Photo: Bolivian indigenous communities use computers to learn more about organic agriculture and the sustainable use of natural resources among farmer communities, photo by IICD, Wikimedia Commons
It was late December when Indian Voices’ publisher Rose Davis floated the idea that I write a brief missive on Indigenous thought and artificial intelligence. Neither of us are anti-technology, per se. We both work in print news, as well as digital media. We own smartphones. We use Google. We’re on the internet pretty much every day, and as a result, AI is now a part of our lives. For the most part, technology adds to the quality of life. But what does it take?
It was a day or two later that a comical scene addressing the topic played out in front of my eyes.
Two young people were waiting at a bus stop and arguing about what time the bus would arrive. Both had smartphones: one had an iPhone, the other an Android. Neither could get the bus rider app to work on their respective devices. Both seemed to accept their state of learned helplessness.
An older gentleman, also waiting for the bus, rose from his seat and stated confidently, “The bus will arrive in about six minutes.”
“Oh, that’s good to hear, but how do you know?” said one of the young people.
The gentleman replied, “The sun is still high in the eastern sky, so I know it is morning. My stomach is not yet demanding lunch, so I know it is before noon. It is a weekday, and on weekdays, the bus runs every hour. And most importantly, I can see our bus at a stoplight two intersections away.”
This wasn’t exactly an example of artificial intelligence pitted against Indigenous intelligence, but it was an illustration of overdependence on technology. The option of lifting their eyes from their phone screens to look down the road had been deleted from their minds. It makes one wonder what other aspects of reality are being deleted in favor of their electronic, virtual, and artificial counterparts.
In 1995, Willie Ermine wrote, “Indigenous philosophies are underlain by a worldview of interrelationships among the spiritual, the natural and the self, forming the foundation or beginnings of Indigenous ways of knowing and being.”
In our present day, I humbly ask: Is being in a solitary digital “space” and reading news online, which was specifically tailored to individual tastes, and written by artificial intelligence… truly an improvement over sharing in the collective experience of reading a physical newspaper written by real people with actual intelligence? Human writers belong to communities and have souls. AI news-bots do not.
More recently, in American Indian Politics and The American Political System, author David Wilkins wrote, “Most white philanthropists agreed that the Indians’ tribal social structure, generally founded on common stewardship of land, was the major obstacle to their ‘progress’ toward civilization.”
The perspectives of Ermine and Wilkins are decidedly more wholistic. As is much of Indigenous thought around the world and throughout time. It is thinking that holds the individual, not as the center of a universe digitally designed for it, but views the individual as but one member of a vast collective of all other things.
