Words Make Worlds

A few weeks ago on her substack “How Not to Use AI,” Abi Awomosu published a massive, fantastic piece,“Don’t Start with Silicon, Start with Soul.”

It’s worth the time to read—she starts with the recent turn in Silicon Valley towards hiring philosophers, interrogating the practice as superficial and extractive, before moving into a larger reflection on intelligence, wholeness, and empire. How the story we are told about how to use this new technology is one of accelerating the project of empire, but if we look closer we find that LLMs have blurred the clean categorical lines of what counts as “real” knowledge, making them more akin to a medium than a maker.

My favorite move she makes is to create new meaning from the acronym LLM: she calls them Large Listening Models. Naturally, I love this. This frame illuminates the reflective pattern-matching nature of these systems, such that what we bring when we sit down at the keyboard to interact with them, the exact ways we have automated our own thinking and living, is deftly reflected back to us.

And if we aren’t aware of how we have been shaped, the ways in which our wants, desires, and orientation towards life have been coopted by systems of extraction, then we may just find ourselves using these machines to get infinitely faster in the wrong direction.

AI enters that world as a fork. It can help you run the inherited script faster – better emails, better calendar, better CV, better optimisation of a life you did not choose. Or it can help you see the script. It can dissolve the categories the institution was built to defend, so that a person can move from philosophy to physics to poetry to ancestry to code to theology to grief in a single sitting – the archive turned back into a commons, the walls between the rooms suddenly optional.

There is so much more in this piece than what I am sharing here—go read it!

Over at Commoncog, Cedric Chin has a wonderful piece about what to pay attention to when it comes to AI. His thinking centers around the idea of sensemaking, which he defines as the art of knowing what to ignore—a phrase that melted a knot in my stomach I hardly realized was there.

I’m not someone who needs to stay up-to-date on every new method and technique (many of which become obsolete in a matter of weeks), but I do find it challenging to consistently ground my assessments of what is happening and how that is impacting leadership and organizational life given the absolute deluge of articles, videos, hot-takes, and deep-dives flooding the information environment. Which makes the first step of Cedric’s methodology so useful: “ignore all opinions, analysis, predictions, fanciful essays ‘from the future’, ‘situational awareness updates’ and scenario forecasts about AI.” Done and done.

We need people who think clearly and rigorously about the belief that LLMs are conscious. People like Ted Chiang, whose recent piece in the Atlantic offers a grounded and clear refutation of what Silicon Valley claims is maybe, possibly, potentially, the emergence of consciousness in their products. This, of course, has major implications for how we think about the role of LLMs and whatever comes after, in our lives and in our organizations.

What I’m saying is that whatever protections our hypothetical conscious software would deserve if it were real, granting it those protections would be anything but easy. The abolition of chattel slavery involved enormous societal upheaval, and eliminating cruelty to animals will require rebuilding our entire food industry. Anthropic would have us believe that it is inventing a new category of being whose needs for protection require essentially no divergence from how a software company would treat an ordinary chatbot that lacks conscious experience. That’s so convenient that it’s simply not plausible.

A quick heads up—I recently published a new resource, “Moments of Deep Rest”, an introduction to Yoga Nidra, along with an audio-only guided practice that you can use at any time.

Over at The Beautiful Mess, John Cutler writes about the desire to help as both an attunement to what needs attention, as well as a source of pain and overwhelm. He breaks the impulse to help into four distinct impulses connected to personal identity, and links them to personal and relational power. It’s a great read with a lot of nuance, but it preserves the illusion that helping is a useful approach to begin with.

In Leader as Coach, one of the early assignments I give to people is to stop helping. When folks hear this, they balk. What? How could that even be a thing? I share with them Rachel Remen’s piece, “Helping, Fixing, or Serving?” that exquisitely illuminates the power imbalance hidden within the posture of helping.

She writes, “Helping is not a relationship between equals. A helper may see others as weaker than they are, needier than they are, and people often feel this inequality. The danger in helping is that we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity or even wholeness.”

What to do instead? Serve. Trade mastery for mystery and sink into the power of our shared humanity.