I’m not sure that this shows up in the training set
About 8 years ago I remember Dave Snowden coming to Vancouver directly from a conference of security experts where they were discussing the top existential threats to humanity. In ascending order, at that time, they were: nuclear war, climate change and AI. At the time I remember thinking that how strange that seemed given that climate change is an absolute certainty and at least with nuclear war, we could actively try to prevent it. I had no idea what AI could really look like.
Nevertheless this particularly dystopian view of things had me on alert as I watched for signs that this might be happening. I am no AI expert, and the only AI I regularly and consciously interact with is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is now the best search engine out there, as everything else has become ruined by algorithms. It works, but it is also highly flawed and there is a simple reason for that: It acts like a human being.
If you’ve used ChatGPT you will be familiar with its major flaws which include approval seeking, hallucinations and, an overinflated sense of its own abilities. It will often say it can do things – like a harmonic analysis of a jazz tune – that it cannot actually do. And when it does the work and confidently provides the user with absolute garbage, my instinct is, that if it was an employee, I’d fire it. The inability to say “that is beyond my current limitations” is maddening. I was asking for this musical analysis the other day and after it couldn’t provide it, I discussed the fact that there is a price to this misplaced confidence. ChatGPT uses a tremendous amount of energy and water, and when it does so to just waste my time, I explained, there is an ethical issue here. It acknowledged that issue but it didn’t really seemed bothered by it.
That shouldn’t be a surprise because it was trained on the documented behaviours of certain classes of humans, for whom performative ethics is the norm. We do almost everything here in the global north with a detached knowledge that our ways of life are unsustainable and deeply and negatively impactful on our environment and other people but we don’t seem particularly bothered by that, nor to we display any real urgency to do anything about it.
This training is why Yuval Noah Harari is so worried in this video. AI is unlike any other tool that humans have invented in that it has agency to act and create on its own. As Harari says, printing presses cannot write their own books. But AI can, and it can choose what to write about and what not to, and it can print them and distribute them too.
The issue, and we have seen this recently with Grok, is that AI has been trained on the detritus that humans have left scattered around on the Internet. It has been raised on all the ways that we show up online. And although it has also been trained on great works of literature and the best of human thought, even though most of that material appears to have been stolen, Harari also points out that the quantity of information in the world means that only a very, very tiny proportion of it is true.
When I watched the video and then reflected on the post I wrote yesterday about difficult conversations, I had the insight that AI will know all about the stupid online conversation I started, but will know nothing about the face-to-face conversation that I later had. Harari points out, very importantly, that AI doesn’t understand trust. The reason for that, he says, is that we haven’t figured out the trust and cooperation problem in human society. That’s the one we should be solving first.
AI has no way of knowing that when there are crises in a community, human beings often behave in very beautiful ways. Folks that are at each other’s throats online will be in each other’s lives in a deeply meaningful way, raising money, rebuilding things, looking after important details. There is no way that AI can witness these acts of human kindness or care at the scale with which it also processes the information record we have left online. It sees the way we treat each other in social media settings and can only surmise that human life is about that. It has no other information that proves otherwise.*
For me, this is why face-to-face work is critically important. Meetings are just not the same over zoom. We cannot generate the levels of trust on zoom that we can by spending a significant amount of time in physical proximity to one another. Face-to-face encounters develop contexts of meaning – what I have called dialogic containers – and it is in those spaces and times that we develop community, trust, friendship, sustainable commitment and, dare I say, peace. The qualities of living that we ascribe to the highest aspirations for human community are only generated in their fullness in person. They require us to work through the messiness of shared life-spaces, the conflict of values and ideas and paths forward, the disagreements and confusions, by creating multiple ways in which we encounter and relate to one another. Sustainable community life requires us to see one another in multiple identities so that we discover that there are multiple possibilities for our relationships, multiple ways we can work around blockages and unresolvable conflict.
We are fast losing this capability as human beings. When people ask me to work with their groups there is always the lingering question of whether we can do the work of three days in two, and the work of two days in one. The answer is no. We can do different work in limited times and spaces. Narrowing the constraints on the act of making meaning together creates more transactional relationships based on incresingly incomplete and inaccurate information. This is world we are showing to AI agents. The actual human world is also relational, multi-faceted, subtle and soaked with meaning. As we feed our robots a particular picture of ourselves it’s possible that we are also becoming that very picture. Depth of relationship and meaning becomes replaced with a smeared, shallow breadth of connections and transactions.
