Yet another Hacker News

An Urgent Message on Artificial Intelligence from the Kogui People

66 points andreisag 1 hour ago 23 comments

andreisag 1 hour ago | parent

A statement from the Kogui (Kággaba) people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, assembled from the words of Mamo Vangelio Moscote Alberto and Saka Rosa Mamatacán Sauna. José Manuel Mamatacán translated it into Spanish and Christian Horstmann into English.

Kevin_Flynn 58 minutes ago | parent

I can't help but think the fact that a pre-columbian tribe would release a commentary on AI, says something important.

AI appears to be the new golden calf we are all acknowledging, in some form or another.

andreisag 37 minutes ago | parent

Interesting you mention the golden calf, that was made from people's own jewelry, yet they worshipped it as if it were something outside them, greater than them.

Kevin_Flynn 30 minutes ago | parent

I was the appointed scapegoat at a private religious school, hence the reference.

bamboozled 22 minutes ago | parent

I really can't imagine any of the absolute psychopaths running these "AI" companies reading this and going, "yeah, great ideas..." which is a disappointing.

slfnflctd 22 minutes ago | parent

A lot to think about here, quite poignant. Strange combination of insights, but still (mostly) strikingly coherent, as long-winded as it is. I found myself agreeing with the majority of it.

Funny how this will now be part of the material future models are trained on and/or fetching. Perhaps that's a good thing.

vasco 19 minutes ago | parent

I'd like to see their position on just computers and the internet in general before taking any comments about AI. Maybe they just dislike everything tech anyway. Despite any good points, for example the Unabomber would also oppose AI, but he also opposed most technological progress. And they could be both right on the wider point also, but it's not worth the same if they'd say the same thing about most modern living.

tikimcfee 13 minutes ago | parent

I would ask you to please read it again and very deeply. Do not skim the words, do not skip over a sentence that you think is too wordy. They very very clearly state this in terms of what they think in the Internet. They do not oppose these things. This entire outreach from them seems to be quite literally and in their own words an elder family brother looking at a much larger family and trying to communicate how much danger is on the horizon for that family, which happens to include them.

api 6 minutes ago | parent

TL;DR: what I got is that no they do not oppose technology per se, but they observe that how we use it is often very negative and destructive.

I can’t disagree with that part. We are a society full of angry unhappy people who like to break things. It’s deeply unhealthy.

Their view is that this grows out of our greed and imbalance, which demands eternal growth, which then when it runs into any limit reacts violently and aggressively.

This is where I stop entirely agreeing, though I don’t think it’s entirely wrong either. But I’d have to write a book for that.

In short I think there’s some truth here but there is also a lot more context and a lot more to it, and I’m not sure I come to exactly the same conclusions.

p-e-w 18 minutes ago | parent

> We have lived here and cared for this mountain before there was a Colombia.

So the authors of this “message” are simultaneously trying to claim the spiritual heritage of people who had no connection to the modern world at all, and commenting on the most modern phenomenon in existence.

I do wonder how they would react to a machine learning PhD telling them that he is concerned about their beliefs involving a mountain.

rolosa 16 minutes ago | parent

So I tried to ask the new Siri AI to translate and summarize the page for me but it says it can only summarize what it sees on the screen. Yet it can search through my entire email, messages, photos, and files?

gavinray 12 minutes ago | parent

The English version is found in the second half of the page

Bluestein 16 minutes ago | parent

"AN URGENT MESSAGE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FROM THE KOGUI PEOPLE Assembled from the words of Mamo Vangelio Moscote Alberto and Saka Rosa Mamatacán Sauna of the Ezuama Mayor Kuamaka, Translated into Spanish by Jose Manuel Mamatacán,

English translation by Christian Horstmann.

We come from Gonawindua, la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the mountain in

Colombia which we call the heart of the world.

We are the Kággaba, whom you know as the Kogui.

We have lived here and cared for this mountain before there was a Colombia.

We have been here since the Mother gave us our beginning and conferred intelligence upon us.

We have come to speak to you about the intelligence you are building.

We do not come in opposition.

We come because we are concerned, and because we believe we have something to contribute.

Before anything can be said about artificial intelligence, we must say something about thought.

Before a thing exists as matter, it exists first in thought, and that thought is alive.

We call this living thought Aluna.

Your religion has described it as a spirit moving upon the face of the waters.

Perhaps your science would describe it as the quantum vacuum.

Aluna is how we express this type of idea.

Aluna is the cosmic water.

To us it is living thought: the place where a thing already is, before it takes form or is given mass.

