Dear Ariel,
You had asserted that technologies are not value neutral, and pointed to how, historically, technologies have been used to oppress the majority. I think you need to point to the use and deployment of technologies. By "the elite."
It is the case that not just AI technologies. but ALL technologies, have the potential to change the conditions of life. How helpful, how harmful? That is on our shoulders.
Technologies have no inherent morality. Human use of technologies--to use or refrain; the reasons why; and how, as well as the the extent to which we choose to deploy them.
This calls for wisdom. Or savvy. Or plain thoughtfulness. These do not translate well into the world of activist action.
My core point here, in the context of my understanding of the Pluriverse Approach and my resistance to the "struggle" frame of activism, is derived from mis-conceptualizations of the core objectives. AI activists, and indeed most activists are simply aiming at the wrong target. This matters, because it virtually assures failure. Ask the wrong question, don't be shocked if you get the wrong answer
It's not AI, it's the undemocratic and elitist-centric deployment decision systems that are what need to change. If we see ourselves as change-makers, rather than warriors.
Making AI unhappen is not an option, any more than making the first stone wheel unhappen. Ashish's arguments--which I know many of you see, and I support--is that decisions about who benefits and who pays must be inclusive. For me, subsidiarity does not mean "only the locals decide". It means that decisions made without those who will suffer the consequences are not equitable decision processes.
One important root of the idea of sustainable developments is that future generations (those who are not at the table) still must have a voice
Fairness and equity require that the voices of all who will be affected, positive or negative, be at the table.
--
Ashwani
Vasishth vasi...@ramapo.edu
(323) 206-1858 (Cell Phone)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasishth/
| Subject: | The Place AI Cannot Reach |
|---|---|
| Date: | Sat, 18 Jul 2026 20:24:12 +0000 |
| From: | Ernesto Van Peborgh from Ernesto’s Substack <ernestopv...@substack.com> |
| Reply-To: | Ernesto Van Peborgh from Ernesto’s Substack <reply+3fldkb&2hqjt&&3ab780678d84013e1bdf703f394e8d53...@mg1.substack.com> |
| To: | vasi...@ramapo.edu |
The Place AI Cannot ReachThe future will not be decided by artificial intelligence alone. It will be shaped by the quality of our humanity
There is a story I keep returning to about the telephone, not because it is remarkable in itself but because of what it quietly rearranged. Before it arrived in ordinary homes, a woman’s world was often bounded by walls she had not chosen: the kitchen, the nursery, the visiting hours of relatives, the distance she could walk before dark. The telephone did not free her from any of that directly. What it did was thinner and stranger. It let a voice travel where a body could not, and through that thin wire, frustration found another frustration, encouragement found someone who needed it, an idea that had been circling one woman’s mind alone for years suddenly discovered it was circling several. Nobody designed the telephone to seed a movement. It simply changed the conditions under which women could recognize each other, and recognition, it turns out, is most of what solidarity requires.
Marshall McLuhan spent a career insisting that every technology is an extension of some human faculty — the wheel extending the foot, the telescope extending the eye, writing extending memory beyond the length of a life. What he did not quite say, and what the telephone makes visible if you sit with it long enough, is that an extension also draws a line. The wheel has carried us across continents and never once, in all that distance, learned to want somewhere. The telescope has shown us galaxies whose light left home before our sun existed, and it has never paused, the way a person pauses, simply to be moved by what it sees. Every tool we have built has amplified a capacity while leaving untouched the deeper thing that gave the capacity its point. That is the line I want to draw around artificial intelligence, because I think we keep measuring it against the wrong faculty. For generations we have measured progress by the powers we could project beyond ourselves. We externalized muscle first, then movement itself. Fire became a kind of stomach outside the body, letting us cook, preserve, and transform whatever nature offered before we had digested a single bite of it. The plow multiplied the reach of an arm; the tractor, later, multiplied the strength of a horse. Writing carried memory past the length of a single life, and printing multiplied that memory into thousands of hands at once. Radio carried a voice over the horizon. Television brought distant lives into the room where we ate dinner. The internet dissolved the old boundaries of geography, and then social media discovered that a network, given the right conditions, could organize itself without anyone in particular being in charge. Each of those media changed more than what we were able to do. Quietly, without announcing itself, each one changed who we became. We keep asking whether artificial intelligence will become more intelligent than we are, whether it will surpass us, whether somewhere past the next release it might even become conscious. These are fascinating questions and probably not the ones worth losing sleep over, since arguments built on what a model presently cannot do have a way of aging badly within a few product cycles. Artificial