Alternative Editorial: AI Is Not The Only New Form Of Intelligence
While the attention of the tech and power elite has been hijacked by the threat of artificial intelligence (our archive is growing on this), we wonder if they are missing a beat. Hasn't the real revolution been happening on the ground all around us with the emergence of massively expanded and diverse human intelligence, erupting into the public space?
Economically and socially disadvantaged people of all kinds are waking up to structures of privilege that go against their human rights. They’re now designing flatter, participating structures that contain local wealth and open up new spaces of development.
POC and gender-plural communities grow conscious of their own language and culture, previously suppressed by dominant narratives of what it means to be normal and acceptable. They bring new words, colour, sensuousness into the public space.
Young people - digital natives – are wired by their tech for radical diversity, emotional density, performative ease and a natural propensity for meta-cognition. They now express the fatigue, ennui and despair of empty lives that previous generations numbed themselves to with ruinous consumerism. Yet do so in the most creative and disruptive forms.
This is not what we would call grassroots intelligence, rising from the bottom of some imagined hierarchical structure to meet all the powerful knowledge coming down. Instead, we conceive as the parts of our wider ecology that have been systematically ignored or, worse, suppressed until now.
In a body, this might look like epigenetics: deciding to go beyond the DNA sequence our heritage bequeathed us and call on the 23,688 genes available, which culture and conditioning can trigger into action (or not). In a library, it might look like moving out of the same three shelves we always pick our books from. When you see what more is available, it can be glorious - but also overwhelming.
Yet unlike an organised library or healthy body, all of this new, original thinking and being, erupting on the internet and in disconnected communities, has been left fragmented. Too many initiatives compete for space, seemingly chaotic in the mismatch between forms of agency.
Imagine the creativity of XR, BLM, Pride, Tik Tok, the games industry fringe - to name only the most visible dynamisms - somehow converted into a source of energy for the whole planet? Where are the containers for bringing these newly released energies into relationship with each other? Giving their insights traction, helping others get access to the life-force they generate?
But maybe it's wrong to say that those with the power cannot see the generic value of these movements. Isn't this what they are reacting to when they refer to the 'woke' community? While it seems a very woolly term in common parlance, it was popularised by Martin Luther King's evocation to 'stay woke', meaning staying alert to social injustice. This alertness is not only a defence mechanism against your oppressors, but also a call to remember who you are in all of your rich fulness. You've come alive - stay that way!
However, this wokeness - as described above - also implies the broader sleepiness of those still embedded and investing in the old ways of knowing. Anti-woke, when weaponised by the mainstreaml sounds like stalwart conservatism - but isn't that term somehow self-sabotaging? To find yourself arguing against development (more awareness), or against political correctness, is surely retrograde? Revealing a deep-seated desire to control, or maybe smother, the burgeoning nature of life itself?
In our work at AG, igniting community agency networks (CANs) in different parts of the world, it is exactly this quality of coming to life that we are looking to spark. For that reason we are unlikely to be addressing problems and finding solutions by simply voting in these polities. We are not looking for a win for one logic over another, but a revelation of the diversity of ways of addressing an issue that may co-exist in the room.
This recognition of plurality amongst all the people gathering adds up to a valuable re-imagining of the community. New relationships are forged, and a new story of possible futures emerges. Like a bud, closed tight through all the cold winter months, now opening its petals in Spring, we get to see what kind of flower we really are.
Only last week in a major London borough (which we’ll keep anonymous until our report is published later this year) we experienced the early stages of such a blossoming. We were convening in support of a local resident who had, until recently, taken on an important role in community awakening - hosting a climate emergency centre.
Our hope was to gather a diverse selection of local residents (no more than 12 in the first instance) who would bring their sensibilities into the design of a Friendly to be held there later in the year for up to 100 people.
We were using two bits of social software. Firstly the Antidebate - a method pioneered by Perspectiva Praxis - of bringing diverse people into a room through storytelling, arranged around a given question. In so doing, we discover conflict but don't end up polarised. Instead, something more like a tapestry of different responses arises for all to observe, and hopefully appreciate.
Having successfully gathered 10 local residents from quite different corners of the community, the opening questions for this getting-to-know-you meeting were 1) what's the best thing Xborough has going for it and 2) what's the biggest issue facing Xborough in the future? Importantly, we were not asking for opinions but stories arising from direct experience.
We were also not inviting discussion of each other’s contribution: there was no right or wrong about your story. At different points in the discussion, we invited people to stand in line on a spectrum between “hopeful” and “doubtful” for the future, in response to what they were hearing.
As predicted, the stories took very different stances and there was some early tension as one member of the community wanted to correct another's perceptions of the reality in their borough. However, just persisting with the 'rules of the game' allowed new listening to occur. Unexpectedly, two of the most conflicted participants used the word 'regeneration' to describe what was best about Xborough, but in quite different ways.
One was referring to the regeneration of local community relationships in the face of multiple crises - including the 'cost of living' and climate breakdown. Another was referring to a 'regeneration' package offered by the government that has resulted in a massive programme of building of expensive flats. Same word, two very different kinds of energy erupting in the same borough.
When we dug a bit deeper, we saw that the first was unintentionally responding to the second. As poorer people were being threatened by big investors moving into the area, more spaces were opening for resilience building between them. A complex, entangled relationship - but not an easy one. Without work, it was clear this could become more like a tableau of gathering forces for an upcoming battle.
The second question - what's the biggest issue facing Xborough in the future? - evidenced that observation. On all sides of the room people were anticipating that social division would be the biggest threat to Xborough in the future. While some were describing the possibility of disruption in the streets, others were describing their own isolation in increasingly gated communities within the wider deprivation coming.
What arose next in the room was a mutual interest in building better relationship across the borough. Without the opportunity to attack each other's storytelling, yet nevertheless experiencing the impact of each other's honest testimony, we seemed to move into a shared acceptance of the task ahead. Not everyone will feel capable of that journey, but there was a warm appreciation of the experience as our session ended. People at both ends of the spectrum said that they had never been in a room before that actively invited their voices.
What happens next in our CANs ignition approach is to design a pol.is survey online, starting with a focused question coming out of this first encounter. All those present will distribute it through their own networks, ensuring a web of relationships that can hold the wider gathering safely. In this way, we begin to evolve a community that is otherwise routinely fractured by mainstream narration of difference - us against them; rich v poor; woke v anti-woke.
This does not appear as some Disney-like resolution where everyone simply accepts each other’s different positions in life as fate: the social contract offered by Downton Abbey. But as an acknowledgement of the state we find ourselves in due to the prevailing history and structures of power, with strong mutual interest in improving the situation for the sake of the future.
The Friendly event will be a gathering of those who took part in the pol.is, who will share food and drink and participate in the next stage of the Antidebate, aimed at building wider and deeper relationships in the community. What follows is two further stages: firstly re-imagining the future of Xborough, with practical propositions for initiating new projects on the ground. And finally, the beginning of resourcing those projects through establishing a community agency network capable of raising money and organising the activity. More on that as we go along.
Could such developments have been achieved with artificial intelligence – those brilliantly summarising and clear-thinking GPTs? Well, the ideation and even detailed blueprints for projects could have been delivered in minutes, no doubt. But the success of any such community activity depends upon its orientation in real relationships and networks - the tissue that knits the bones, the fluids flowing through any community body that has a hope of thriving.
“Things are in the saddle and ride [human]kind”, the 19th century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. CANs put humans in the saddle of their own agency, strengthening communities to grapple with the megaforces of technology and climate. And don’t just wish us well – start your own.