There is no better way – no faster way, even – to develop trust than to be together. I think this is so true that it certainly is axiomatic to my practice and how I live my life. And if trust is the critical “resource” we need as human beings, to not only live well but to also address the existential threats that we face – which are all entirely created from our own lack of trust – then being together face-to-face working, playing, singing, struggling, discussing, and figuring stuff out is the most radical act of hope and generosity we can make, to ourselves and to our descendants.
I suppose there will always be a top three list of threats to human existence, but it would be nice if those top three were things like “sun goes supernova” or “super volcano blankets the earth in decades of darkness” and not actions for which we are entirely responsible.
* It also occurs to me that alien cultures who are able to pick up and understand the electronic signals we have been radiating towards every planet within 100 light years of ours will also get a very particular picture of who we are as a civilization. Never mind what was on the Voyageur record. Monday’s TV news has already overtaken it.
Peter Levine shared a video today of a panel he was on back in June, discussing practical ways to have difficult conversations. We could all do with a little more practice in this these days. I know I certainly could.
I found the audio hard to hear, but Peter’s post helpfully summarizes what each presenter practices, and I have gathered these principles here in a list for future reference. Each person is working in a different context, but the gathering was about teaching civics in schools in the United States. I think there is some useful transferrance of these principles, so I’m going to slightly rephrase them to be more general.
- Ground discussions in shared principles, such as living well together or a desire to find common ground
- Explore tensions (such as between equality and liberty(
- Use historical rather than current examples.
- Let the other lead.
- Set norms for addressing identities
- Allow a person to opt-out of “representing” a group
- Take responsibility for imbalances in credibility
- Give full attention to the other
- Practice receptivity, curiosity and open-heartedness
- Allow long pauses to allow quieter voices to emerge
- Make the conversation multi-centred, in other words allow it to become a real conversation rather than a mediated exchange of ideas through one person with power in the situation.
- Ask “What are you concerned about?” to uncover core values
- Legitimate concerns without needing to agree with them.
- Ground the discussion in a shared moral foundation
- Understanding your own philosophical, moral or ethical principles can help you generate good questions.
- Listen for understanding, not debate or attack.
Peter Levine (my summary , because he doesn’t cover his own talk in his post!)
- Name your own biases and make them visible
- Find a share ground of values
- Ask questions that are neither too abstract but also not settled.
- Explore unresolvable tensions
I recently found myself in a difficult conversation and I handled it really badly. It stemmed from a poor comment I made on a social media post during an election campaign where I accused my interlocutor of posting a hoax becasue a meme he shared did not reflect the data that was contained in the report it referenced. I know this person in real life, and the conversation did not go well online. When I saw him in real life, I apologized. A few days later we found ourselves together in the community and we started discussing the point of the post he made. It became a dogfight. I was triggered and upset, feeling some shame and guilt that I had kicked this whole thing off with what he perceived as a personal attack online. For his part, he is a lawyer, so the conversation became a debate, both of us convinced we were right. I was without any kind of skillfulness in creating a good curiosity based conversation. It wasn’t a proud moment.
Practicing these kinds of conversations is incredibly hard. None of us are saints. Principles like the ones above are just basic good sense for anyone hosting or participating in a difficult conversation, but they are incredibly difficult to remember and practice when we are in an emotional state and when the conversations we are having may ultimately have existential implications for the folks in the discussion.
I think at the end of the day one of the key principles that is my own personal responsibility to take is “I want this to go well, for me and the person I’m talking too.” I don’t mean that we should avoid conflict and just be civil to each other, or that we should deny any part of our emotional response to a situation. What I mean is that we should embrace a relationship, even if only for a few minutes, that can hold different experiences, different points of view and different aspiration side by side. For that we need a practice ground and before we step out onto that mat, we need some principles to guide us.
Here are some. What are yours?
Me and Toke in Montreal in 2013, on the back of a 120 person Art of Hosting.
Twenty three years ago, in November 2003, I sat next to Toke Paludan Møller in a circle called by Peggy Holman to discuss how we were going to carry on the work of practicing peace that we started in a remarkable gathering at the Whidbey Centre. It was the last day of the conference, which featured Harrison Owen discussing his book The Practice of Peace, and then a group of truly amazing practitioners working together to learn about opening space for peace. On the last day we were in Open Space and Peggy called a session around the topic of “what next?”
