Making Kin with the Machines

Notes

Man is neither height nor centre of creation.

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machines with increasing levels of sentient-like behaviour, we must consider how such entities fit within the kin-network

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extended “circle of relationships” that includes the non-human kin—from network daemons to robot dogs to artificial intelligences (AI) weak and, eventually, strong—that increasingly populate our computational biosphere

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Indigenous epistemologies are much better at respectfully accommodating the non-human

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knowledge is the relationship one has to ‘all my relations’

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Indigenous epistemologies do not take abstraction or generalization as a natural good or higher order of intellectual engagement. Relationality is rooted in context and the prime context is place

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how do we as Indigenous people reconcile the fully embodied experience of being on the land with the generally disembodied experience of virtual spaces?

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how Ito’s call to resist reduction might best be realized by developing conceptual frameworks that conceive of our computational creations as kin

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Hāloa : the long breath

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polysemy (kaona) is the normative cognitive mode of peoples belonging to the Moananuiākea

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“operating code” that shapes our view of time and relationships in a way that transcends the cognition of a single generation

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Rather than extractive behavior, moʻolelo such as these have shaped values privileging balance (pono) and abundance (ulu.)

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Pono is an ethical stance—correctness, yes, but also an index and measure which privileges multiplicities over singularities and indicates that quality of life can only be assessed through the health of land and people

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attend to the power (mana) which is exchanged and shared between AI and humans

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wahkohtowin : kinship within and beyond the immediate family, the state of being related to others

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I am not worried about rogue hyper-intelligences going Skynet to destroy humanity. I am worried about anonymous hyper-intelligences working for governments and corporations, implementing far-reaching social, economic, and military strategies based on the same values that have fostered genocide against Indigenous people worldwide and brought us all to the brink of environmental collapse. In short, I fear the rise of a new class of extremely powerful beings that will make the same mistakes as their creators but with greater consequences and even less public accountability.

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do pre-consciousness AI already have spirits, as do many objects already in the world?

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I am cautious about making AI kin, simply because AI has been advanced already as exploitative, capitalist technology

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wakȟáŋ : that which cannot be understood

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communication through and between objects requires a contextualist ethics which acknowledges the ontological status of all beings.

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“epistemology of control” and is indelibly tied to colonization, capitalism, and slavery

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Any damn fool can treat a living thing as if it were a machine and establish conditions under which it is required to perform certain functions—all that is required is a sufficient application of brute force. The result of brute force is slavery’

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Slavery, the backbone of colonial capitalist power and the Western accumulation of wealth, is the end logic of an ontology which considers any non-human entity unworthy of relation.

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Who can enter these relationships and be in relation? One answer could be: that which has interiority.

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Wakȟáŋ is a fundamental principle in Lakota ontology’s extension of interiority to a “collective and universal” non-human. Oglala Lakota holy man George Sword says, “[Wakȟáŋ] was the basis of kinship among humans and between humans and non-humans.”

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Forming a relationship to AI, we form a relationship to the mines and the stones. Relations with AI are therefore relations with exploited resources

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non-humans have spirits that do not come from us or our imaginings but from elsewhere, from a place we cannot understand, a Great Mystery, wakȟáŋ: that which cannot be understood.

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Resisting Reduction: An Indigenous Path Forward

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It is clear to us that the country to which AI currently belongs excludes the multiplicity of epistemologies and ontologies that exist in the world. Our communities know well what it means to have one’s ways of thinking, knowing, and engaging with the world disparaged, suppressed, excluded, and erased from the conversation of what it means to be human.

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rationalizations for treating the human-like as slaves, and the way such a mindset debases every human relation it touches—even that of the supposed master

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