In watching the current obsession with AI, I felt that it’s time to finally share my thoughts about using AI from a Permaculture perspective.

Spoiler: I don’t like it. So why post a video at all? Does it really matter if you use AI or not? What does it have to do with Permaculture?

From Techno-Optimist into… well, I believe in trees.

People who met me in the past few years may be surprised to know that I was once very into technology. I was a computer nerd and coded my first game somewhere around 3rd grade.

When I started waking up to the ways we were wrecking our environment and harming each other, I was a big believer that green technology could get us to a better world.

I imagined a world where everything was powered by solar and wind. I believed the claims that automation technology would be used to give us all a 20-hour work week while renewable energy would remove the need for any fossil fuels. I thought we’d be entering a world of shared material abundance coupled with care for the planet.

As an activist in my early twenties, I fought pretty hard for that world. Along with renewable energy, I studied machine learning, promoted open source, and even coded a rudimentary AI to use as a game engine. I programmed microcontrollers that I thought could make useful gardening hardware. I supported apps that helped us barter or freecycle things we needed instead of buying more. I was a part of that early 2000s techno-optimism where we hadn’t yet seen the damage social media and smartphones could do.

Now, as a Permaculture teacher in my forties and writing from the 2020s, I see things very differently.

You can watch the video to understand more of why I don’t think AI has a place in Permaculture, and if you want to learn more, I’m including some writing about AI below.

Permaculture Values Long-Term Health Over Short-Term Convenience

AI can get us some places faster, but so can using Roundup. We trade short-term convenience and predictable yields for long-term systems health.

Permaculture is not about fast solutions. It has ethics and care for people at its heart. It is a philosophy as much as a design system. I don’t expect my clients to share the philosophy, but it is my responsibility to live it how I can as long as I’m claiming to practice permaculture.

Permaculture is About Relationships. AI is About Replacing Them With a Machine.

We are in a time where most humans are lonelier than ever. Ultimately, AI is about replacing human relationships and roles with a machine owned by one of a few giant corporations.

Permaculture is and has always been about relationships.

Rather than hiding behind a machine, we face the weedy, muddy, and gloriously beautiful reality of the fact that everything around us is alive. We face the awkwardness of asking the neighbor for help. We pay people in our town to help us do things we can’t, and by doing so, we support their family so that maybe one day, they support ours.

We don’t outsource the discomfort of being to a chatbot. We don’t insist on knowing everything immediately. We live the uncertainty, the social awkwardness, the messiness of relationships, and through them, the gifts of life flow.

Permaculture Has Ethics

One of the first and most core permaculture principles we learn is to Make No Waste. LLMs are an incredibly wasteful design.  They give answers through a brute force method of prediction via overmassive sets of stolen data.  

It’s been said correctly that there are more elegant, better-coded models for AI out there. People have been working on them for decades. Machine learning and neural networks are old disciplines by now. The ascendancy of LLMs is not because of their superiority as a model. They exist because a few wealthy people were able to convince people to fund resource usage at such a scale that the model didn’t need to be smart – it only needed to be huge. LLMs work by throwing absolutely everything at anything.

In order to give you a trite (often confidently wrong) answer about a topic, AI requires super-massive data sets, endless server farms, mining, and energy and water use at a scale we’ve never seen before. You could use AI – or, you could just, you know, go ask someone or read a book.

I am also not OK on an ethical level with how AI is trained on the non-consensual theft of others’ creativity, nor with the rapid book destruction AI companies are now doing where they buy and permanently destroy books after training models on them.  

Destroying books in order to make knowledge exclusively accessible through a few gigantic corporations is one of the most wasteful and dystopian scenarios I can imagine. That’s what exists behind the sycophantic voice of the AI chat bots.

Google’s Bait-and-Switch

Another unethical bait-and-switch behind the LLMs comes from search engines like Google. For the previous three decades, Google told small business owners that in order to be seen at the top of the search engine, they needed to generate as much free content as possible. The search engines would crawl this content and decide which sites to show. It was similar for the many writers, artists, and other people who were told they could make ad revenue off of their websites by writing a bunch of free things and then putting Google’s ads on the websites.

Countless millions of words were written with the understanding that writing them online and sharing them freely would support the livelihoods of the people writing them. Now, that writing has all been sucked up into the LLMs. You don’t even know whose writing it is that has been eaten to make your answer or whose art it is that has been chopped up and extracted to produce the social media slop you’re wading through.

LLMs exist on a foundation of an unprecedented theft of human creativity. Your labor has been turned into a mega corporation’s profit without recompense, acknowledgement, or consent.

Humans Need to Be Needed. AI Makes Us More Alone.

The only crisis we’re facing greater than the climate crisis is the social crisis of our collective loneliness and isolation.  

When people turn to AI – instead of other people – to meet their needs, then there are that many more people who feel unneeded.   I can ask AI about the local climate, but if I ask a local farmer, I am also helping that farmer feel needed and potentially making a friend.  

It is a frightening world for me where people rely on one of a few giant corporations to answer their questions and meet their social needs.  The outcome is an even lonelier world, where people feel even more unneeded.  

There is good research showing that one of the greatest predictors of health and longevity is how many ways people feel needed in others’ lives.  I feel sorrow to know how AI is making so many people feel redundant and without a way to contribute.  I want a world where we ask each other and not a data center to help.  

One more little thing called Soul…

Soul is personal. I won’t tell you how to think about soul.

But whether not you believe in something like an individual soul, or the land having a soul or plants having a soul, chances are you can feel whether or not something feels soulful.

To most people, a golf course, a warehouse, a chain store feels a little absent of soul. Food can have soul or it can be industrial. A song can have soul or it can be mechanical and dead. A monocrop farm feels absent of soul. That’s why few birds or insects or people want to be there.

For me, what’s created by AI lacks soul. Some of us notice this more than others, but everyone can learn to perceive it.

If there is one unifying quality of any place that has been lovingly tended in harmony with nature, it is a feeling of soul. You want to be there. You don’t want to leave. The conversations that happen there are deeper, slower, supported. Children want to be there. Healing happens there.

You can achieve the most technically perfect permaculture design, and it can be completely devoid of soul. And if you do that, I don’t think it will last. You may be able to keep it going with a lot of work, but it will always be lacking the quality that helps it come fully alive.

Bringing AI into anything important is a recipe for creating something soulless. Engaging with AI is a recipe for forgetting our own quality of soul. AI music, AI poetry, AI landscape designs may be impressive, and they will never have soul. And in the end, soul is what I think the human heart needs the most.

Resources

Feel free to copy and use this logo:

AI’s Ecological Impact

• Environmental impact of AI data centers – PBS – and another from MIT
• Wikipedia’s article on it

AI’s financial ridiculousness and why it may destroy the economy

• Why AI is likely the biggest financial bubble we’ve ever had (technical reading) – Ed Zitron

Why AI isn’t really giving us the productivity increase we might think it is

• How AI coding tools actually make users less productive (even as they think they’re working better)
• 95% percent of companies investing in AI are not actually making money from doing so