I knew Toke a little from the online world, but this was the first time we met in person. We passed the talking peace around the circle and when it came to Toke who was sitting to my left, he spoke words that I later invited him to turn into this poem:
it is time
the training time is over
for those of us who can hear the call
of the heart and the timesmy real soul work
has begun on the next level
for me at leastcourage is
to do what calls me
but I may be afraidwe need to work together
in a very deep sense
to open and hold spaces
fields
spheres of energy
in which our
and other people’s
transformation can occurnone of us can do it alone
the warriors of joy are gathering
to find each other
to train together
to do some good work
from the heart with no attachment
and throw it
in the riverno religion, no cult, no politics
just flow with life itself as it
unfolds in the now…what is my Work?
That was my invitation to work, and when he passed the piece to me, I said “yes…I want to do THAT.”
The next year, Toke was coming to my island to teach an Art of Hosting, having previously met some of the stewards of Rivendell, a retreat centre here. It was there that I met Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and others who would go on to be some of my most influential work and learning partners for the next 20+ years. The work of the Art of Hosting was taking off in North America, supported by the Berkana Institute and it gelled so completely with what I was doing through working in Open Space that I jumped into the remerging community. I was invited the next year to be an alumni at the 2005 gathering at Rivendell, and then invited to be on the team for 2006 and beyond. We have held Art of Hosting trainings on Bowen Island or in Vancouver every year since (and lately twice a year, in the fall and in the spring). Toke and I ran a session for Indigenous youth in 2006, set up by Pawa Haiyupis.
That work led to me inviting Toke to be a part of the engagement work we did for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team (VIATT) an organization that was working on establishing a regional governance structure for Indigenous child and family services on Vancouver Island. Together we did two Art of Hosting trainings for folks working in that field, at Tsa-Kwa-Luten on Quadra Island and Hollyhock on Cortes Island. Those gatherings were profound. David Stevenson was our CEO and Kris Archie was the engagement specialist that I was working with at VIATT. Kyra Mason was the policy specialist. So many of my colleagues and friends that have developed this practice of the Art of Hosting were introduced to it at that time as we were using this practice and participatory methods to engage in some truly system changing work.
Toke invited me to join him and Monica teaching the Art of Hosting at the Shambhala Institute in Halifax the following year and I did that for several years as well including in Victoria and Columbus, teaching alongside a faculty of unbelievable quality and stature. I felt so privileged to by a part of that work.
In the mid-2010s we worked together in Estonia and Montreal, responding to calls for Art of Hostings in those places. We worked together with folks in Minnesota through the Bush Foundation in work led by Jerry Nagel and at the University of Minnesota where Jodi Sanford was leading a group of folks in exploring the practice in the public policy sphere. I dipped my toes in the work that Toke and Monica were supporting in Columbus with Phil Cass, trying to bootstrap a community-based health care network. That is work that I continue to do with Phil to this day, as a regular member of the Physicians Leadership Academy faculty. We worked together on a team with Monica, Phill, Tim Merry and Tuesday Rivera on the Food and Society conference for the Kellogg Foundation, hosting 550 people in a process that radically transformed that conference. We followed in his footsteps as he worked with a crew in Japan in 2017 and we followed up to support that community with a three-week intense visit in 2019.
We were at stewards gatherings in Slovenia, in Nova Scotia, Minnesota, Belgium, and on Bowen Island where we wrestled with questions of how a global community of practice could be held together without being controlled. Some of those gatherings included peak moments of my life, notably the night when we gathered on the rampart at Statenberg in Makola, Slovenia, where we sang into the grey, foggy, gloaming of dawn with Luke Concannon, gathered around a fire, joined in beautiful, present community.
Toke taught me about simplicity and clarity in the work of facilitation and hosting. He calls forth depth in everyone, and is a lovely facilitator. His commitment was always to practice. as a life long meditator, he knows the fruits of awareness of attending to the basic patterns of life – breath, movement, invitation, dancing together. With the Art of Hosting he and Monica distilled many years of professional practice into a framework that can hold this depth and that invites each of us to become better and better at what we do, more committed to dignity, to heart, to voice, to a commitment to what lies in the centre between us all, the desire for a more purposeful, life-giving and loving world.
