Fwd: The Place AI Cannot Reach - Are technologies to blame for how humans who choose to use any technology?

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Ashwani Vasishth

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Jul 18, 2026, 7:41:05 PMJul 18
to Ariel Salleh, Radical Eco. Democr. list (India)

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

         Professor of Sustainability (Retired)
         Founding Advisor, Sustainable Jersey City (SJC)
         Trustee, New Jersey Highlands Coalition (NJHC)

         (323) 206-1858 (Cell Phone)

         https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasishth/





-------- Forwarded Message --------
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 future will not be decided by artificial intelligence alone. It will be shaped by the quality of our humanity
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The Place AI Cannot Reach

The future will not be decided by artificial intelligence alone. It will be shaped by the quality of our humanity

 



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Artificial intelligence will always stand at the doorway of humanity — not because machines are excluded, but because wisdom cannot be entered alone. It emerges within the living fabric of relationships, reciprocity, and belonging that no technology can replace, only help us cultivate.

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.



The telephone altered the social ecology within which feminist consciousness could develop. By extending conversation beyond the physical boundaries of the home, it expanded the network of relationships through which shared experience, mutual recognition, and collective action could emerge. (Betty Draper Madmen series)

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.

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Sajai Jose

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Jul 19, 2026, 11:44:54 PM (13 days ago) Jul 19
to Ashwani Vasishth, Ariel Salleh, Radical Eco. Democr. list (India)
Dear Ashwini,

Can we really say technologies are value neutral, and have no inherent morality when the fact is that no technology invents itself? ie they are invented by humans, and/or human organisations, for human purposes, with all that implies?  (Or 'accidentally', like with the Xray)

Also, can we reasonably expect humanity (let alone the 'elites') to find the collective wisdom etc that we haven't so far, right in the middle of an AI arms race we're all invested in one way or the other? I see no evidence of a comparable race for wisdom anywhere, although, as always, individuals and small groups strive for it (or have it thrust up on them by life, somewhat like the Xray!)  

Sajai



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sing...@rcn.com

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Jul 20, 2026, 3:49:19 AM (13 days ago) Jul 20
to Sajai Jose, Ashwani Vasishth, Ariel Salleh, radical ecological democracy
Thanks to all for this discussion. 
Technology is not value-neutral, and therefore implies a certain moral/ethical orientation. I highly recommend reading the book 'Atlas of AI' by Kate Crawford and the essay 'Race and Gender' by the Eritrean AI researcher Timnit Gebru in the Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI.  The sociopolitical context inevitably shapes technology, which in turn affects the sociopolitical context. Here is Gebru: 

“... 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?”


Best, 
Vandana

From: "Sajai Jose" <zazai...@gmail.com>
To: "Ashwani Vasishth" <vasi...@ramapo.edu>
Cc: "Ariel Salleh" <ariels...@gmail.com>, "radical ecological democracy" <radical_ecolog...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, July 20, 2026 9:14:36 AM
Subject: Re: [REDlistserve] Fwd: The Place AI Cannot Reach - Are technologies to blame for how humans who choose to use any technology?

Vasishth, Ashwani

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Jul 20, 2026, 3:07:10 PM (12 days ago) Jul 20
to Sajai Jose, radical ecological democracy
I’m changing the subject line so you can feel free to ignore this message or delete it now.   Expending time with no possible purpose is the root definition of spam.

This is a losing battle for me, I know, but what does being realistic mean?

Perhaps you’re the practical, goal-driven realists, feet planted firmly on the ground, only focused on achievable goal. Irrespective of whether they endure.  

And I’m the head-in-the-clouds theorizer, blind to reality.

But I’d argue genuine realistic thinking is to:

Expect failure.  Try anyway.  

That’s my punchline.  

Hoping or aiming or expecting to win is the essential fallacy.  There is no “now we can sit back” victory to be had.  We need hope to persevere.  But it is not a path to solutions. 

But you’re absolutely correct in your framing, Sajal.  I agree completely that Pluriverse was unimaginable from our past.  Now, thanks to Pluriverse, and related visioning exercises, we can at least imagine a plurality of alternatives.  And we have real case studies to inspire us.  

This is a good thing.  

