📺 You can watch my spoken word rendition of this post on TikTok.

Thanks to the tech we built, we can now watch a genocide unfold live, yet we still debate about which side to take, as our elected leaders continue bending to corporate interests. What else do we have to witness to acknowledge that business as usual isn’t working? To acknowledge that we can’t keep stealing, extracting, and killing people to grow an unsustainable system to its breaking point.

I try to focus on the positive and spread messages of hope so that we can imagine better futures, different from the insidious Black Mirror visions of tech we are told are inevitable in the name of progress. But as I’m reading through various climate reports and watch children and young people from Gaza report a genocide in real time, my faith in humanity falters.

Tell me, how is AI, AGI, superintelligence, or whatever you want to sell it as, going to stop us from killing each other to ensure the continued extraction of natural resources? How is AI going to help humanity when we’re still obsessed about winning, dominating, conquering, colonizing, crushing our enemies? Are these the values we’ll align our AI models to?

We have a lot to rethink as a society before we should even dare to think about building superintelligence. Before playing gods, we should invest in human intelligence to realize how stupid we’re actually being in our disregard for life on our planet.

The children are watching and judging us. Will you tell your children stories about smashing KPIs and scrolling social media when they inevitably ask you what you were doing to keep the planet habitable for them and their children?

Yeah, you’re too busy. You don’t have the right title. But who does, if not you and me?

Cease fire. Rethink the stories we tell. And start valuing all life on planet Earth.