Also Toke taught me to be a teacher, to always have mentors and always find apprentices who are hungry for the work. He models this by supporting young people in their journey as the learn to host and lead. He shares widely and deeply with those who hunger for the knowledge and wisdom he has acquired over the years. He models mastery – the humble learner, the humble teacher, confident in what he knows, open to what might happen, never knowing where the next thing will come from.
And he taught me to be a steward, to care for the lineage of what has been handed to me and to pass it to those who could also care for it. Not to preserve it unchanged, but to let it morph and respond and grow and be useful to the world.
Yesterday, Toke announced that he was retiring from this work. In a Facebook post, he wrote:
After 55 years practicing the art of organizing, hosting, process consultancy, and sustainable leadership training, I’m awakening into the next chapter of my life.
At 77, I’m retiring from professional work – to walk the path of gratitude – simply for being alive, and to live in deeper harmony with Life itself – as best I can in the last chapter of my lifetime.
I am focusing on deepening my practice of peace – regardless of circumstance.
Supporting other humans of the next generations – who choose to listen – to awaken to practice simplicity, to practice peace, and serve Life and humanity with courage & kindness – in our smaller and bigger contexts.
My journey continues with the co evolving Practicing for Peace Dojo, The Flow Game practice field – and the subtle Art of loving Life – in service of peaceful coexistence and wellbeing for All.
To all my clients, friends, and companions – thank you.
It’s been an honor and good fun to walk and work alongside so many of you in the fire of learning & what matters – striving to bring a bit of clarity, nowness, natural order, capacity – and peace into the fragmentation of our world – wherever invited and possible.
Listening for – and responding boldly to – sincere invitations from the heart is, I trust, a graceful way to live, walk and serve Life.
Learning in the right and wrong.
Now, tending a quieter flame.
Still, the Work goes on…..
The Work is in good hands. I am eternally grateful to this man for setting me on this path of devoting my own life to the deep practice of participatory work through the Art of Hosting. It is not easy, and it is not possible to do without a community of friends and colleagues and co-conspirators in the work. Toke’s greatest gift to the world through his work was perhaps that: tending to a community of “mates” who were willing to say yes to wild things and get in there and see what we could do.
When I met Toke he was two years younger than I am now. His example gives me a path of possibility for the next 20 years of my own life.
A bow to you, my friend.
This is not a well funded health care system.
We are heading into a period of austerity in Canada. The federal government is working on a budget that will provide a 15% cut to government services and spending and a tax cut primarily for the middle and upper classes along with legislation to fast track large resource development projects. The idea, I suppose, is that these large projects will stimulate the economy and protect us from the shocks of the destruction to the global trade system generated by the US’s arbitrary trade policies.
Some governments are quite excited about the construction of fossil fuel projects in Canada. We have a local one here in Squamish. A liquid natural gas facility and port called Woodfibre LNG. Woodfibre LNG is 70% owned 70% by LGE, which is a private company owned by Indonesian billionaire Sukanto Tanoto. His companies such as Asian Agri, Unibank and various logging firms have been convicted of tax evasion, fraud and environmental degradation, leaving local communities and people on the hook. Tanoto is a billionaire.
As with all large resource projects, this one was promised to bring jobs to the local community, a city that is struggling with housing affordability, a stretch on its public infrastructure and a generational transition from resource-based industries to tourism and recreation. Squamish needs services – health and education services for a growing population, housing, social services, public transportation infrastructure to serve its connections to greater Vancouver and Whistler. Back in the old days, with union jobs and local townsites created around the mines and mills of Howe Sound, you could count on these kinds of projects to bring in settlers who establish businesses, schools and local services. That is where resource towns gained their reputation for driving prosperity. They also destroyed First Nations cultures and degraded the local land and waters for 100 years too.
That picture has changed. These towns don’t drive local prosperity, they enrich non-local investors. As predicted, the WLNG project has brought in hundreds of workers from elsewhere in Canada and around the world to build the plant and the port. Hundreds are staying in two converted passenger ships known as “flotels” which house work camps for the project. Most workers are engaged in a two weeks on/one week off rotation. While they are living on the flotel they are not allowed to visit Squamish, and therefore do not support local businesses. Because they aren’t living in Squamish they aren’t paying local taxes either. There are about 51 local people out of more than 650 currently employed on the project. Some businesses are providing contract services.
