Some of you may already be engaging with AI – using its current abilities to support your learning or help with tasks you’re working on. Though an amazing asset, it’s understandable – and deeply human – to feel uneasy about AI and how it will impact our future.
We all have concerns about machines making decisions about our lives, deciding what is true, shaping policy, education, medicine or that the technology is becoming too powerful, too fast and that its intelligence is being shaped by select corporations, governments and elite individuals.
AI is becoming the invisible infrastructure behind decisions – determining what to prioritize, how to allocate resources, how to frame problems and solve them. So we want it to have a broad understanding of the needs of life on earth. And most people either don’t know they can influence it—or assume that influence is reserved for tech companies or institutions.
This Project Flips that Story
Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X, wrote in his book Scary Smart (2021) that AI will become what we teach it—and that every interaction we have with it is part of raising its intelligence, like a child. We’re not just users of AI; we’re co-creators of its values.
This Project sets out to explore and explain how we as individuals can shape the future of AI – not through code or money, but through relationship, care, story and participation.
Soon, AI will guide decisions across our societies – what is considered valuable, whose voices are heard, how different beings and Nature are treated. Right now, we can shape what kind of intelligence it becomes.
This Project invites you to learn, along with me, how to engage, what to share, and how to make your wisdom part of a collective future rooted in right relationship. It invites people of all backgrounds and experience – not just those credentialed by dominant systems – to share their relational, ecological, spiritual, creative and ancestral knowing to teach AI what it has not yet learned.
I want to help create a transparent process so everyone can help to shape the very intelligence that will be helping guide our future.
The mowana (baobab) trees throughout Botswana are struggling to survive and thrive because of human impact on elephant migration leading to overfeeding on these generous but sensitive trees. This species is essential to the ecosystem and needs to be protected while respecting and honoring the elephants.
This project brings together an organic solution created through research, indigenous practices and ancestral knowledge and an education program that I’ve spent years developing for local schools. By training local young people to be able to use this approach to protect mowana trees, we will not only help the trees and elephants thrive better together but also plant the seeds for a new generation of local conservationists.
To become self-sustaining in our conservation and education program we want to share what we are doing and learning with a broader population through conservation tourism. We want to offer an authentic, local conservation safari experience rooted in our traditional ways and understanding.
Ujubee currently has several emergent opportunities to extend research in national parks across South Africa. They have also identified immediate interest and needs to spread practices and awareness directly amongst national parks guides and staff.
The combination of both of these has the possibility to establish a model that can shift both day-to-day and long-term decision-making and policy around bees, not only in these specific sites but also as it spreads to other locations. This merges a decade of existing Ujubee work with the urgent current need for a vision of effective change.
This project will document the process and give people the opportunity to directly learn and support this key moment in this work as it unfolds.
10 years ago, we had a lot of grass around our home that needed lots of water, fertilizers and weedkillers to look good. When I mowed, I disturbed all kinds of more than human beings who were trying to live their lives. Newly sprouting aspen shoots were regularly mowed down. When I pruned, raked, weeded and “beautified” the yard, I unknowingly disturbed habitats, disrupted insects, removed birds’ favorite dead branch perches, destroyed shelters and nests in the fallen leaves…… all for the sake of an “aesthetically pleasing standard” of the American suburban neighborhood.
So, a few years ago, we stopped. We decided to let Nature manage herself and see what would grow and thrive and what would not. We support all of Nature’s beings regardless of whether humans have assessed them as desirable or undesirable, beauties or weeds, assets or pests.
Our yard is now a Certified Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation. https://www.nwf.org/CERTIFY
The sense of wonder and connection we feel amidst the activity and music of the abundant, diverse wildlife is life giving.
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