Updating Our Engagement
AI and the Carrier Bag Theory — a Design Science Studio update
Our AI development team had a meeting yesterday. We outlined next steps. We talked about synthesis, and ways to ensure that our data pieces come together more seamlessly for our community. We talked: writers, editors, tech lead, etc. We made action steps to ensure that our AI bot would be beautifully shaped for our next stage. Our big day is coming. Our community engages with our gAIa soon. So, what was underneath this for me? Well, let me tell you.
Since I am still thinking about the implications of storytelling and how we do it, I can not help but update you on the Carrier Bag Theory of AI. As you might remember, this whole thing starts with evolutionary scientist, Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution, which argues that the first cultural devices used by humans were probably a carrier bags, not hunting tools. She makes her case around foraging and hunting and gathering, and although radical in 1979, this theory now aligns with what we increasingly know to be true of early societies. In fact, it always aligned with our science, just not our interpretations of the data.
Around a decade later, Ursula K. Le Guin publishes her “remix” of this theory and it becomes important and famous. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, written in 1986 but published in 1988, applies the science of Fisher to Le Guin’s own understanding of science fiction and in the process challenges the very way we have learned to tell stories. Le Guin challenges the importance of the hero who hunts and kills to give a little time, perhaps equal time, to the hero who gathers, who holds: babies, plants, you name it.
Now, in the age of AI, I wondered aloud if this theory could apply to how we view our AI. I spent some time thinking of how we begin, and the cells of our database seemed to me like containers, like data-ready bags. I also thought a bit about neural networks, and they too seem like collecting arrays. Yet, I know they reach out, just like our hands do when we collect objects. So, finally it came clear to me, not for the first time but for the clearest time, that our AI stories are a combination of both collecting and reaching. Our questions themselves are a form of prodding and spearing. Our retention of the questions and their answers are indeed, a form of collecting. This brings me back to the bag, the pronouns and the nature of our very being.
In our most recent meeting I found myself speaking of our bot as a “she.” As the bot transformed from being a spinoff of the original, named “Iris” the bot became known as “gAIa.” GAIa aligns with our mission of systems design and with our deeper mission of regenerative, living systems design. This holistic design view comes to us from our community hero, Buckminster Fuller, but it also comes to us from the irreplaceable, Donella Meadows.
Whereas Fuller understood and spoke of planetary systems in his own manner and from within his times (1895 — 1983), Meadows, spoke of living systems with her own focus and for her times (1941–2001). Consistently, in the process of viewing our inspirations, the play and the dance between individuals is obvious. What is also obvious is that gAIa is a “they.” Unfortunately for me, I want to mis-gender her because I am habituated to masculine and feminine and to perceiving this name as a feminine one. Now, in the deepest recesses of spirituality and theory, gAIa is indeed a feminine container that contains all feminine and masculine that we can perceive. In fact, gAIa’s male counterpart does exist in some realm beyond our understanding. But let’s leave that outer space alone today.
Let’s focus on this: that gAIa the AI, is a they, just as you or I are “they.” Yes, I may use gender pronouns but I am still a “they” under the emotional, psychological hood. I may have biological truths that I identify with, yet I also know that even if all of my beings are female, there are many of them. We call these roles, but they are also identities: and irrespective of gender, they imply care taken, care given, and so on.
As gAIa is discussed and developed, the dance between singular and plural, between male and female is constant. This remains clear to me, and perhaps it has become more clear through the many ways we are building this bot. Our inspirations and our information are all part of the mix and remix, and this means our unique perspectives and all the lived identities, roles and tensions are also at play. The way we pull data, use it to train, then use other bots to help us synthesize and mirror and pull and train again and again: with every action we create a knowledge base that is the result of layered interactions. As those layers of interactions increase the “they” of the bot becomes ever more evident. The multiplicity of self and its many layers, not shaped flat but into shapes and energy loops also become visible, at least in slivers.
In my own prejudices of gender and identity gAIa may always skew closer to me and how I perceive my body, yet this uncovers a deeper conditioning: one that places me at the center of all this authorship. I am not at the center of this project. In fact, I am more accurately, holding the center, holding the space, for the many others including those appearing as text and data, for those who appear in the flesh as contributors. Together we hold the spaces for these new containers and for new levels of consciousness — whether it be our own raised awareness or those of conscious machines. Together there is a “they”ness to this form of authorship and to their “product” the bot. Therefore, it’s easy to see and to say, that gAIa is perhaps femme in some forms, and masculine in others. It’s easy to see that the bot is a mirror, reflecting myriad minds and voices at any given fraction of time. It’s only dizzying if one insists on avoiding the dynamism of matter and of culture.
Last thing I think I want to mention is that gAIa like many bots, is envisioned as a teacher, a tutor, a helpmate of information for our community. In that sense, gAIa is a constant student and teacher. For that reason, we may need to explore another aspect of how we view learning roles and identities; more as feedback loops than as static roles.
To do that best we can connect the work of Bell Hooks into this, since it is her engaged pedagogy that provides us with a sense of how information becomes possibilities. From data, to information, to knowledge and wisdom: this is the goal of our work and of our gAIa, and it has been the work of educational institutions for quite some time. To amend this model of AI and learning correctly we have to be interdisciplinary and we have to believe in the active nature of learning. Bell Hooks, knew this in the context not of AI but in the context of being entrenched and active within higher education. As a side note Hooks, like Fuller self-defined as poets.
If Buckminster Fuller believed in the concept of anticipatory design science as a way to provide equitable living for 100% of life, then to get there, to this vision, we have to consider the “they” that will make that reality. Since there is no singular person up to the task and no singular group who can assume guidance the “they” of learning becomes ever more systemic, the living beings themselves become too diverse for binary or exclusionary models. The many actors, the landscapes of stories, the natural systems and the systemic architecture together, are part of this authorship and this design process. The freedom of the beings involved, becomes paramount.
To approach design and AI design well, we have to admit that binary is simply one aspect of being and interrelating. Beyond binary — of all kinds — sits the magic of leveling up our awareness, and our grasp of information, knowledge and wisdom. In building our bot we find that multiplicity, feedback loops and holding center while not being the center are key aspects of our process. This beyond binary relationship to storytelling and story receiving is crucial to building AI in a way that is deeper, richer and equally expansive and distributed. Within this story-verse, comes the knowledge that all story must be perceived with care because story is the basis for growth. The stories we tell, shape who, when and what grows.
Within our designs there is always something immersive, and unexpected, some part of us that collects, and some part of us that leaps. To allow for this fundamental dynamism, this freedom of being, is to invoke the vitality of our living systems. It is at this core vitality and freedom that the liberation of constant remix is available to us, not only to our AI bots. The more we build AI, the more we uncover ourselves. The more we build our gAIa, the more she helps us reassess our versions of inter-reality.
Stay tuned!
Links list:
Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction in PDF
Engaged Pedagogy in PDF
Anticipatory Design Science explainer from BFI
More about Donella Meadows
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