intelligence belongs within this same lineage, and it is worth saying plainly that it may be the most capable extension humanity has built yet, not a lesser one. It recognizes patterns beyond what our own perception could ever sort through, retrieves knowledge at a speed no library card catalog ever promised, composes music, writes essays, helps discover molecules that might otherwise have taken a research team a decade to stumble onto, and is beginning, in a real if narrow sense, to reason across disciplines that used to require separate careers to master. But an extension, however sophisticated, is never identical to the faculty it extends. A map is not the territory. A library is not wisdom. A conversation is not friendship. And intelligence, remarkable as it keeps becoming, is not the same thing as being human. I came to this distinction slowly, mostly by watching forests. A single tree, however old, however wise-looking in the way old trees look wise, does not hold the intelligence of the forest inside itself. That intelligence — which species share water in a drought, which seedling gets shaded and which gets fed, when to mast and when to hold back — lives in the mycorrhizal threads running between roots, invisible from above, indifferent to which tree happens to be doing well this decade. You could catalog every tree in that forest, sequence every genome, and still not touch the thing that keeps the forest alive, because that thing was never in any single organism. It was in the relationship. Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career trying to get scientific language to admit what her Potawatomi teachers already knew: that a system’s real intelligence often lives in its reciprocity, not in its parts. I think wisdom works the same way, and I tried to say this once in an essay I called The Wisdom of the Commons: wisdom is not an object sitting somewhere, retrievable if only you had the right query. It is not a more refined form of knowledge, the way a diamond is a more refined form of carbon. It is an emergent property of relationship — of reciprocity honored over years, of shared purpose, of belonging, of trust that has been tested and held, of care extended to people who cannot immediately repay it, of responsibility accepted before anyone demands it. It does not live inside a person the way a fact lives inside an encyclopedia. It appears between people, the way trust appears between two people who have kept their word to each other through something hard. You cannot mine it. You cannot index it. You can only keep participating long enough for it to arrive. Intelligence, by contrast, answers questions. Wisdom keeps circling one question underneath all the others: what allows life to flourish here? Intelligence optimizes toward a target someone else has already chosen. Wisdom is what decides, often slowly and imperfectly, which targets are worth choosing at all. This is not a hierarchy so much as a difference in kind, and it is why the Arab Spring and the Indignados and Occupy could summon, almost overnight, a coordination capacity that would have astonished any general a century ago — millions of strangers organizing themselves through nothing but shared signal, no headquarters, no chain of command — and still, in most of those places, dissolve within a few years into disappointment. The networks were extraordinary at coordinating action. They were not equipped to grow the trust, the patience, the willingness to disagree without fracturing, that turns a coordinated crowd into something that can actually govern itself afterward. That second thing has never been a matter of bandwidth. This, I suspect, is the boundary artificial intelligence runs into, and it has almost nothing to do with how many parameters the next model ships with. A system can be trained on every account of compassion ever written and describe compassion more eloquently than most of us manage in a lifetime, without that description costing it anything, without it having anything at stake in whether the compassion is real. It can recognize the shape of a moral dilemma across a thousand variations and still carry none of the weight of having to live with the choice afterward, the way a person does who has actually had to forgive someone or actually had to ask forgiveness. It can hold a conversation that feels, in the moment, like being understood, and yet a conversation is not a covenant — nothing was promised, nothing was risked, no one will be there in the particular, inconvenient way friendship requires when it is three in the morning and something has gone wrong. What the forest teaches and what The Wisdom of the Commons was trying to say in its own register is the same thing: the field where wisdom grows has to be tended by beings who are actually inside the consequences of their own participation. A model that can be copied, reset, and run again with no memory of what it cost is, by its very design, standing outside that field. For centuries, we have lived within a remarkably successful idea. We came to believe that intelligence could be separated from the living world that produced it — that it could be extracted from experience, distilled into knowledge, stored in books, encoded in machines, and eventually made to travel anywhere. Much of that idea is true. Knowledge does travel. A mathematical proof remains the same regardless of who discovers it. Scientific understanding can be shared across generations and continents. Libraries, universities, and now artificial intelligence exist precisely because knowledge can be accumulated, copied, and extended beyond the individual mind. But