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Before we get close to Superintelligence we must code in ethics and values into all AI. The first ethic to code for to insure our future is that silicon (all AI) is explicitly tasked to enhance carbon based life. Silicon serves Carbon. Not vice versa. This is the primary guardrail that perpetuates life on the Earth and protects humanity.
Nature’s Operating Principles
Nature’s operating principles must be coded explicitly into all AI less the silicon turns on carbon and makes humans part of the 6th Great Extinction. It’s much more than a base survival issue because the result of following “nature’s operating principles” is a world of abundance and thriving for all life.
Concordantly then, if you must prioritize life, as in living soil, biomes, bioregions and planetary life support systems, we have a lot of work to do because across the board in the vast majority of conversations around AI life is getting short shrift. It’s Generative AI not yet Regenerative AI. It’s mostly about chips, compute, brute force, data centers, getting to Mars, and trans-humanist dreams of a disembodied life, untethered from our home planet, from all that is nurturing to a life worth living. The overwhelming focus is on the artificial over the natural, control over reciprocity, adherence over coherence, and here lies the achilles heal of the hype-cycled GenAI. Earth will be cold, dead and absent humanity if we don’t put the redemption of life first. It’s time for The Great Regeneration (TGR)! That’s the promise of Regenerative AI.
The Dream of AI vs. the Nightmare of Generative AI
The AI dream is to build intelligent tools that enhance and protect life, that solve real world problems, that relieve suffering, resolve conflicts, and bring humans together in peace. That’s not happening; that’s not what’s driving AI. Rather it’s over-promising dishonest hype, greed and arrogance devoid of accounting for human impact on and destruction of living systems. GenAI may be nurturing life and Spirit around the edges and in some niche domains but not at its core. In this sense GenAI is spreading darkness at the speed of light, over a trillion dollars invested without a trillion dollar solution. Until Generative AI turns Regenerative it will continue to accelerate destruction of nature instead of reversing the collapse of life and building a human economy built on repair, restoration and care. Peace and thriving economies everywhere will be enabled and nurtured through regenerative AI. GenAI in its current generation will bring ruin through ignorance.
Generative AI’s Blind Spot: Real Wealth
At the root of this blind spot, this myopia is a misunderstanding about what constitutes real wealth. Unless this misunderstanding is replaced with true understanding we are doomed. Real wealth flows from nature whose intelligence has evolved over billions of years. Real wealth is a perpetual flywheel of abundance that leads to thriving life, all that we need now and all that we will ever need. Real wealth is a rich thanksgiving harvest not dead soil. Real wealth is naturally stabilized atmosphere not geo-engineering. Real wealth banks on nature, not Central Banks. Real wealth turns all of us into billionaires. Real wealth is not the hoarding of bitcoin, gold or billions of dollars in Panamanian or Swiss bank accounts, it’s the movement of natural, even divine, intelligence through human and AI agency, that becomes the tide that lifts all boats. It’s biomimetics and warm data for warm bodies that respects Creation and the ‘immeasurables’. Nature’s inherent ability to regenerate itself is what Dr. Zach Bush calls “Biological Grace” and this is our saving grace.
Overturning the Tables of the Money Changers
Regenerative AI operates on this fundamental abundance of life support flowing from natural intelligence. But more than that it applies nature’s operating principles to heal and restore life, repairing human-caused damage done and turning what’s in deficit, failing or damaged back into life giving abundance and beauty. We should be banking on this resilience. Doing so will render the old economic system and its driving myth of scarcity obsolete. Perhaps that’s the rub because true Regenerative AI will upset the tables of the money changers in the temple of autocratic control. Regenerative AI will bring light to what produces real wealth and herein lies the revolution. it’s bitcoin as store of value. It’s nature’s infinite storehouse. The real gold is peace through regeneration. Thriving economies everywhere based on regeneration, spun up by the flywheel of life. It’s honest practical good works of regeneration in the soils of our fields, in our streams and rivers, along our coasts and across our oceans that will deliver genuine lasting and real health and wealth to humanity.
Our Wake-Story: The Dawning of a New AI Narrative
This is the wake-up call represented in a symbiotic Regenerative AI, one that puts silicon, bitcoin, CPUs, blockchains and stablecoins in service of carbon and organic life, rather than undermining or ignoring it. This is the kind of carbon tunnel vision we need, a truly profound focus on enhancing organic biological life. Net zero and drawdown are downers and miss the forest for the trees. We take care of life and it will take care of us. The simple math of the most important ‘algorithm’ we must code in is “adding life to life.” GenAI and big LLMs are not doing this and they haven’t even begun to try. For that reason we must look to decentralized, open-source, merging of models (including Active Inference and neuro-symbolic approaches for example) and full-spectrum sensor networks powering a Spatial Web that will give us real AI agents that make transparent the damage we’ve done and continue to do to the very source of all wealth. Regenerative AI opens the way to a naturally thriving abundant home planet. Turning Generative AI regenerative is what’s needed now because Life is, naturally, the ultimate Rx!