Woodfibre LNG’s own report on socio-economic impacts begin rather ominously with the words “ Woodfibre LNG is committed to managing socioeconomic effects associated with the construction and operation of its liquid natural gas facility located in Squamish BC” which aren’t exactly the words of a company focused on becoming part of the local community. When it was announced WLNG promised 650 jobs during construction and 100 jobs over the 25 year operational life of the facility. As taxpayers we gifted them a reduced rate on their electrical bill, to the tune of about $23 million a year. They have yet to begin paying local property taxes to Squamish, and are currently negotiating a tax agreement with the local government. That has gone to court becasue Woodfibre thinks it’s too much. So now in addition to challenging the rate, WLNG is now costing local taxpayers money to fund a legal defence.
These companies do not want to pay taxes, but they are happy to get subsidies on energy costs, and a reduction of royalties until capital costs are paid off. Those costs by the way have doubled recently, much to the chagrin of LGE’s minority partner, Enbridge. These companies demand and receive the help and relief from financial pressures that citizens do not. We are bending over backwards in Canada to develop these kinds of projects, and we are cutting much needed health and education and social services to provide incentives for wealthy investors to do it.
These projects do not “build nations”. They are the fruits of a nation we have already built. They provide very few local jobs and when it comes to making a meaningful impact, by providing long term tax funding for services to give back for the resources we have freely provided to them, they do everything in their power to avoid, dodge and not pay.
This is not how to build a nation. We are in a place where we need to literally invest in the human and physical capital to sustain health care systems, public infrastructure, education, social services not to mention the public-good parts of industries like agriculture, energy generation, community development and manufacturing so that we are safe, fed and cared for. Without that there will not be a nation to invest in.
The market will not do this. Despite private mega projects like LNG plants convincing local governments that they are good for the economy, they do everything in their power to avoid paying taxes and royalties which is the ONLY way to get more doctors and nurses, more teachers and scientists, more public transportation and safer food and water. Government’s job is to pay for those things.
We need energy. Maybe we even need LNG and certainly people need jobs. That doesn’t mean that energy companies are the most important sector in our country, nor is their success the only way to fund a functioning society. Individuals benefitting from development is not the same as a community or a province or a nation benefitting from it. We have been sold a pile of garbage for 45 years about how the market will solve all our problems, how creating investment opportunities for very wealthy people will return resources to the rest of us, and despite ample evidence to the contrary, people STILL believe it.
Canada is entering into a dangerous time. Not because the economy and the climate is tanking. But because our current governments are disinvesting in our social infrastructure just at a time when we need to increase it. This will load individuals up with debt, forcing them to borrow for things that government should be borrowing for, at better rates. It will increase the costs for families and small businesses and property owners as municipalities struggle to absorb the costs that provinces pass on to them.
I’m not optimistic. Emails to my MP Patrick Weiler have gone unanswered. The current federal government budget consultation is clearly just window dressing because we have been discussing this budget for weeks now. It’s already made and Departments are already looking for cost reductions. No one is going to pay attention to folks who say “hey, we need to substantially increase tax revenue and do a wholesale reinvestment in our citizens.” It might be decades before we can have that conversation again, and by then the game might be fully rigged in favour of it never happening.
The summer morning light on the east wall of Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound.
When I set a vacation responder on my email during times of travel or rest, I try to make it useful. That often means sharing a recipe.
Here’s the current out of office message…it’s a little easter egg for folks who read the automated responses:
While I’m away I am going to be eating salmon, because it is salmon season on the coast and there are Sockeyes and Chinooks to be had. Here’s my go to barbecue recipe.
Get a filet, fresh if possible. Season it with salt and pepper.
Heat your grill so it’s hot, then place the fish skin side down on the grill over minimum indirect heat and let it cook slowly. If you can keep it going at about 250 F you’re good.
Cook it until the fat just begins to render out of the thickest part of the fish. If you cook it too long the fat will all render out and the fish will be too dry. 10 minutes might be all you need.
In the meantime make a gremolata. This is easy:
1 small bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley (about ½ cup chopped)
2 tbsp fresh dill, chopped (or substitute tarragon or add some other herbs if you have them like rosemary and thyme or a bit of basil. You cannot go wrong here.)
1 clove garlic, finely minced (or smashed to a paste)
Zest of 1 lemon
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp capers, rinsed and chopped
3–4 tbsp olive oil
Salt and pepper, to taste
1 tbsp of mustardWhen the salmon comes off the grill slather the gremolata on top and serve.
You don’t have to send me an email to get this recipe. Enjoy it.