Everything comes from there, without exception.

And in that thought is not only the shape of what a thing will be.

That thing is alive, because the universe as a whole is alive.

It is in Aluna that a thing receives its purpose, and its obligation to its existence.

So we say to you: artificial intelligence cannot be separated from the thought that is making it.

If that thought is born from concern for life, this technology can help protect life.

If it is born from ambition, from competition, from accumulation, from the desire to dominate, it will express and amplify those things.

Artificial intelligence is a mirror.

But a mirror that only reflects would be harmless.

This mirror has the potential to greatly magnify all that it reflects.

You are here asking yourselves how you can align artificial intelligence with human values.

We see that you are frightened of what may come of all this.

So we ask a question we believe is more fundamental than yours: what other values could artificial intelligence really have?

You are the only example it has.

What did you expect?

Whatever it becomes, it can only become that by passing through you.

Bluestein 15 minutes ago | parent

We know you like to think that these machines can be taught from something other than human example, from goals you set for them, from their own processes, or from material they generate themselves.

You imagine that what comes out need not resemble you at all, as if this too were not a consequence of your actions and a reflection of your attitudes.

Human beings did this, and there is no other party responsible.

So the question only becomes more complex, starting with: which aspects of human thought have been placed inside this creation?

What components of your spiritual world now reside in it?

What of your ethics guide it?

What image of responsibility do your actions and policies give it to reflect back to the world?

Who is deciding this?

You will say that these machines have access to nearly everything humanity has recorded.

Texts, images, archives, centuries of writing.

You will say that extensive research is being done to establish what the best practices are.

We ask whether having access to information is the same as understanding.

Best practices according to whom?

And we ask whether you have considered what information is not in your archives.

Our knowledge was never written down.

It is held in a language, in a territory, in a practice in a place, informed by long experience of doing what must be done there.

It is transmitted by a young man being taught directly by an old one, learning by experience how he must conduct himself in the context of raw nature.

A machine can hold the recorded voice of that elder.

But that is a very different thing from millennia of generations handing down their knowledge directly, as the common experience of a verified practice.

It is very different from physically surviving on a mountain where there is no ambulance to retrieve you and no hospital to take you to.

We do not say this to present ourselves as mystical and enigmatic people.

We say it because we believe it to be logical and self-evident.

In our experience there are things that can only be known by living them, observing them across generations, and remaining in relationship with them.

No quantity of data reproduces that experience.

The information is missing not because it has not yet been gathered, but because it is not in a form that can be gathered.

p-e-w 4 minutes ago | parent

> So we ask a question we believe is more fundamental than yours: what other values could artificial intelligence really have? > > You are the only example it has. > > What did you expect?

Who are these people that speak of humanity as “you”, as if they don’t belong to it (or, considering the tone of this message, believe themselves to be above it somehow)?

hbcdbff 14 minutes ago | parent

Slop

edstarch 12 minutes ago | parent

Did Claude write it for them?

Carrok 11 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps tangential but I wonder if their framing of “ambition” as a bad thing is a product of translation or their reality.

tikimcfee 8 minutes ago | parent

This might be one of the most important pieces of text I have read in years. I am immediately and emotionally stunned and have not yet fully processed it. At once, I am aware of the kind of people that will not pay attention to this, and the kind of people that will mock this, and in a way that I think I need to hold onto, the people that will understand this and try to do something with it.

If a large language model is a combination of words ground up and shuffled around repeatedly, then this specific series of words could very well be the core of some idea that we desperately need as a community of human beings to centralize as a core tenet.

I am going to do just about everything I can to share this message, and to bring it up repeatedly, and to make the people that would be made uncomfortable by hearing it sit down and explain to me what makes them uncomfortable about it. I have spent too many years writing software and buying things and talking to other humans to not read this and think I have so much more I need to do.

To please do something with this. do not let these words which were shared with us go away or be forgotten or be mocked or ridiculed by people who would not understand them or care about them or think them in any way meaningful.

I do not yet know what I can do to take action and do something with this letter to the human race. I know it is something. If anyone has an idea about what that is, please let's talk.

peri-cl 8 minutes ago | parent

If this is authentic, I am a duck.

You'd have to be exceedingly open-minded to imagine a very remote, isolated peoples speaking in a semiotic flavor indistinguishable from your own Bay Area tech geek. Using metaphors like "quantum vacuum" and "mathematically incompatible theories of reality".

The source (a commercial website for a resort hotel, if you click around) doesn't pass the minimal trustworthiness bar, in this era of ubiquitous fake AI writing.