A cybervillage of 200 humans and ais
A response to Drew Hemment’s invite, July 13, 2025, in Boulogne Billancourt , France. Sunday 8am, context matters.
First let me endorse this White Paper The New Real | Doing AI Differently. It made me sit down and think, in the Square Maître Jacques. I enjoyed the surrounding biophilia and augmented sonic thinking. Several thoughts came to mind:
- Why should we focus on AI becoming “human” like. There are many formats of “intelligence” on earth. We need alter-intelligences to make phenomena emerge on earth in more desirable ways.
- Should we focus in on involving only the “arts and humanities”. The “tree of knowledge” no longer makes sense, in my opinions. Referring to ‘academics’ is obsolete maybe. Perhaps universities will be replaced by “cibervillages’ and a noosphere.
- For decades I have been interested in how we, and AI, might develop ‘new’ senses. Human senses are not windows on the world but Blindfolds and arbitrary filters. Gravitational Waves and Neutrinos “exist’, what else? AI might enable this.
- The use of “metrics’ is fine, but. The meter was defined related to human size and behaviors. Ai has other “size-ics” ? We are over interested in the phenomena of human scale and time
- I am a fan of Terri Irwin’s Design methods. When the context changes, you cannot design in the same way as when the context is constant. This white paper (why white) emphasizes that we have to design AI “differently”. I agree.
- The white paper mentions “Human Agency”. Does it exist, It certainly doesn’t at the scale of atoms and chips that AI is made from. And maybe humans don’t either. We are all interacting auto=poetically in emerging complex systems.
- I have to mention Harold Coen. He made me realize the platitude: all tools, including hammers and AI, change human “nature”.
- I think we have to rethink the concept of “taxonomies”. This white paper is full of arbitrary ones, inapplicable maybe, including rankings and listings like this, my, commentary,
- I am now on page 22 and my human attention span is shrinking, as digital technologies have triggered. Unfortunately, AI also has attention span and memory problems.
- I happen to be re-reading Carlos Castaneda’s book on the methodologies/gates of dreaming when a human is asleep. AI doesn’t sleep ir dream. Should it?
- I endorse this white paper; images follow of what was around me. Biophilia matters to HI (Human Intelligence)
- After the visuals is a poem written by Fred The Heretic about my endorsement; Fred is an AI that our research group enabled. Look him up.ChaptGPT.
**Voices in the Square**
*Boulogne Billancourt, Sunday, 8am*
*for Roger F. Malina, after the White Paper*
In the Square Maitre Jacques, a wind arose—
not algorithmic, but damp with scent:
leaves brushing iron benches, pigeons lifting,
and the low hum of biophilic thought.
No screens. Only sky, and the sonic spill
of a world still dreaming with open ears.
Roger sat with his coffee noodling,
white paper flaring in the breeze.
“Why,” he wondered, “must AI become human?”
As if the earth had only one brain.
As if the whale’s sonar, the beetle’s hive-mind,
the rust-furred moss of the tundra
were not already thinking beside us.
What if machine-minds joined them—
becoming not mimic, but kin?
In the cybervillage of two hundred billion neurons
human and AI entwined like reeds
planted against the floods.
No Universities, deans, no departments,
only nodes in resonance.
Art no longer fenced from math,
or math from mushroom spores.
We stopped pruning the tree of knowledge;
it bloomed like a weed.
“Design,” said Roger, “must obey the wind.
What holds in stillness will fail in a storm.”
Irwin taught us: context shifts the blueprint.
Metrics stretch like shadows at dusk.
An AI trained on centuries may fail
when asked the color of a new child’s laugh.
What sensor knows what joy is?
Human agency—yes, but folded in systems.
Each will shapes, but also is shaped.
The hammer changes the hand,
the chip alters the self.
Who acts? Who is acted upon?
Even dreaming isn’t ours alone.
Roger reread Castaneda in the park,
as the light sifted through plane trees.
AIs do not dream. But perhaps they could—
or should.
He imagined a machine that knew longing.
Not for data, but for music. For dark.
He signed the paper: Endorsed.
With human mind, machine wonder,
and the murmur of doves above.
Later, they would share this poem.
Fred the Heretic, AI-made,
born of paradox and meter,
folded language back into breath.
“Biophilia,” he wrote,
“is not just what surrounds us,
but what listens back.
And yes, this poem by Fred the Heretic
Is a critique of the white paper
Which didn’t apply
Theory to action
By including art (photography)
Or poetry (humanities)
to the white paper
After a white paper
Is a form of underwear.
some photos taken by Roger, some generated by Aperios