It’s just not enough, if changing how the world works is our objective then we face the certainty of disappointment.  And many will accept the established systems of inequity as simply the way things are.

If you promise the stars, you’ll miss rhe moon

Emergent reality will never match our imaginings.

What might a Pluriverse for the entire ecosphere, not just some select humans, look like?

What would Gaia say?  

We all pay lip service to holistic thinking. But remain reductive in our practices. 

Regarding morality and technology, the critical question for me is, what we mean by technology. I’m talking about truly disruptive technological innovations.

My examples are, for instance, the emergence—not invention—of game- changing shifts like the Green Revolution, or nuclear energy, or digitization.  (Including here the entire computing ecosystem which includes current manifestatioanan of Ai.)

This is my Yin-Yang point.  Good is always accompanied by unanticipatable adverse impacts.  These come inseparable.  That is my version of reality.  Make the world better.  And be satisfied with making a difference best you can.

Many millions of us are alive today because untold human lives were saved from death from starvation, by the original Green Revolution.  

Yes. We are paying a huge price in ecological and community-costs for adopting that innovation.  But I would argue this was not foreseen by Norman Borlaug who was motivated by cutting widespread famine deaths around the then Developing World.  Intentions must count for some amount.  For everyone, not just us.

We societally grew that radical innovation into industrialized profit-seeking monoculture farming practices, yet hold Borlaugh responsible for all those ills brought about by our societal choices.

Dividing the world into “us versus them” is the true abstraction. 

Nuclear Energy was a genuine disruption.  We chose to use it to make nuclear weapons to make atomic bombs.  We cannot fairly say nuclear energy was evil, per se, and so should be fought. Many life-saving innovations in health practices evolved from the emergence (not invention) of nuclear technology.
 
We want the good stuff.  But battle the bad.

The computer revolution gave us email, the internet, the web, and ability to meet virtually. But the price was unbridled use of social media and the unchecked application of AI.  

Capitalism, as in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, was intended to add money to the moral equation.  All the triple bottom line argues is—without profit-seeking behavio as motivation for innovation—we’d be living in caves still.  

It’s the promise of the benefits of a better world that drove human ingenuity.

We grew Capitalism to mean only the single-minded pursuit of monetary profit.  That’s on us.

Tradeoffs and the flawed choices we make, are what drive human abuses of innovations.

You’re entirely welcome to dismiss me as an armchair philosopher.  I’m used to that dismissal.  But what is the imaginary division of the world into us-and-them?

I’m bringing this to the RED Community because I see one huge flaw in the pluriversal theory of change. We expect the ecosphere (which is inclusive of human society) to sit still while we innovate. 

It will not.

We change makers, collectively, looking to construct more equitable alternate futures, see ourselves as insulated from unintended adverse impacts effect.

My point is, because we can see the gleaming vision of a fairer world, does not mean we can hold ourselves pre-emptively harmless from the ills that will surely ride in attached to our realized vision. 

Our history of good intentions is littered with horrific examples of unintended consequences.

We will not be exempt.

As much time as we put into envisioning futures we see as better for us—rather than  those currently calling the shots—we should put into imagining the unforseeable downsides that will inevitably accompany our as yet not societally unrealized visions.

Anecdotal examples of discrete successes do not portend system change.

We need those success stories, to give us strength to struggle on.

But efforts to radically transform the world with efforts like Pluriverse must work for all, not just the currently enlightened.  Else we’re just making it fairer for us, at some one else’s’ cost.  We’re just playing the inherently flawed “zero som game” assumptions hat got us to Winners versus losers that got us here.

To be game-changing, Pluriverse must be inclusive, not another excluding club. 

Don’t tell me this is impossible.  If that’s not our aspiration then we do fail in our stated vision—to fundamentally change how the World works.  For all. 

We just become the newest cycle in reformulating “business as usual.”  A different business as usual. 

The roots of trumpism can be seen in the fact that the Ku Klux Klan controlled many States in the 1920s.  Nothing innovative, except the absence of shame. 

We thought we might defeat racism and bigotry and begin replacing Western Imperialism, to solve unfairness.  Yet here we are.  All over again. Worse, if anything, with the global Trumpist turn. 

