Natural Intelligence
Natural Intelligence
How Natural Intelligence, not Artificial Intelligence, will help us build a flourishing future
With all the hype and talk about Artificial Intelligence, I can’t stop imagining what would happen if we invested as much attention, time, and money into Natural Intelligence?!
With Natural Intelligence, I don’t really mean advancing human intellect and smartness or kids with Einstein-level IQs or so. What I mean by Natural Intelligence is an intelligence that arises out of the nurturing of nature. And actually, maybe ‘intelligence’ is the wrong word here. What I really mean is Natural Beauty or Natural Consciousness – basically, an evolved state of being that originates from a flourishing nature, from life flourishing.
I know this sounds a bit fuzzy. So let’s make it clearer by looking at a few elements of this Natural Intelligence – for lack of a better word. And I promise you that by the end of it, you’ll be much more hyped about Natural Intelligence than about Artificial Intelligence. 😉 So here we go:
Stewardship
When we – and with “we”, I mostly mean the environmental movement – think about the wilderness or nature before humans started destroying it, we often picture a very romantic and peaceful image of nature. I hate to break it to you, but nature isn’t always so romantic and peaceful. There are things in nature that are pure evil, or at least morally ambigious. Just one example: Young baboon males who immigrate into another baboon group will sometimes kill infants and attack pregnant females and, in doing so, kill their fetuses, all only to gain social status in that group. Very brutal!
On top of that, an image of nature without human influence is also quite false. It’s an image that only makes sense in a worldview where we see humans as separate from nature. In a worldview where we are inextricably entangled with nature, there is no nature without human influence – good or bad.
“Traditional indigenous territories encompass up to 22 percent of the world’s land surface and they coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity”
Source
Rewilding, a term I have used a lot in my recent articles, doesn’t really mean ridding nature of human influence but reducing it while restoring natural processes and biodiversity. A better way to think about it, in my opinion, is that we, as humans, are using our unique skills as a species – e.g. being able to collaborate in large numbers, to apprehend certain things that other animals might not be able to do, or, even more importantly, to contemplate the future – to become stewards or guardians of nature. Practically, this means deeply exploring and understanding ecosystems and ecological processes – or life-giving systems – and making sure that things are in balance with the goal of keeping biodiversity and life flourishing.
Essentially, stewardship of natural ecosystems is a sort of Natural Intelligence equivalent to Machine or Deep Learning in which we humans become the algorithm that analyzes the data from all the various neural networks – i.e. ecosystem participants and processes – in order to recognize patterns, make predictions and adapt strategies based on feedback from nature. All with the aim to nurture the overall health and biodiversity of the natural ecosystem.
“Our species is misnamed. Though sapiens defines human beings as "wise," what humans do especially well is to prospect the future. We are Homo prospectus.”
Homo Prospectus by Martin Seligman et al.
Bioproductivity
Are humans productive? How are we productive? When we think of productivity today, we mostly think of it within the framing of ourselves, society, time, and the economy. What happens when we include nature or our environment in this framing? How can I be productive not only in terms of time efficiency, societal value, or economic value? How can I be productive to nature?
Despite a few activities, humans aren’t really bioproductive. Granted, at first, we seem to be quite productive when it comes to providing value to ourselves – which, however, also becomes debatable when taking a long view (*cough* climate breakdown…) or different progress perspective – but do we actually provide value to other animals, plants, mushrooms, etc. on this planet?
Once you see humans as just one part of an ecological family that, as a whole, constitutes what we call “nature,” we humans suddenly become quite lonely, alienated, and separated, given that we mostly take care and provide for ourselves.
“The rest of the world is “producing” stuff — goods — too. Unlike us, though, they are producing goods for everyone, not just us.
Everyone as in “all of life,” not just “us humans.” Think about the fish. They clean the rivers — from which everything drinks. Or think about the trees — they are happily producing air, which everything breathes. The soil is helping produce plants and other organisms, which are eaten by all kinds of life. The worms clean the soil, which benefits much, much more than just the worms.
The rain falls, not for the sake of the rain.”
Umair Haque
In “nature” or, more precisely, non-human ecosystems, there are lots of processes that are bioproductive and useful for other species and ecosystems. Many other members of our biosphere are actually bioproductive simply with their existence and their typical day-to-day activities. How could we humans become more bioproductive? How could all the stuff we produce and how we produce it be productive to nature as well? How could our very existence become (almost) entirely bioproductive?
So far, the only relatively major movement or production framework aligned with bioproductivity is regenerative agriculture, which aims to enrich and protect the soil and biodiversity.
What’s the AI equivalent to bioproductivity? This one is a bit tricky, but maybe it’s as simple as equating it to good or useful data, in terms of producing goods/data that can be used by other (eco-)systems in a beneficial way. So let’s produce more useful data for all these various natural “algorithms” out there! 😉
Biomimicry
Biomimicry is all about learning from time-tested processes, structures, and designs found in nature and then applying them in other (human) domains. For example, mimicking the design of otter fur to create wetsuits, making LEDs more efficient through inspiration from fireflies’ lantern microstructures, or, as shown above, using the kingfisher’s beak design to make trains more aerodynamic and quiet.