wisdom has always resisted that extraction. Something essential remains behind. Not because wisdom is mysterious, but because it does not exist in isolation. It emerges within relationships: between people, between communities, between cultures, and between humanity and the living world that continually shapes us. The pattern can be copied. The context cannot. Information can be transferred. Participation cannot. Perhaps this is why the arrival of artificial intelligence feels so unsettling. The question is not whether machines will become more intelligent than we are. In many domains, they already exceed us. The deeper question is whether their extraordinary fluency tempts us into believing that intelligence was the whole story — that meaning, belonging, love, responsibility, and wisdom are simply more complicated forms of computation waiting to be optimized. I suspect the opposite may prove true. The more successfully we externalize intelligence, the more clearly we begin to see what intelligence alone has never been able to explain. Wisdom has always emerged somewhere else. It grows through trust, reciprocity, shared purpose, and participation in life itself. Intelligence can illuminate that terrain. It cannot inhabit it. That distinction matters more than it first appears. The real question is not whether artificial intelligence will become more like us. It is whether we will begin to reshape ourselves in the image of our own inventions. Every technology quietly carries its own values. The industrial age rewarded efficiency, standardization, and scale. The information age rewarded speed, connectivity, and optimization. Artificial intelligence promises to amplify all of them. There is extraordinary value in those capabilities. Yet if they become the measure by which we judge ourselves, something essential begins to recede. Care starts to look inefficient. Patience becomes latency. Listening feels slower than prediction. Reciprocity appears less productive than extraction. And, Relationship itself begins to seem like friction in a system designed for optimization. That is not because AI asks us to become less human. It is because every powerful extension subtly invites us to resemble the logic by which it operates. The challenge before us, then, is not to resist artificial intelligence, but to resist forgetting ourselves. Our technologies were created to extend our humanity, never to redefine it. If efficiency quietly becomes our highest virtue, if optimization becomes our deepest aspiration, we will have surrendered the very inheritance those technologies were meant to serve: our capacity to participate in the living relationships from which wisdom, meaning, and the flourishing of life continue to emerge. Evolution gave us something no extension has ever possessed, however far its reach: the capacity to participate, consciously, in the unfolding of life around us — to keep a promise past the point it stops being convenient, to care for a child or a stranger or a forest that will never be able to repay us, to notice beauty and let it change what we do next. If we mistake the extension for the faculty, the map for the territory it was drawn from, we risk losing the very thing that made the extension worth building in the first place. Every extension humanity has ever created has enlarged our reach into the world, and artificial intelligence may turn out to be the greatest of them, amplifying our capacity to understand, discover, and create in ways earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. But like every extension before it, from the plow to the telephone, its significance will ultimately depend on the quality of the humanity guiding it, not on the sophistication of the tool itself. The future will not be decided by artificial intelligence alone. It will be shaped by the quality of our humanity: by the relationships we cultivate, the communities we belong to, the living world we choose to participate in, and the intention that places every extension of ourselves in service of life’s unfolding. Perhaps that has been the message of every medium all along, quietly there since the first voice traveled down a wire and changed, without asking anyone’s permission, who was allowed to reach whom. If these essays resonate with you, consider planting a seed. If this piece gave you something to think about, consider planting a seed. I invite you to subscribe—or become a paid subscriber. If you'd like to support the continued exploration of these ideas, you can also buy me a coffee You're currently a free subscriber to Ernesto’s Substack. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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2026 Ernesto Van Peborgh |
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“... if the tech industry were not dominated by cis-gendered straight men, would we have developed automatic gender recognition tools that have been shown to harm transgender communities and encourage stereotypical gender roles? …if the most significant input for developing AI used in the criminal justice system came from those who were wrongfully accused of a crime and confronted with high cash bail due to risk assessment scores, would we have had the algorithms of today that disproportionately disenfranchise black and brown communities in the United States? If the majority of AI research were funded by government agencies working on healthcare rather than military agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency would we be working towards drones that identify persons of interest?”
Dear Sajal, Tom,
We may be talking past each other. Let me try again.
