Humans are Scared Shitless of Nature: How AI is just another distraction from the truth

One of the things that our ancestors knew without a doubt, is that we humans are inextricably connected to the natural world. Try as we may to create alternative realities, nature has a way of proving this truth again and again. And without that acknowledgement, we are, as Pam Montgomery writes in her book “Plant Spirit Healing,” like a tree without roots, waves without motion, or a heart without soul which continually longs for that which gives it life.” 

We want to believe that the rise of AI is something new, something surprising, something we humans have never seen before. But what we are experiencing right now is nothing new. Humans have been pursuing this escape from truth for a millennia dating back at least 64,000 years to the cave paintings of the Neanderthals in Spain. Throughout history we see efforts to frame the natural environment as something other than it is, something created from our own imagination. Look at the rise of landscape painting during the 16th and 17th centuries which sought to create static images that represented nature, or the rise of theater and novels during that same period which served as a mental escape from reality. Look at the rapid growth in popularity of radio during the 1920s which disconnected us from the natural sounds of our environment, or now, the metaverse, these persistent digital spaces where humans can work, socialize, and live entirely within an unreality.

Artificial intelligence is just another form of distraction for us. It is nothing new. It is a way for us to escape what is and will always be a universal truth; that we humans cannot control this thing called nature. And that scares the shit out of us.

But our ancestors, at least some of them, knew better. Lao Tzu, sage, philosopher and writer of Tao-Te-Ching wrote, “showing nothing as alluring will have the effect of putting the people’s minds at rest”. Max Frisch, Swiss writer and architect of the early 1900s wrote in his work Homo Faber, “Technology is the art of arranging the world so that we do not have to experience it." French philosopher, sociologist, and cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard, described the simulated world in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death as “the desert of the real.”

We humans may be able to trick ourselves into believing that we are not subject to the laws of nature, but nature holds the truth. We are “part of this soil” as Native American Chief Seattle, Duwamish noted in his 1854 speech about the colonization of his people and land by the White man. “Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event…Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people” Scraps from a Diary: Chief Seattle, translated by Dr. Henry A. Smith).

The truth is, we don’t want to know the truth. We want to believe in our own hubris, that we can control things. But the reality is, there is very little we can control. And nature gently, consistently, and sometimes wildly, reminds us of this. As Professor of Science Francis Hole points out to herbalist Mathew Wood during his trip to the Upper Midwest for the Quaker community’s “Yearly Meeting” (my roots which I will write about later), “Nature is alive. Nature is alive.” And if we are honest with ourselves, we humans crave that knowledge. “It is life itself,” notes Hole, “and [we] can’t live a happy life without it.” Wood, The Book of Herbal Wisdom)