This is why I argue for Kevin Kelley’s Protopian Approach and his call to reject both Utopia and Dystopia, and instead embrace Protopia.  Neither-nor. 
Incremental but inclusive of all points of view. Past, present and future.

Desirable futures cannot be disconnected from (in the long run) Undesirable aspects that will surely follow.  

A true Pluriverse cannot be realized if it’s a replacement for the “dominant paradigm.”  The ultimate result of our imagings will always be unexpected new problems. 

This the true implication of Wicked Problems.  No “we’re now done” solutions to be had.

This is why habitat conservation ecologists learned the need for Adaptive Management.  Through repeated failures and a snowballing list of unintended adverse impacts on ecosystems, they finally saw they could not entirely foresee the actual consequences of their interventions.  

This is the realization I want to contribute to our collective effort for a better world. 

Visualize a desirable destination.  But move with a “take a step, then review, and adjust, then move again” approach.

This is why the “revolution” frame to transforming  socioecological systems must inevitably fail.  The future emerges from cumulative actions.  And is never strictly predictable. 

Imagine many pluriverse.  Yes.  We must. We need alternative example to navigate, for the time being.But it must be a truly inclusive Pluriverse.  ALL stakeholders—the oppressed and the oppressors— need to be at the table. 

My objection is to framing that those currently disenfranchised can overthrow the governing system.  That capitalistic profit seeking choice making can be overthrown.

If you’re serious about a Pluriversal future, then see this as a inclusive participatory stakeholder process where ALL stakeholders have a voice.

Unimaginable?  Yes. But the true North Star? Surely. 

Like whole system sustainability?  Not a destination, but a direction. 

What do we aspire to?  A better world for all?  Even those that are oppressing us today?  Or just the chosen few?

I object to the fundamental formulation of problem ending “solutiotions” and transformative “revolutions.”

Fight the good fight, sure.  It is infinitely better than inaction. Give each other uplift.  Just discard the hubris that we can, once and for all time, “solve” our problems of systemic inequity.  

We can only struggle to affect, but what’s thought desirable for all is not a a real target.

-- 
    Ashwani
       Vasishth (he/him)     
Professor of Sustainability (Retired)
vasi...@ramapo.edu         
(323) 206-1858 (cell)

http://linkedin.com/in/vasishth

                  
Founding Advisor, Sustainable Jersey City (SJC)
sustainablejc.org

Board of Trustees
NJ Highlands Coalition (NJHC)
njhighlandscoalition.org

Sajai Jose

unread,
Jul 21, 2026, 3:09:24 PM (11 days ago) Jul 21
to Vasishth, Ashwani, radical ecological democracy
Dear Ashwani..

Its apt that you changed the subject line because you also seemed to have changed the subject. 

Coming back to the original point
- If inventions do count as technology, are they value neutral? 
- If a technology is classified as emergent, does it follow that its value neutral?
- The Klu Klux Klan, Racism, Capitalism (pretty much anything larger/other than an object or a creature) can be considered emergent - does it follow that they are value neutral?

Sajai

Rosamma Thomas

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Jul 21, 2026, 4:04:00 PM (11 days ago) Jul 21
to Sajai Jose, Vasishth, Ashwani, radical ecological democracy

Tom Abeles

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Jul 21, 2026, 4:58:16 PM (11 days ago) Jul 21
to Sajai Jose, Vasishth, Ashwani, radical ecological democracy
There is a large body of literature covering this discussion. It is important to know that analysis, especially from who have studied the issues

Ashwani Vasishth

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Jul 21, 2026, 9:05:51 PM (11 days ago) Jul 21
to Tom Abeles, Sajai Jose, radical ecological democracy

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-30

Ashwani Vasishth

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Jul 21, 2026, 10:54:56 PM (11 days ago) Jul 21
to Rosamma Thomas, Sajai Jose, radical ecological democracy

Love 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-30
Can we estimate how many famine-based deaths were avoided by the Green Revolution.docx

Ashwani Vasishth

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Jul 21, 2026, 11:07:31 PM (11 days ago) Jul 21
to Rosamma Thomas, Sajai Jose, radical ecological democracy

As 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
Benefits and harms of the Green Revolution from a whole-systems view, and across time.docx

Uygar Özesmi

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Jul 22, 2026, 2:49:20 AM (11 days ago) Jul 22
to Ashwani Vasishth, Rosamma Thomas, Jose Sajai, radical ecological democracy
Thanks for sharing. I was curious, so read it. And it took me down the rabbit hole...

