AI and the Great Ontological Transformation

How did we get to this horrific moment when life itself may be snuffed out on this once animated planet? For 98 per cent of the time our species has inhabited the Earth, we adapted to the temporal processes, patterns, and flows of an environment alive with agency. Two thousand years ago our ancestors changed course and began to think of our world as made up of inert substances, things, and resources to be extracted, propertized, commodified, marketed, and consumed. We quickened the pace over the past two centuries of the Industrial Age, systematically stripping the planet of agency, and now find ourselves and our fellow creatures on the brink of extinction. Philosophers describe this historical dialectic as process ontology vs. substance ontology.

The existential question we now face is this: can we restore vibrant life on our planet or will we continue to exploit and degrade our Earthly largesse? The answer will depend, in great part, on how we choose to use Artificial Intelligence.

The powers that be in the AI world imagine a geopolitical approach to managing the planet, where a handful of tech giants govern the future and extract the last remains of what was a thriving environment, and where even humanity is bypassed by machine intelligence, giving rise to the “singularity” alongside an AI-framed substance ontology paradigm. By contrast, a powerful alternative AI is quietly scaling with the build-out of a highly distributed AI infrastructure attached to local ecosystems and stewarded by bioregional commons governance, enjoining the collaborative intelligence of both our species and our fellow creatures. The People’s AI is pure process ontology and fosters a deep biophilic realignment with the natural world.

The choice we make between holding on to an AI substance ontology or grabbing hold of a nascent AI process ontology will determine whether our planet, once brimming with life, will flourish again or perish.