Collective Intelligence, AI + Total Transformation

Notes On Distributed Sensing

I suspect without commentary it may be difficult for others to follow, but I’ll share the video below for curious ones who may want to wade into the flow of emergent, coalescing conjectures and have a look around. Hopefully in the next week I’ll be able to sort through our voluminous text thread and map out the concepts well enough to do a structured overview of our expanded thinking on the situation in which we find ourselves.

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Video

People are going to have a hard time keeping up

It was a comment with a bittersweet edge. I don’t mean to imply people are slow or ignorant. It’s just that our merry band has ventured far off into uncharted territory, and few are prepared to extend themselves past comfortable / comforting narratives. Beyond there be dragons and all that…

I experienced this with my own family, an ongoing heart break. You changed, you do research, you left us…was the refrain. Even though I was always right there in the living room. Yes, I was in the living room, but the information that surrounded me was…different. I wasn’t the NPR-listening mom I used to be. I followed the money. I saw patterns. I built my own understanding of what I sensed was unfolding. I wanted to know more, and in that quest I realized, too late, I had isolated myself from my former life with terrible finality.

The work I’ve done in partnership with fellow travelers; pulling threads, making maps, uncovering connections, and weaving a tapestry that continues to challenge everything I thought I knew about the world, gradually pushed me to the margins. Over time, it led to my painful cancellation as a daughter, wife, mother, and friend even as it has opened doors to productive new collaborations and adventures in new lands. I continue to grapple with that reality alone here in this efficiency apartment, awaiting my next chapter. Despite persistent, ineffectual, attempts to build bridges back to my loved ones, the vast chasms, for the moment at least, seem like they will not be overcome.

There is an ongoing refrain running in the back of my mind…Meg facing off against IT… “you are not my Charles Wallace.”

But also, “love wins.”

While touring homes this week, my realtor commiserated with me.

Yes, Covid, whatever it was, changed everything.

We are all brain-boxed to varying degrees. It’s challenging to integrate information we’re not socialized to see, have no context to see, into an updated world view. As a researcher, I freely offer questioners maps of my thinking with copious source material. I cannot, however, compel anyone to dive in and explore. Even with a framework that contextualizes my thought process laid out for consideration, learning a new landscape takes time; and that is bandwidth people may not have.

They may not want to make an investment in a journey that could result in them being jettisoned from their life, as I have been from mine. There are no shortcuts to getting familiar enough with a new lens that you can try it on and look at things from different angles to see if it works for you. And at the end of the day, few people want to put hours, days, weeks, or even years of effort into deconstructing the stories inside which they live. Because you risk being left standing out on your own, ideologically, emotionally, spiritually naked. Only those who are prepared to embark on an uncertain journey take that first step. No judgment. It’s just the way it is. We’re not all the same, and that’s ok. Not everyone is here to walk the same road. Blockchained or not, we are endowed with agency and the capacity to make choices.

Moving Beyond Carbon

Choose, pause, reflect, and choose again

Spatial computing, digital ID, terraformed synthetic telepathy, carbon credits, an emergent GAIA noosphere, and NVIDIA’s plans to give every child an AI companion

My intelligence forays keep looping me back to education, my starting point, particularly early childhood “education,” the centerpiece of the emerging social impact finance landscape. Each time I “level up” into an expanded understanding of this complex “game” I find myself revisiting work I’ve done before in a new light. I’ve been thinking about Montessori education melded with the forest school model in the context of invisible spatial computing, digital ID, terraformed synthetic telepathy, carbon credits, an emergent GAIA noosphere, and NVIDIA’s plans to give every child an AI companion that will help manifest bring their imaginary worlds into this realm.

Where does Sep Kamvar fit in with Wildflower Montessori (think – Evan Baehr’s “flourishing” Learn Capital investments, Regen Network’s Web3 soil sequestration shenanigans, systems theorist Dana Klisanin and her indigenous “rewilding” of the mind, not to mention cryptographer Ian Grigg’s tokenized laminated flowers).

Wildflower is gaining ground in charter micro-school franchises nationwide. Could MIT’s social computing project ultimately be paired with Celo’s “beautiful” digital community currency to manage the homeostasis of an emergent global superorganism? Are they after a network of youthful imaginary explorers, each classroom a fractal holon coordinated with token engineering and game mechanics? Will Oliver Reiser’s “won’t you be my sensor?” World Sensorium be run by the under-eight crowd, children just beginning to lose their baby teeth, their minds gradually domesticated by the printed word? Just what is this “science of reading” really about? It’s starting to feel like memetics and mind viruses melded with “personalized” AI literacy playlists of OER, EEGs, and IoT eye-tracking.

Kamvar speaks often about the intelligence of the forest, fungal networks, and decentralized collective intelligence. Think of communication reframed as a free market economy of underground signals – phosphorus routing through mycorrhiza and roots and soil and food and bones and around again it goes – dust to (nano?) dust…interdimensional communication…gut programming…unexpected data storage and retrieval mechanisms…hypercubes…crystal lattices navigated by entrained heart field energy…

Could the future of Moore’s law computing look like moss and lichen on a boulder? With the move to quantum photonics, there is a logic in putting photosynthesis front and center. I sense the system knows a sacred intelligence already exists and there is some pressure to harness, divert, and scale up nature’s secrets.

Again…for what purpose? I do not know. So please don’t ask me to stop looking and start judging, demanding I put a thumb down on the good/bad scale. That’s not who I am anymore. I don’t know enough yet to say, and ultimately I feel it is vital for each person to come to their own inner knowing of where things are headed with this Noosphere, gamified GAIA superorganism. I am more than happy to share my notes, and see yours if we are operating in the same problem space. I can’t tell you how to think about it all. It’s not my place.

Over the past few years I’ve swapped my previously assumed roles of judge, warrior, and activist for curious scout and pattern finder. My brain and my heart are full. There exists a shrinking circle of people who share enough common ground that we can compare notes and piece together more of this puzzle. For my fellow collaborators I continue to be profoundly grateful. For whatever reason I sense it is my fate to keep walking towards the horizon, my current base of operation being Hot Springs, Arkansas (the natural state) where I’ll poke around in the corners of philosophy of mind, quantum consciousness, information theory, extremophiles, biogeochemistry, and the origins of life against a backdrop of ancient, weathered mountains, clear water, and majestic trees.

An added bonus are the welcoming people here, some of whom have opened their hearts to me and seem more than happy to take a wayward Yankee under their wing and share their local wisdom of fishing, hiking, swimming holes, and t-ball.

I’ll end with some photos I took on walks this past week, seeking solace in the dappled shade of my new home place. One of the reasons I chose Hot Springs was the fact that despite being just an hour’s drive from Little Rock, it is surrounded by the wild nature of the Ouachita National Forest along with generous doses of pastoral beauty. These worn-down mountains are perfect for women of a certain age, like me. I adore the mix of hardwoods and towering southern pines interspersed with glints of distant sunlight sparkling on the lake.

Pics include a forest renewing itself from a devastating tornado 15 years ago, fungal decomposition, geological layers that reset one’s perception of time, cheerful rudbeckia, milky quartz, a tiny coral fungus of the most captivating purple, kids enjoying the first days of summer vacation at the lake, and a tiny heart of white pebbles!

Onward! This piece, “Portage” I saw in the riverfront sculpture garden today after grabbing some okra and squash at the farmer’s market seems to sum up the state of my life at the moment. Hopefully, I’ll be able to put my boat back in the water soon.