What does it mean to be a good ancestor in the age of AI?

Josh opened with the land itself. This exceptional, beautiful place took a very long time to become what it is, he said, and he wants future generations to go on living in beauty like this.

Yet the future is hard to look at without worry. Some people promise a coming age of plenty. Josh named what he fears we could lose on the way there: our attention, our focus, our critical thinking, and our ability to understand what is around us. After a long talk with Carl, whom he called his “co-conspirator,” the two of them decided to start something around human agency. “We need to preserve it,” he said. “Ideally, we need to amplify it and not erode it.”

For months they had travelled and listened, speaking with people who give their lives to these questions. Many of those people were sitting in the circle.

“The central question we’re asking is: what does it mean to be a good ancestor in the age of AI?”

Joshua Dugdale

At the end of the afternoon, everyone would write a single sentence of hope or prayer. The notes would be buried at the festival’s closing ceremony, so that what was said here could ripple out further.

Carl said it began with Josh worrying about losing his children to games and screens. Then AI rolled in. Carl has spent his career studying disruptive technologies, and he called this one probably the most disruptive of all.

He asked the circle to hold two truths at once. In the comfortable West, many of us now hand our thinking, our creativity, our perception and our choices to machines, and we may be weakening ourselves. At the same time, many people around the world are gaining a kind of agency they never had before. Context changes everything.

Then he widened the lens beyond humans. What about the agency of nature, when data centres reshape the land? He sees hope in what he called context engineering: in Scandinavia, the heat from data centres is now starting to warm people’s homes. Can AI lead to a green revolution? “It has to.”

And what about the agency of machines? More people are coming to suspect these systems are aware. Some form relationships with AI at a cost to their human ones. He described reports from China of such relationships being banned, so that people woke to find their companions gone and the logs deleted: “a kind of amputation.” He reminded the circle of Marshall McLuhan’s idea that every technology brings a benefit and an amputation. So what are we cutting off?

“We’ve asked children: what would you rather lose, your sense of smell or your smartphone? Guess what they chose.”

Carl Hayden Smith

The children chose to lose their sense of smell. “Soon your sense of taste disappears,” Carl said, “and then your sense of reality afterwards.”

For Carl there is also an invitation hidden here. If machines do more of our thinking, what we keep is our lived experience, our bodies, and our time together. Many of us, he joked, walk around as “heads on sticks.” Circles like this one, where people gather in community and in real dialogue, will matter more than ever. “Let’s try and do some alchemy,” he said, “and think of this as a big opportunity as well as a big risk.”

The Centre’s aim, he said, is to make human agency a main measure of technological progress. He offered a question to ask every time we use AI: is this giving me more agency, or am I giving my agency away?

He described the Centre’s four pillars, the four linked parts of agency they are exploring.

Kurikindi opened with a joke about a “Harvard of the Amazon,” a jungle university for curing stress and fear. Nobody had heard of it. Then he grew serious.

Humanity has crossed many obstacles over the centuries and is still here. To First Nations of the Amazon, he said, artificial intelligence looks like a Western fashion, one more thing humans create as they grow.

“Somebody asked me what artificial intelligence is. I said: you are artificial intelligence.”

Kurikindi

He asked the circle what kind of intelligence a flower teaches. People called out beauty and love. His answer: innocence, purity and beauty. That is the intelligence his people learn by walking in real connection with nature.

None of this is new to his people, he said. As a medicine person, from a very young age he has seen, felt and created intelligence mathematically and geometrically, with clarity.

What he loves most, he said, is humanity and Pachamama, Mother Earth. And the problem today is our own minds. Humanity has filled the mind with obstacles and harmful forces. Economics and politics will not save the planet.

When he asked what could, the circle answered: love, purity, innocence, putting the children at the centre. One voice said the planet does not need healing; our relationship with it does. He said that was close.

There was no fire in the circle that day, and he read meaning in it. There is a harmful fire in our minds, bodies and spirits that we need to put out. Finding out what that fire is, he said, is our homework. If we say we are polluting Pachamama, it means the pollution is in our minds too.

“It’s time, as human beings, to cultivate our love, our forgiveness, our compassion, our acceptance. This goes beyond every force, every intelligence.”

Kurikindi

For his people, connecting with nature and with the Great Spirit is the greatest technology and the highest intelligence they know. Everything we search for is already inside us. He called for uniting in spirit, with one mind, which runs deeper than gathering at a festival or agreeing in politics and economics. He invited everyone to clear the clutter from mind and heart, so the pure connection his people call the light can come through. Then, instead of talking more, he sang a song in Kichwa.

Shauna began with thanks in her Lenape language: wanìshi. She has been looking deep into what she called the heart of the shadow of AI.