Biomimicry is basically the Generative AI version of Natural Intelligence – General NI, so to speak. There is this input of massive datasets of patterns and strategies found in various diverse ecosystems, which nature or we humans then turn into new designs, new language, new output.
The bigger, dizzying story here, though, is that one could also argue that Artificial Intelligence as a whole is a sort of biomimicry. We learn how natural intelligence works and try to build an artificial system that mimics that and bam: we’ve got AI. In my opinion, this only makes sense to some extent.
As I’ve outlined before already, our idea of “intelligence” – especially in relation to human intelligence and AI – is quite limited. Therefore, AI lacks the ethos that biomimicry innovations have. Actually, AI does not really mimic some sort of natural or human intelligence; its goal is to transcend human intelligence, to be artificial. So, while AI might be bio-inspired, it’s not biomimicry.
In line with those words by the Biomimicry Institute, it’s important to note that there is a huge difference between viewing biomimicry as a separate domain and viewing it in relation to a more holistic definition of Natural Intelligence and the various elements within that which I’ve outlined here.
Mutualism
This is the last element of my concept of Natural Intelligence and it’s all about designing mutually beneficial processes between us humans and other members of the biosphere. It’s interspecies collaborations that achieve shared goals more effectively than each species could individually.
Cooperative AI might be the AI-related equivalent here. This subfield seeks to build systems that enhance human-machine cooperation or human cooperation in general, mediated by AI, going back to ideas of an eventual symbiosis between humans and machines. However, Cooperative AI, similar to interspecies mutualism, hasn’t really gotten too much attention yet (at least compared to other AI fields).
When it comes to “natural” Mutualism, one super interesting and clear example comes from the Yao tribe in Mozambique:
“The mutualism between oxpecker – a kind of bird and the rhinoceros/zebra, bees and flowers, spider crab and algae, leaf-cutter ants and fungi are some examples. But it is very rare to see such an adaptive collaboration between human-beings and animals.
A research study published in the journal Science, gives concrete evidence of the existence of cooperation between the bird species, greater honeyguide and the Yao tribe in Mozambique. The honeyguides (Indicator Indicator) recognize and responds to the specific sound signals from honey-hunters by flitting from tree to tree and guiding the hunters to the tree with bee-hive. Hunters take the honey, while the honeyguides relish on the bee-wax.”
Source
Other such examples include the human-dolphin hunting cooperation in Brazil:
“A 15-year study of the practice by an international team from Brazil and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, has revealed the behaviors of fishers and dolphins with unprecedented detail. By combining drones with underwater imaging, they found that dolphins and net-casting fishers synchronize their behavior, which leads to both catching more fish.
Source
Unfortunately, although these mutualistic practices used to be more widespread, there aren’t many more truly mutualistic practices or systems between humans and nature out there today – and those that do still exist face extinction. However, these two examples offer us a glimpse of what can be possible when humans build truly symbiotic systems with nature. When humans and certain species or ecological systems are fully in sync and acting truly together, imagine the amazing and enriching possibilities!
In my report Alternative Prosperity: Reframing the ‘Good Life’ I ask a few thought-provoking conversation or inspiration starters regarding Mutualism. One of these questions focuses on the aspect of time: How could an understanding of mutualism change our relationship with time, considering both the rhythms of nature and the pace of human life? An important prerequisite to establishing mutualistic relationships with nature, therefore, might be to re-adjust our rhythms to those of nature (or specific ecosystems or animals within nature). Because only when we are in sync, can we also build deep relationships with it and act truly together with nature.
Nurturing Life vs. Transcending Life
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or when AI can basically do everything that we humans can do, is the next goal of today’s AI proponents and developers. One step even further to that would be the idea of Superintelligence, or when AI far outstrips human intelligence. Ray Kurzweil famously thinks this might happen around the year 2045. The obvious objective here is to maximize and exceed human intelligence and, to some extent, transcend nature which is seen as an annoying limitation – in essence, the philosophy of Transhumanism.
What would be the equivalent when it comes to Natural Intelligence, i.e. Natural General Intelligence or Natural Superintelligence? I’m not sure, but I think it’s less about developing something new and transcending certain limits and much more about embracing limitations (or endings, cycles) and nurturing a new way of being, a new way of attending to the world that sees it in its full beauty.
The essential perspective shift or reframing at the bottom of all of this is to include nature (or other non-human ecosystems) within the framing, whether it’s the framing of democracy, economy, community, or intelligence.
This and the aforementioned elements form the basis of a future that is defined not by an ever-evolving, nature-destroying, and -transcending technosphere but by an ever-evolving, nature-embracing, life- and beauty-generating biosphere.
How amazing and rich could the future be if we became stewards of nature, produced goods that nourished nature, learned from nature to create regenerative designs, and cooperated with nature to build mutually beneficial systems?
“Life runs on sunlight. Life rewards cooperation. Life builds from the bottom up. Life banks on diversity. Life recycles everything. Life builds resilience through diversity, decentralization, and redundancy. Life optimizes rather than maximizes. Life selects for the good of the whole system. In short, life creates the conditions conducive to life.”
Janine Benyus, Co-Founder Biomimicry Institute
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See you on Wednesday for the usual Rabbit Holes issue!