What Color Is the Soul of Your Superorganism?
Author: George Pór Issue: 2023-10-04
What Color Is the Soul of Your Superorganism?
Notes for a Metamodern Sociology of AI
by George Pór
No wonder I’ve never finished any of the books I started writing. By the time I completed the book outline and the first couple of chapters, the focus of my conversation with the field kept advancing, and so did my attention zooming in on it. Since I got my first computer (an Apple II with a 300-baud modem) in 1982, the “field” has always been the social-technical phenomena that I perceived as floating to the top of evolutionary developments.
While I kept climbing to a higher vantage point to look at the field, both the seen and the seer transfigured. From time to time, an intense sense of FOMO (fear of missing out on something) kicked in, tempered only by my talent in knowledge networking and keeping company with people and groups in the know of the field.
Those groups were not only observers but frequently also active shapers of the field. I started pondering, when did all this begin? Humans and tech have been living in a state of symbiosis since the Stone Age, when we began shaping our tools, and the tools started shaping us. Of course, symbiosis is not a human invention. For example, I enjoy watching the Turkeytail mushroom feeding on the dead log we use to mark the edge of the gravel path in our garden.
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
What happens between our social and technological systems seems more than symbiosis. Together, we are creating something new. Donna Haraway, a prominent scholar of cyborg (and a socialist ecofeminist), introduced the Greek word sympoiesis, which means making-with.
Sympoiesis would be the proper term for co-creating the entity emerging from the hybrid intelligence of networked human and AI agents. But the sympoiesis of human and tech systems began way before the current revolution of generative AI. While the beginning of emergence in natural systems is hardly perceptible, the tech-human sympoiesis can be linked to a specific date, 1-Jan-1983.
On that day, the TCP/IP protocol was switched on to allow different kinds of computers on various networks to communicate with each other. On that day, the Internet was born, and with it, the network of global conversations, free from time and space constraints.
Fast forward two decades. For the AI-enabled new entity growing from the cross-pollination of human and artificial intelligence, different people use different names: symbiont, metabeing, superintelligence, post-human, holobiont, superorganism, and many others.
They don’t all refer to the same; their connotations are linked with the perspectives from which people who coined them are looking at the world. The name will only find and stick with this baby when it learns to speak for itself.
For now, I’m talking about that newborn as a special kind of “superorganism” resulting from the AI-enabled blending of the social and technical. Its possible developmental paths are foreshadowed in the different dreams of techno-utopians, nightmares of techno-doomsters, and the sincere-ironically smiling protopian future of metamodernists.
Can there be a totalizing, all-encompassing planetary superorganism? Yes, if we apply the term only to its underlying technology stack, separated from its value-laden social component. Otherwise, there will be not one superorganism but different ones corresponding to humanity’s developmental stages.
When some developmental psychologists ran a sentence completion test through ChatGPT, it turned out that the Large Language Model (LLM) on which it was trained sits in the Orange value system in Spiral Dynamics parlance.
Orange is characterized by materialistic, result-driven core values and worldview, in which the world is full of chances and opportunities and can be fully understood using rational thinking. Its unhealthy manifestations include exploitation of the living environment, being too functional, and losing sight of the human aspect.
We can see some backlash against the Orange AI in the language, if not in the substance, of various academic and other initiatives for a “human-centric AI.” That moniker means, most of the time, simply increasing the algorithm's effectiveness and efficiency thanks to human feedback.
On the far horizon, some experiments represent a Green AI alternative to the presently dominant Orange AI. The central themes of Spiral Dynamics’ Green are welfare, love, finding meaning in life, personal growth, and living in harmony with others and the Earth.
There are not yet Yellow, Turquoise, or Metamodern AI projects, but technically, it wouldn’t be challenging to train LLMs on the significant volume of Integral and Metamodern literature, videos, and podcasts.
The next installment of this series will explore the colors of the Superorganism’s soul in more depth.
Related:
- George Pór (author)
- 2023 (year)
- Topics: AI and Technology, Tools and Platforms, Metamodern and Integral Approaches