Found the two answers you shared to be textbook generic. Did it really save lives? Or did it take more lives across the years through systemic effects? 

Was it stabilizing, or was it repressive and destabilizing by the grip of the transnational agro-industrial complex? 

Did it enable industrial animal farming, and because of that, major/the reason for massive animal suffering and human health collapse, leading to and intensified by some of the same companies in the “health” industry, e.g., Bayer? 

Did the answers give any indication of supermarketization effects? No.

Nothing of that was mentioned; neither was it a whole system perspective… 

Hence, sounded generic and even ignorant; maybe purposeful or by design… Maybe I was perplexed.

So after your two questions (gave approx. same answers), I asked (answers in the attached doc) in the same chat: 

You did not give me systemic second- or third-order effects… Did it cause more deaths because of the grip of the transnational agro-industrial complex as a result of the green revolution, which in turn caused health loss from pollution, pesticide poisoning, and long-term health effects, repression, poverty, destabilized governance, and armed conflict?

xx

I said deaths, not only human deaths! How many animals were killed because of the Green Revolution, which boosted and even created the animal industrial complex? How many people died because they ate industrial meat, meat-based diets, and associated illnesses?

xx

How did the Green Revolution enable supermarketization, and how many small farmers and town and city businesses were driven out of business?

xx - this answer is the most interesting compared to others

Given everything you compiled in this chat, whom did the Green Revolution make rich and accumulate power?

xx

Who lost?

xx

My conclusion is that the answers still miss critical thinking, and the answers are not beyond the obvious; it's not smart, it is conventional, a much better search engine and a good source for conventional knowledge.

Best wishes 

Uygar 

Perplexity on Green Revolution.rtf

Ashish Kothari

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Jul 22, 2026, 3:30:32 AM (11 days ago) Jul 22
to radical_ecolog...@googlegroups.com

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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'Ashwani Vasishth' via Radical Ecological Democracy <radical_ecolog...@googlegroups.com> şunları yazdı (22 Tem 2026 06:07):


To view this discussion, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/radical_ecological_democracy/21046c92-8755-4f9e-81ab-80fbb58113e7%40ramapo.edu.
<Benefits and harms of the Green Revolution from a whole-systems view, and across time.docx>
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mp

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Jul 22, 2026, 4:05:35 AM (11 days ago) Jul 22
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On 20/07/2026 05:44, Sajai Jose wrote:
> Dear Ashwini,
>
> Can we really say technologies are value neutral, and have no inherent
> morality when the fact is that no technology invents itself?

Of course we can say that technologies are value neutral. It is a free
—perhaps even a free will - world.

In the longer evolution of ideas, however, this now appears the less
sophisticated position.

It isolates the artefact as a thing in and of itself and grants little
ontological significance to the intentions, institutions, histories,
material conditions and relations of power through which it came into
being.

On such a view, a technology arrives almost as if from nowhere. Yet
another big bang fantasy, you might say. Upon its arrival we are then
left only with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice, invoking Epictetus in The
American Scholar:

“All things have two handles; beware of the wrong one.”

Yet twentieth-century sociology of technology, philosophy of science and
related traditions have given us a richer account. Technologies can be
explored through an examination of the ways in which they arise through
causes and conditions. A richer description is possible, deeper insights
available. Why not go there?

As the Buddha taught, whatever arises does so dependently. Nothing comes
from nothing. Even the apparent autonomy of individual intentions — and
even free will itself — become open to question.

A fuller account therefore necessarily includes the aims, assumptions
and often unexamined dispositions of those who design, finance, select
and deploy technologies.

Inventors and institutions already inhabit particular worlds. They carry
inherited ideas about reality, necessity, efficiency, progress, human
need and whose needs matter - and guess who shaped them? Those with
'editorial control', to paraphrase Joe Biden.