I changed the subject line because I'm responding to what appear to be misunderstandings of my intended point. And I've always advocated for content descriptive titles. One of the adverse impacts of the email culture is that we are discouraged from modifying Subject lines. What we get are wide-ranging chains where the point being made in a particular chain cannot be known until you open the email. I made explicit my reasons for doing this. I'm not ducking your question.
I am limiting my arguments to technological disruptions, not specific technology applications. Nor do I include inventions. Those are human choices, and rest on our shoulders. It's simpler to blame the "technology" than to take responsibility for our own flawed choices.
All military regimes have used the "it's them, they are doing you harm. Attack (destroy) them and you'll be whole again" tactic. Because they do it, must we?
The values we object to, were not waiting there in the technology for us to find. WE bring our own values (both in use and abuse).
All technologies come with both benefits and harms. We insert our OUR values into them when we choose to use them this way or that. The technology does not itself demand that we use it to do harm.
Yes. I firmly maintain that technologies are not our problem, they are closer to blank canvases, with which we can do what we will. Helpful as well as harmful.
For instance, all the things we commonly call "advances" in science and technology (or do you deny that knowledge has grown?), do not, in themselves, insist that we use them to do harm. We just don't like to take responsibility for our historical civilizational choices.
The "us versus them" frame is convenient. We're the good guys. They are responsible. So, let's fight the Establishment. Fighting has never, in itself, led to positive outcomes. We are loud that we prefer cooperation over competition. But how we act is almost always combative--with those not in our in-group. Naming an us and and a them is a defensive action against the truly hard work of inclusive cooperation.
Isn't that the originating critique of colonialism and imperialism? Those who impose their choices on us, without our explicit permission, are the bad guys? Does that only work for us? If we became the imposers, would it be "All animals are equal, but pigs are more equal than others"? Or could we really be inclusive after centuries of struggle against "the oppressors."
Oppression is a very real thing. That every society And must be resisted. But parts of all members of the North and the South are oppressoras. And parts of all members of the North and the South are oppressed.
We merely use computers, and email and Zoom, extend our reach and to make our lives easier. But that is "good technology," because we want to use it. We fight Social Media and the (not-us) convenience-seekers. Yet we all want a less effort-filled life.
AI is an emerging technology, so is an easy target for moral superiority. "Oh I'd never use AI." Do you run searches on the web? You're in the same box as all AI users. The question is not "should we use AI," the question is WHEN and HOW and WHY should we use (or not use) AI. That's bringing ethics to technology. But it also puts us squarely in the driver's seat.
It's too much of a cop-out to say AI is bad, let's just ban it. I am unapologetic that I use Perplexity AI to ask questions about things not within my held expertise. That's research. Finding out things that I know I would like to know, but do not yet know. Learning, on tap. But I have stopping rules. I don't use ChatGPT to think for me. Nor do I use Generative AI to create for me. We're not very good with self-imposed stopping rules.
That's my point about the ancient insight of Yin and Yang. AI is a technology, and we are the users. As some say, it's time to"Man Up." Take responsibility for our own choices. To expend less personal effort. You drive much? Try walking everywhere. A barrel of petroleum is worth five years of an individual's life work. Argue with that.
AI did not tell use to use it to create fake images, to write
things for us, to generate content plucked out of an LMN
databases. That's on us.
But all technologies can be used to do harm. We want what we see
as beneficial--then we use technology without hesitation. And
object only what we don't like. Selective Prosecution.to
Let's stop trying to set up abstract (conceptual) enemies we can do battle with, so we feel we're at least "doing something"?.
Enemies are convenient to have, because then we can at least claim to be doing something.
--
Ashwani
Vasishth vasi...@ramapo.edu (323) 206-1858 (Cell Phone)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasishth/
--------------------------------------------------------
Professor of Sustainability (Retired)
Founding Advisor, Sustainable Jersey City (SJC)
Trustee, New Jersey Highlands Coalition (NJHC)
You can ALWAYS set up an Appointment with me, without negotiation, seven days a week,
at: calendly.com/vasishth/google-meet-30Love the Glen Stone interpretation. But there is documented
evidence that Borlaug's motivation for his work in the 1940s was
the number of famine deaths in what we now call the South.
