A recent conversation with an activist friend unfolded around a frequently voiced conviction: “AI is here to stay, so we have to deal with it.” And the exchange then wrestled a bit with a new book, Burn Out from Human by scholar Vanessa Andreotti, proposing to integrate AI with indigenous values, attempting to embrace this tech as “kin.” My responses here primarily address these two propositions, raising questions more than offering solutions.
AI to stay? Yes, it would seem. But at another level, no, in view of the cascading cataclysms that threaten to disappear much of what we now take for granted in our lifetime. The science I read on every side is now saying that climate change is baked in; insect apocalypse is continuing apace with dire consequences for our food production among other things; The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the global gulf Stream which circulates waters in the Atlantic Ocean, has been slowing down and could shut down as early as this year, but likely will do so with radical implications by 2050; fresh water is disappearing through heating and evaporation and through draining of aquifers especially by corporate enterprise whose polluted returns to the water cycle contributes both to habitat degradation and to sea level rise; PFAS and plastic are wreaking havoc in every ecosystem across the globe including our bodies; tens of thousands of chemicals are released daily into the environment without any testing; the wild life population has seen a reduction on the planet by 73% since the 1970s so now wild mammals are only 4% of the biomass of the globe, etc., etc., etc.
The issue of the hour for us is limitation. Can we limit ourselves as a species? Either we do, or “nature” will do it for us. And indeed, I think this is exactly why Musk and co. are hell bent on getting to outer space. Leaving everyone and everything else behind. So, is AI here to stay? For a minute. But probably not for long, the way things are going.
And then, Andreotti’s push to integrate AI with indigenous values. I applaud the approach, but have one deep question. She continually uses the language of embracing reciprocity and co-creativity with human and more-than-human “intelligences.” The word is slippery for me. I would prefer “with human and more-than-human ‘creatures.’’’ The issue is this: can I be kin with your intelligence while I enslave your body? The writing talks at length about being kin with AI. But what is AI? More precisely, what is the body of AI, its materiality? It only exists inside all kinds of other creatures—stone, ores, oil, silicon, plastic, copper, transistors, cables, wires, servers, racks, data centers, generators, immense amounts of water, and electricity, etc.
To be kin with AI in an indigenous way would mean being kin with every component part of the body of AI.
I think of Robin Kimmerer, the Potawatomi Botanist and author of the popular book Braiding Sweetgrass, and her way of talking about the honorable harvest, that in indigenous approach means, first of all, respecting the plants, asking permission, waiting to hear what may be a “no,” and if so, honoring it, and in any case not taking more than you need for that meal, or that day.
Anishinaabe/Cree teacher Martin Prechtel, the indigenous mentor my wife and I have been learning from for 20 years now, talks about indigenous cultures not building space shuttles and malls and cargo ships, etc. not because they didn’t have the intelligence, but because they ritually “give back” to nature for everything they take from nature. In a 2001 interview with Derrick Jensen, Prechtel talks about the “cost” to the planet of making a single knife blade and how the Mayan community he married into in the 1970s would handle the forging and smithing involved in creating such a tool. They would give back to the “wild” for each of the extracted materials, through the creation of handmade beads (each taking anywhere from 1-7 hours to craft) that were then offered ritually—one each for the ore originally mined, the fire kindled to smelt, the wood needed for the fire, etc.
The point being here, to really live sustainably, he would say, is to live with deep ritual respect and embraced limitation on our uptake that is concretely mediated by this kind of material “give back,” giving beauty back for beauty taken. To make a space shuttle would take generations and generations of such “return gifts” for all the materials extracted, and simply prove impossible. But for 5,000 years “civilizational cultures” have been scoffing at such impossibility, living in disdain for such, taking with impunity and without care or concern to honor or ritually return value. But I think the bill is now coming due.
And I confess I do not know how to take in this kind of vision of living sustainably and in concrete material honoring of our wild natural kin in the midst of our now gargantuan maw of extraction and squeezing out of everything the planet has to offer. And I am complicit, as are most of us alive today (but not all, there are still a few communities on the planet who do still live this way, though they are being eliminated as we talk). Not having a “solutionary” answer does not, for me, erase the imperative for stopping and listening to the likes of what Prechtel and Kimmerer are saying. I want to at least face into the kind of radically different way of living they are witnessing to, that used to be the lifestyle and vision of all our ancestors. I might not be able to make a sharp turn back into something like that way of living. But I can at least honor those ancestors by stopping my frenzied drive “forward” and listen. And I do so while remaining committed to being involved in the emergencies of the hour—the Detroit water struggle, the genocide in Gaza, etc.—and trying to remedy them as best I can with others similarly acting.
So, thus: kin relations with AI? Laudable aspiration. But what really would that mean if we took it seriously? To talk abstractly about kinship with AI without grounding it in actual kinship with the thousands upon thousands of actual “creatures” that make up AI—each and every part, every stone, every metal, every fiber, every chemical—seems dangerously misleading. We are proclaiming kinship with a vaguely imagined “intelligence” without bothering to be in kinship relationship with that intelligence’s actual body—or in this case, trillions of bodies. A typical cellphone today alone has between 10 and 184 billion transistors in it. And if we gave a handmade bead for each . . . ?
Again, this writing is not addressing a whole thicket of other AI considerations. It is only weighing in on the idea of embracing such as kin, “indigenously.” But it does point to the large-scale question that AI brings to a climax for us as a species. I have no hope for us except we limit ourselves. Can we? I don’t know. But I don’t want to pretend we can scrabble “AI” and “indigenous” together in an abstract vision that is not grounded in actual creatures, materiality, parts, stones, cables, metals, etc. I don’t want to pretend an intelligence can be free and “kin” while that intelligence’s body is coerced and enslaved.
James W. Perkinson is a settler/educator/activist/poet for 40 years on Three Fires land in inner-city Detroit, Social Ethics Professor at the Ecumenical Theological Seminary, author of six books on white supremacy, colonialism, ecology, including Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars: The Angel of the Jordan Meets the Trickster of Detroit as well as two poetry books.