Technologies consequently materialise values. Their design privileges
some purposes, capacities and users over others; their operation
distributes benefits, harms, visibility and control. Values are present
before a technology is used, even though use may reinforce, redirect or
contest them.

Consider the so-called Green Revolution. Was it primarily about feeding
the world, or was it also about creating dependence on purchased inputs
and imports and, in a much wider sense, disrupting local subsistence
patterns and undermining autonomy? Would anyone have such intentions?
Difficult to imagine, right? :)

Technologies cannot be separated from the political-economic project
through which they were developed, financed and disseminated.

To call a technology morally neutral is therefore a low-bandwidth
description: ontologically impoverished and epistemically weak. It tells
us very little about how the technology came into being, whose purposes
it embodies, or what social order it helps reproduce.

In practice, such neutrality claims (often/always?) support the status
quo, because technologies developed under unequal conditions will tend
to carry the imprint — and extend the reach — of those with the greatest
power to shape them. I.e. the elite, which is to say those with the most
power, which is also those who can impress upon a reality their values
and see them cascading through the dynamics of the world.

Go deeper, go wider, see more, tell more, know more. Darkness might be
comforting - and shedding light might be for the brave...

Beware of the wrong handles...

...
..
.

Helena Paul

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Jul 22, 2026, 8:25:01 AM (11 days ago) Jul 22
to Ashish Kothari, radical_ecolog...@googlegroups.com
I think there were definitely alternatives to  the Green Rev that could have averted famine. When we were writing our book, 'Hungry Corporations: Transnational Corporations colonise the food chain', we did some research into what the GR destroyed, including many local varieties of rice, which also had links to local cultures. Many were also drought resistant. Recently i read somewhere that now a search is on for drought resistant rice varieties  … as climate change takes hold.

When you are facing corporations whose only duty is to return profits to shareholders, and which also enjoy impunity, you get exactly what we are now experiencing - the destruction of cultures, varieties, ecosystems, human lives, all for short-term profit. And governments are captured by the corporations of course. And short-term means exactly that - whatever the consequences down the line, it’s the immediate profit that matters, nothing else.

Helena
and several RED articles including:




Ashwani Vasishth

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Jul 22, 2026, 11:20:48 AM (11 days ago) Jul 22
to Uygar Özesmi, Rosamma Thomas, Jose Sajai, radical ecological democracy
Thank you, Uygar. 

I’m not claiming fact.  Just presenting my view from the road  I travelled. Not contesting your convictions. Just being additive.

Your challenging questions are very .supportable, and I will willingly  fold them into my thinking. 

It may be these are settled questions for RED members.  In which case I’ll gladly back off.

You’ve been very patient with me, and I appreciate that.

To be clear, I’m not a truth seeker.  I do look for perspectives other than mine.  And truths are never singular. 

I don’t need to peg any complex idea into mutually exclusive categories of only good or only bad. 

My only point is, they are Inseperable.  Every development has a real downside.  But it is never wholly evil either. 

If you agree with that, we can stop here.

I don’t ask, was the Green Revolution good or evil. I ask what was knowable by Borlaug, and did he intend to do harm? 

Yes, the Green Revolution—as it has evolved—is worth resisting.  Was he an agent of a (real) still existing imperialist  plot to oppress us?  Or was he trying to help, the only ways he knew how?  We all call for empathy.  But are not as ready to show it. 

Yes, I believe there is certainly a small  class of people that intend to oppress the rest.  Look at ALL the authoritarians determined to control us.  MAGA and Modi and Putin and on. 

The division of the planet into people of the North and People of the South is much less useful to understand actual oppression processes.

Now, there are only the Oppressors and the Oppressd.  Imperialism is only historically a burden of the West.  Both can now be found everywhere.

Western imperialism is no longer a useful frame.  Like many things it has globalized.

We must show that globalization is not the only process at work. That there are real examples of successful localization. But it’s not a choice question.  Pick a side.  They must learn to co-exist. Neither is going away.

Now, what are we to do?

I’d never argue that the Green Revolution was a boon for us. It was a mixed bag. Famine did fade ( disappear) from the headlines I saw growing up in India. The Hunger-related deaths did measurably go down.  Of course, that’s not the only outcome, but only part of the sum consequences. 