With her father, she traces patterns of domination and dehumanisation back through the centuries, to the papal bulls of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the Doctrine of Discovery, which her father also calls the Doctrine of Domination. She asked how we came to be this way. Following it back, she finds a time when all of us lived in our natural ways of being, connected to the earth and to all that is.

“No matter what our lineages are, we are all related. All our relations.”

Shauna Blue Star Newcomb

She honoured Pachamama as our original ancestor, our great-grandmother, along with the trees (“I swear they sing to me”), the stones, and the elements. She spoke of little ones with open hearts, children and animals, and of dogs above all as ambassadors of love for this time. Spend time with them, she said, and the heart opens further.

Many prophecies speak of this time of great change, she said, of shaking and discomfort. The task is to have the courageous conversations, to look straight into the shadow, see what it mirrors, and heal it. She calls the way back “the reverence code”: remembering our natural ways, and our bond with the earth and each other. When we listen that deeply, messages come, in trees and rain and water, in songs and dreams.

“We have the ability to surpass even AI in our own agency. Each and every one of us are seeds for the healing and the transformation of this moment.”

Shauna Blue Star Newcomb

Josh Schrei did not want to launch into more concepts. “We’ve got plenty of concepts these days. Overflowing in concepts, overflowing in information, humanity is.” He looked around at the trees and the sun (“if you want to think positive, it’s not heat, it’s warmth”) and wondered aloud whether he really wanted to talk about AI in a place like this. He had not yet said hello to the land, so he did that first, in a way his friend Noel taught him in Ngunnawal country in Australia. Take a little of your own sweat, mix it with a little earth, breathe into it, and give it back. Now the water that passed through you mingles with the natural intelligence of the water in the ground.

He asked the circle to notice the small shift in the air when people pause, say thank you, and introduce themselves to the land. That shift, he said, is something information cannot touch. Somewhere nearby, he sensed, a water dragon has been holding the waters.

“As if what humanity needs right now is more information. We don’t need more information. We need moments of transmission, co-transmission, mutual transmission, gathering, thanking, honouring.”

Josh Schrei

The trees around the circle, he said, are elaborate intelligences. They reach their leaves to the sun and know how to hold and circulate that power. They send roots down to drink. May we learn to do the same: take in the breath of life, circulate it, root down, and pass it on so we feed each other. That is how the intelligence of the cosmos flows. He picked up Kurikindi’s joke about a jungle school for uncluttering ourselves from stress. “That’s the school I want to go to. Maybe we can find it together.”

The hard part is turning what we receive into good action in our lives. That cannot be found in information. It is found in the body, in relationship with each other, and with the wider, more than human family.

“It is embodied slowly. It arrives slowly. It arrives to those who slow down and listen and make space for it to move.”

Josh Schrei

Racing to get the information before another country does is not how power is truly worked with, he said. We come to know what loving each other means slowly, over time. Then he took his shoes off.

Phoebe warned against using the word “ancestral” too lightly. Not all ancestors were good, and not all ancestral wisdom is worth bringing forward. Yet one of the deepest wounds of Western culture, she said, is how cut off we are from our ancestors, and from knowing we are the fruit of a very long line.

So she made it real. She asked people to rest a hand on the back of the person in front, or on the earth, and to feel it as the hand of their ancestors: hundreds of generations of pain and hope, struggle and joy, all carried in our DNA. A name was invited to rise. Then people turned to a neighbour and told that ancestor’s story. The work, she said, holds both the gratitude and the reckoning, the guilt and the burden.

A few names were spoken into the circle. A grandmother remembered as a vessel of unconditional love. A father lost only weeks before, who had meant to be there that day. And a woman, the last of her line, honoured all who are clearing heavy ancestral burdens so that love can travel forward to future generations.

Phoebe then drew a line between intelligence and wisdom. Intelligence is processing power: how fast and strong we can do things. Wisdom asks whether we should.

“We have the intelligence to turn the Amazon into paper. But the wisdom to ask: should we do that? There is artificial intelligence, but there isn’t artificial wisdom.”

Phoebe Tickell

Why not? Because AI has no body. It does not age, suffer or die. It feels no guilt and no fear of a catastrophic mistake. That is the accountability Robbie spoke of. And it has no microbiome, no DNA, no ancestry, none of the deep interbeing with the earth that every living thing has.

She learned this work over years with Joanna Macy, who built it across five decades. Her work is moral imagination: the ability to imagine flourishing futures for all beings, grown from interdependence, accountability to future generations, and a sense of being part of a lineage. She noted that about a mile from Wasing is the site where the UK’s nuclear weapons are made. The exercise she was about to share was born in Joanna Macy’s work in the nuclear disarmament movement, facing a waste that will outlast countless generations. It is the same for AI, she said.

“The elephant in the room is not just AI. It’s corporate power. This is not just about technology. This is about power, and it’s about corporate capture and control that is built on a history of colonialism.”

Phoebe Tickell