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Michael, I am excited to hear the conversational magic you will bring to this project. I especially look forward to hearing about the parenting aspect around helping guide and prepare kids for a foreign future.

The thing I wonder a lot about AI is how to help these tools understand that online life is such a strange and skewed facet of human experience. Most people are no where near as quick to anger, disrespectful, one sided, and sexually forward in real life as they are online. Maybe as we become more chronically online as a culture this will shift but I feel like the representation of the common human is off kilter.

Anyway man, I am looking forward to hearing you parse through these topics.

With love,

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Sep 7·edited Sep 7Liked by Michael Garfield

Michael wrote on X, "The more people energize worst-case outcomes [around generative LLMs], the more we guarantee them... Silicon Valley... needs spiritual guidance if we are to live the promise of these tools."

I replied: Where will that guidance come from? Not from gurus & pundits. ⤵️

I don't want to convert the professional doomers who made a career of prophesying about the AIpocalipsis. Nor the media that increase their ad revenues by selling g eyeballs glued to doomscrolling on nightmarish AI predictions. The alternative narrative will prevail when ⤵️

we stop talking about it and start embodying it by communities of AI shaman practice prototyping MVPs in which wisdom-guided AI is measurably contributing to the development and well-being of people, organizations, and communities.

Where to start? 1. Become an AI whisperer ⤵️

2. Train yourself to become an AI shaman. On the journey, you may be facing the pain of confusion, setbacks, and the illusion that you can do it by yourself. When you're ready, look for your tribe. This Fall, I will launch the first Community of AI Shaman Practice.

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Sep 7·edited Sep 7Liked by Michael Garfield

AI shamans are those AI whisperers who use their craft for healing the community when it is off balance and restricting the flow of life energies. AI shamans are using their talents and competences for addressing societal ills. Like in the case of AI whisperers, those competences are co-evolving with the emergent and mostly unpredictable properties of generative AI.

My action research is addressing the challenges of “the Prompt engineer ==> AI whisperer ==> AI shaman” learning path and how people are meeting them.

For the curious-minded:

https://www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2023/2/19/ai-whisperer-george-por

https://medium.com/collective-sentience/ai-attending-human-attending-ai-e13b547ba9b2

https://technoshaman.medium.com/from-van-goghs-bedroom-to-ai-whisperers-with-love-e1ec98a1c14b

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Sep 7·edited Sep 7Liked by Michael Garfield

Michael, would you say more about HOW you're learning how everything and everyone you know all fits into a bigger pattern?

Letting that pattern emerge sounds like a pinnacle of wisdom and coherence and you're surely not alone to strive for it.

Could it help your learning process if you figured out how i would fit into that bigger pattern? :-)

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Sep 7·edited Sep 7Liked by Michael Garfield

Michael, heartfelt congratulations to your new turn in the spiraling up to your permamently work-in-progress opus and your courage to put in the public sphere a numbered list of perspectives that are guiding your work... for now!

I admire your ambition of "building a repository of perspectives on technology and wisdom". How can that repo contain more than YOUR perspectives on technology and wisdom? Is that question relevant to your aspiration?

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This is all about more than my perspectives...it's just framed in a way that gives that inquiry some shape and limit, so that it doesn't spin wildly out of control and become an "about whatever" series like Future Fossils. Should new stable angles emerge I'll gladly embrace them but these six don't currently seem to preclude anything truly important to the scope of restoring initiatic traditions and mentorship and communal oversight...

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I am really happy for you to be on this roll.. your enthusiasm and delight waft from your words like an aroma for my synesthetic I's.

I am at zero point (not the cool kind) with money flow - I wish I could support with a subscription - until then, wishing you all the best with this if thoughts truly count!

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Thanks, man! Keep flowing...

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