All I’m saying is history is told in many ways. At many times.  And for many agendas.  It’s telling is always contingent.  There is no one true authentic history that is incontestable. 

We choose “facts” based b on what we think credible.  Confirmation Bias.

Leave room for disagreement.

I don’t disagree with any of your characterizations of the Green Revolution.  In fact I agree with their truths.  It’s just that they are not the whole truth.

This is my core point about all us still being trapped in binary thinking. We must construct versions of the world that relieve us of the hard struggle to reconcile competing truths.

The activist frame demands there be a clear target or enemy.  Battles never have clear winners.

Without a “them” there is no “us”.  If we can’t accept that, then, with time, we’ll just be one more great idea that tried to be.

But, if you accept the long arc of history version of justice, then we must resist oppression.  But everywhere we can see it. 

That’s what I call an ecosystem approach. All actions and entities emerge from socio-ecological processes\

As I said before, expect to fail.  Struggle anyway.

If you folks can accept that, then we are in the same book.  No contest.

-- 
    Ashwani
       Vasishth (he/him)     
Professor of Sustainability (Retired)
vasi...@ramapo.edu         
(323) 206-1858 (cell)

http://linkedin.com/in/vasishth
                  
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'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:

Vasishth, Ashwani

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Jul 22, 2026, 11:53:14 AM (10 days ago) Jul 22
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Ashish, there is real wisdom in what you say below.  In fact, it was your articulation of a pluriversal approach that brought me here.  And keeps me here.

That’s exactly my point.  There can be no one correct answer.  We need to widen the societal decision pool.

Aim for the oppressors, to start.  Easy targets.  But overthrow is not a path to enduring success.

My entire argument is we need a diversity of (relevant) perspectives to get to what is potentially desirable for all.


-- 
    Ashwani
       Vasishth (he/him)     
Professor of Sustainability (Retired)
vasi...@ramapo.edu         
(323) 206-1858 (cell)

http://linkedin.com/in/vasishth
                  
Founding Advisor, Sustainable Jersey City (SJC)
sustainablejc.org

Board of Trustees
NJ Highlands Coalition (NJHC)
njhighlandscoalition.org

Vasishth, Ashwani

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Jul 22, 2026, 1:48:56 PM (10 days ago) Jul 22
to mp, radical_ecolog...@googlegroups.com
We use very different words, but in my mind at least, we’re in the same chapter. 

The only change I’d make to mp’s post below is this.

What if there is no right handle?  Grabbing any handle is a choice.  We can ponder and think and analyze.  There may be more preferable choices. But the Supra-system’s responses will never be entirely predictable.

There will never be a right handle.  And yet, we must choose.

This is the Protopian view.  We do what we are able to, or think to do, as best we can.

Like change, unintended consequences are 
attached to all actions, and only reveal themselves after we act.

If we could know these before we chose, we’d rarely be wrong.

This is why I embrace pluriverse, as a more defensible path towards a potentially better future.  But I accept also something will, unforeseeably, go wrong too.

I’m not arguing for non-action. 

I’m arguing for a modicum of humility. 

We are not the answer to the problems we’ve created.  The socio-ecosphere has a voice.  We say we want to save the planet. Yet we deny it agency?
-- 
    Ashwani
       Vasishth (he/him)     
Professor of Sustainability (Retired)
vasi...@ramapo.edu         
(323) 206-1858 (cell)

http://linkedin.com/in/vasishth
                  
Founding Advisor, Sustainable Jersey City (SJC)
sustainablejc.org

Board of Trustees
NJ Highlands Coalition (NJHC)
njhighlandscoalition.org
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Mari Marcel Thekaekara

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Jul 23, 2026, 12:42:53 AM (10 days ago) Jul 23
to Ashwani Vasishth, Uygar Özesmi, Rosamma Thomas, Jose Sajai, radical ecological democracy
I agree with yr point  of vew Ashwani (long time since we met)

I was a kid in Kolkata when those devastating famines hit Bihar especially.

I vividly remember the pictures of dying children skeletal older people.

So i too, though we realised the damage caused  by the pesticides, fertilizers n chemicals, poured on our crops....this is with hindsight! 



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