I'm being very rude about it a lot this evening um because um because reading scientific papers is such a joy and the thing that very few non-scientists do and there's incredible things out there um it feels often like that um public awareness uh public discourse is is decades if not occasionally up to a century behind where so much scientific understanding is you know I think of you know we're over 100 years into the the realization of the quantum world and yet the like a true understanding of quantum physics has not really in any way impacted people's daily lives even though it completely upends almost everything that we think thought we knew about the universe and potentially underlies much of what we speak about about this evening um I just remain excited about those things what more can I say abstract um yeah um I mean there's a project I'm very proud of um it came out of exactly the same sort of stupid curiosity that animates most of my other projects and I heard that the UK government was um illegally deporting people in the middle of the night from Regional airports and so I got in my car and started hanging out at Regional airports in the middle of the night and witnessed this happening and was found it quite bizarre that like no journalists were there or that this wasn't a well-known thing so I started making things about it and talking about it which is how I work um and the work that resulted from that which I'm still very proud of was this this Project's seamless transitions which was a series of I worked with I worked with the people who make um those kind of glossy CGI visualizations for architecture you know when they're building a new building it has the big picture of what it will never look like on the front of it and they're very good at what they do so I work with them to because there were various spaces that I couldn't photograph because it's illegal to photograph within airports or within Law Courts in the UK for example where secret trials were taking place so I went to the law court and we sketched it and then we made these CGI Recreations of them to show in the gallery and I'm very proud of that project but but and a lot of my work in that period did take that form of of making as you put it and as others have the invisible visible in these particular ways and it's a very powerful thing to do both with kind of secret horrific government regime projects and with things like technology where particularly Network Technology where the power of the network who owns it who runs it where the money is is like subsumed into this big thing we call the cloud that no one really knows what it is but it's actually like massive buildings on motorways and I go and photograph those as well and all of that's important but myself personally I've actually kind of Fallen a bit out of um love with that as a as a as a way of working um I think it's fundamentally insufficient in fact to make the visible the to make the invisible visible um I it's not enough and I know this because I spent a decade doing it um that actually you can show people pictures of stuff or you like and it makes no difference they may go away knowing something they didn't know before but what concerns me is their capacity to act in response to it um and actually just showing someone a picture of something um usually of something that they were probably aware was going on anyway and this is the thing there's this claim that there's some magic act that is performed when you show them the actual thing it's like oh now you can't deny it humans are really good at denial particularly if they feel that there is nothing they can do about that situation and this is the really fundamental thing I find myself mostly engaged with today is not how you can create an awareness around something because frankly and I think that's particularly true the ecological situation we all know perfectly well what is going on we don't need any more climate reports in you know like campaigns in the media to convince us something is horrifically wrong what we need is the um the tools but also the the capability to act what I usually refer to as agency agency is the um feeling primarily it's a feeling that you are in control of one's own life that you can intervene in your life in meaningful ways and change it and in different ways and and thus intervene and change the world around you as well most of us lack agency because of the tools that we have to use every day that's shaped against us the technological rules also just not having the knowledge to act and so what I mostly do now instead of trying to teach to make things visible as I try to teach agency in various ways like all kinds of ways so for years I did it by teaching people to code um uh not like in the way the government ministers say everyone should learn to code because we need like a healthy programming industry but because learning to code turns a computer from being a television a slightly interactive television which is what a computer is to most people into a the most powerful tool that's I've been put into human hats right that you can actually manipulate uh the insides of this machine and all the machines connected to it and it's most incredibly powerful way using even a small bit of programming in the right ways gives one an incredible amount of agency in the world one feels that and responds to it and then you act differently towards the systems around you and that that awareness is also transferable someone who has who has literacy in a particular area particularly strongly um and is also or perhaps has it in more than one area is then aware that that is that is a transferable skill one can start looking at how to apply that agencies in other ways a couple of years ago while having written my first book which deals with how horrific aspects of the internet have become and also the damage that it's doing to the environment I found myself within my own personal kind of feelings of what's now mostly being termed climate trauma or climate anxiety you know there's just awareness that something is horribly wrong and not knowing what to do about it and that that being a thing that is trapping a lot of people in the present moment um you know the we're becoming more fluent in the language of trauma I think but one of the things that it does is it it traps people in certain circles of behavior and it prevents us coming up with new behaviors or trying out new ideas we need something to move us out of that state of trauma an agency is one of the things that does that um I found myself like learning how to do simple solo installations uh wiring up solar panels started building windmills uh doing these kinds of hours all of these things building a Webmail writing a book building a website each of them are things that I am learning to do uh that that's the process that I've understood that is common to all of them um I'm currently planning on building a house I've never built a house before uh it's on some level it's absolutely terrifying um on the same thing I realized it is something that I can learn to do right that's um that's actually Le Guin the science fiction writer's definition of Technology uh which I adore and love um she she writes about technology because she was criticized as science fiction writer for not writing about rocket ships enough so she said look everything is technology but actually what technology is is what humans do and therefore it is what you can learn to do everything is something that you can learn to do and so Agency for me is is is the conscious awareness that you can learn to do things because if you know that you can learn to do things you can address them and the the anxiety and the trauma around things like climate change and many other aspects of your life become a lot more manageable when you feel you can learn to change them and that is something that can be um encouraged in people as well and also in here YouTube channel

2023-03-30 09:24

Other news