With the rise of AI we are entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths. Powers that used to be reserved for magicians and sorcerers — the power to access volumes of knowledge instantaneously, to create fully realized illusory otherworlds, to deceive, to conjure, to transport, to materialize on a massive scale — are no longer hypothetical. The age of metaphor is over. The mythic powers are real. Are human beings prepared to handle such powers?

In this first part of our course, we’ll explore the rise of AI through the mythic framework and look at the deeper drives underpinning AI development.

What does it mean to be personally prepared to be working with powerful technology? In traditional cultures and knowledge systems there was an initiatory process through which potentially world-altering knowledge was embodied slowly over time. Individuals who were entrusted to wield such power were expected to go through a process of initiation, tempering, and slow, gradual learning to ensure that they could handle such power. This went far beyond what is now covered in a modern-day tech ethics course and involved a deep process of building relationality and dismantling egoic drives.

This portion of the course will explore what a process of individual initiation and tempering might look like in the modern world.

How can embodied accountability be instituted on a company-wide and society-wide scale? What does it mean to communally embody ethics? In many traditional systems, individual achievement is less important than relationality and the ecology of the whole has precedent over the wants of the individual. Therefore, many traditional cultures see the world not in terms of what we are permitted to do but what we are required to do — not in terms of freedom but in terms of responsibility.

This segment explores what an ecology of responsibility looks like, and how we might structure our companies and tech environments to foster accountability, relationality, and sustainability over time.

When confronted with the suggestion that AI developers might consider slowing down a bit in their rush to get new technologies to market, the response is often — ‘that’s impossible — market forces and international competition won’t allow for it.’ And yet a consistent voice that encourages individual and societal slowdown is deeply important. A culture that unleashes new unproven technologies with no planning beyond next quarter is not only flirting with potentially catastrophic consequences but is also ensuring that their innovations won’t last. Slowdown is how we guarantee longevity. But what does slowing down actually mean? It’s not always as dramatic as we think.

This portion of the course will cast a new light on how slowing down — both individually and collectively — is how systems that actually stand the test of time are built.

Tech companies have put forward the proposition that intelligence, once fully realized, will solve everything. Yet intelligence as it is defined in the tech world — computational capability — does not solve anything meaningful in and of itself. Intelligence with no anchor to practice, to relationality, or to living systems remains an abstraction, and there are tangible consequences to constructing our lives and our educational systems around abstracted intelligence. What would it mean to redefine intelligence? What would it look like to build relationality and accountability into the technologies themselves?

This final portion of the course explores how the tech itself can come to embody ethics, and how rethinking the way we approach and interface with tech will determine how it can be integrated into our lives harmoniously rather than disruptively.

All lectures will be recorded and shared with students and enrolling grants you access to 24/7 asynchronous discussion in a private forum. When we’ll host the course again is TBD.

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