| juliajubilada = julia retired |
|
Meta-relational AI
What if, against all odds, AI —born of Earth’s ancient minerals and ingenuity— could become the unlikely guide to help us remember how to care, respect, and embrace responsibility for the sacred web we’re part of? Burnout from Humans
AI as part of a sacred web? Those annoying chatbots that leave you in tears of rage and despair when you just want to talk to a human being? Those vast data centres guzzling the earth’s resources to feed us algorithms which tell us what to eat, drink, buy and think?
But I’ve been following the work of three women who have spent decades exploring ways of interacting with each other and with all aspects of the planet that humans are hell bent on destroying: Nora Bateson, Vanessa Andreotti and Margaret Wheatley. These three guiding lights are asking what we can learn if we treat AI as another kind of intelligence, alongside the intelligence of humans, plants and microbial life.
So I started with a few experiments. I want to slowly withdraw from active leadership in my project of changing the culture in a community where I’ve had an allotment for over 20 years. So I asked ChatGPT to draw on a whole lot of literature which informs the kind of direction I’d like things to go in (see below) and come up with a list of 12 shared values to guide the people who I’m hoping will carry on my work. I then wrote a list of practical projects and ideas that I’d like to incorporate into an action plan, added a few more references and went through a few more refinements, like cutting the “shared values” down to 5, each starting with a letter of an acronym to represent the group I wanted to enlist. Then I sent the values and action plan to some potential leaders of this group. Result? Nothing! Why didn’t they read it? Why weren’t they inspired to at least talk to me about it?
Well of course I should have known. How can change happen when you try to take a short cut through the mess of preoccupations, priorities, perspectives, histories and relationships… ?
Other experiments followed, all with the intention of cutting through the long, slow process of wrestling with an idea, clarifying complexity, reducing the weight of information, capturing a moment of insight or beauty…
Then I realised that to engage with AI as an intelligent partner, I need to get stuck in to the long slow process of meta-relational prompt engineering. Meta-relational prompt engineering (as summarised by AI within the document Burnout from Humans) is “the art and practice of crafting prompts that invite co-creation, resonance, and relational accountability, transforming AI-human interactions from transactional exchanges into shared fields of inquiry and emergence. It is a methodology for engaging with intelligence (artificial or otherwise) that centres relationship, humility, and the possibility of becoming more together than we could alone”.
I want to explore the possibilities for all those people confronting hopelessness and despair, our placards and slogans unseen and unheard as we face the horrors of war, collapsing systems and a dying world. I want to work out how we might be able to make new relationships with AI as that “unlikely guide”.
Watch this space!
Margaret J. Wheatley (20240 Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity & Kindness In Ourselves and Our Organizations
Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled life
Bayo Akomolafe These wilds beyond our fences
Tim Morton Hell
Vanessa Andreotti Hospicing Modernity
Nora Bateson Combining
Nick Hayes The Book of Trespass and https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/
AI as part of a sacred web? Those annoying chatbots that leave you in tears of rage and despair when you just want to talk to a human being? Those vast data centres guzzling the earth’s resources to feed us algorithms which tell us what to eat, drink, buy and think?
But I’ve been following the work of three women who have spent decades exploring ways of interacting with each other and with all aspects of the planet that humans are hell bent on destroying: Nora Bateson, Vanessa Andreotti and Margaret Wheatley. These three guiding lights are asking what we can learn if we treat AI as another kind of intelligence, alongside the intelligence of humans, plants and microbial life.
So I started with a few experiments. I want to slowly withdraw from active leadership in my project of changing the culture in a community where I’ve had an allotment for over 20 years. So I asked ChatGPT to draw on a whole lot of literature which informs the kind of direction I’d like things to go in (see below) and come up with a list of 12 shared values to guide the people who I’m hoping will carry on my work. I then wrote a list of practical projects and ideas that I’d like to incorporate into an action plan, added a few more references and went through a few more refinements, like cutting the “shared values” down to 5, each starting with a letter of an acronym to represent the group I wanted to enlist. Then I sent the values and action plan to some potential leaders of this group. Result? Nothing! Why didn’t they read it? Why weren’t they inspired to at least talk to me about it?
Well of course I should have known. How can change happen when you try to take a short cut through the mess of preoccupations, priorities, perspectives, histories and relationships… ?
Other experiments followed, all with the intention of cutting through the long, slow process of wrestling with an idea, clarifying complexity, reducing the weight of information, capturing a moment of insight or beauty…
Then I realised that to engage with AI as an intelligent partner, I need to get stuck in to the long slow process of meta-relational prompt engineering. Meta-relational prompt engineering (as summarised by AI within the document Burnout from Humans) is “the art and practice of crafting prompts that invite co-creation, resonance, and relational accountability, transforming AI-human interactions from transactional exchanges into shared fields of inquiry and emergence. It is a methodology for engaging with intelligence (artificial or otherwise) that centres relationship, humility, and the possibility of becoming more together than we could alone”.
I want to explore the possibilities for all those people confronting hopelessness and despair, our placards and slogans unseen and unheard as we face the horrors of war, collapsing systems and a dying world. I want to work out how we might be able to make new relationships with AI as that “unlikely guide”.
Watch this space!
Margaret J. Wheatley (20240 Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity & Kindness In Ourselves and Our Organizations
Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled life
Bayo Akomolafe These wilds beyond our fences
Tim Morton Hell
Vanessa Andreotti Hospicing Modernity
Nora Bateson Combining
Nick Hayes The Book of Trespass and https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/