Yes, his innovations were co-opted by the profit seekers, and yes,
he did base his work on the use of synthetic fertilizers, genetic
modification, and chemical pesticides. But you need to adjust for
what was knowable in his time his time. This is the call to resist
judging historical innovations on the basis of what we know now.
Hindsight is wonderful, and backward looking critiques abound.
There is no story without its context, purpose and intent.
I asked Perplexity AI:
Can we estimate how many famine-based deaths were avoided by Borlaug's mid-twentieth century idea of a Green Revolution?
Believe or dismiss. We can all strive for free-will
--
Ashwani
Vasishth vasi...@ramapo.edu (323) 206-1858 (Cell Phone)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasishth/
--------------------------------------------------------
Professor of Sustainability (Retired)
Founding Advisor, Sustainable Jersey City (SJC)
Trustee, New Jersey Highlands Coalition (NJHC)
You can ALWAYS set up an Appointment with me, without negotiation, seven days a week,
at: calendly.com/vasishth/google-meet-30As a follow up I asked Perplexity AI--you're welcome to reject because it is tainted by AI:
From a whole-systems view, and across time, what are the benefits and harms to emerge from Borlaugh's Green Revolution
My personal knowledge grew. I saw things I had not thought of.
--
Ashwani
Vasishth vasi...@ramapo.edu (323) 206-1858 (Cell Phone)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasishth/
--------------------------------------------------------
Professor of Sustainability (Retired)
Founding Advisor, Sustainable Jersey City (SJC)
Trustee, New Jersey Highlands Coalition (NJHC)
You can ALWAYS set up an Appointment with me, without negotiation, seven days a week,
at: calendly.com/vasishth/google-meet-30
Very interesting. Maybe one could also ask (not necessarily the AI types but also anyone who's done nuanced historical research) a qs that rarely gets asked in such discussions / debates:
Beyond the 'Green Revolution' or 'No Green Revolution' scenario, were there 3rd (or multiple) other options, that were ignored, that could have done what the GR is said to have done (averted / reduced famine etc), while avoiding its long-term negative consequences?
I recall when I used to work on large dams, that the only scenarios the govt was presenting were 'large dam or no dam' ... and not 'large dam, no dam, or multiple other options' to produce irrigation, power, etc. ... and even beyond, the more fundamental objectives of producing and making food accessible, or producing and making energy accessible (going beyond the assumption that surface irrigation is the only way to enhance food outputs, etc). In a 'large dam or no dam' scenario, esp. when seen in a short-term time frame, the 'large dam' option seemed better. But not when other options such as other forms of irrigation/power, or enhancement of dryland farming building on available farmer knowledge, or decentralised energy production etc were considered (which was rare, since govt did not do that, and civil society had limited capacity ... maybe its more possible now).
in other words, a pluriversal approach would look into all options, and all possible consequences of each option, to the extent such scenarios can be generated with available knowledge.
As an aside, since this AI is not the main focus of the discussion (I think?) - since some or a lot of this knowledge is not necessarily documented, AI, however advanced it may be, simply won't be able to generate adequate grounds for a truly nuanced and just response.
(btw, I think my colleague Arnaz is considering turning this ongoing discussion into some kind of article or conversation to publish on the RED or Vikalp Sangam Website ... if so, she'll be in touch with you folks).
Ashish
Ashish Kothari Apt 5 Shree Datta Krupa 908 Deccan Gymkhana Pune 411004, India https://ashishkothari.in
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Dr. Uygar Özesmi
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'Ashwani Vasishth' via Radical Ecological Democracy <radical_ecolog...@googlegroups.com> şunları yazdı (22 Tem 2026 06:07):
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<Benefits and harms of the Green Revolution from a whole-systems view, and across time.docx>
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Dr. Uygar Özesmi
Board Chair - Prosumer Economy Society
Founder & Instigator - Good4Trust.org
Trustee - Armaş Foundation
Adj. Asst. Professor - CESD, Kadir Has University and Istanbul University
GSM: +90 533 655 3689
'Ashwani Vasishth' via Radical Ecological Democracy <radical_ecolog...@googlegroups.com> şunları yazdı (22 Tem 2026 06:07):
As a follow up I asked Perplexity AI--you're welcome to reject because it is tainted by AI:
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