AI in Mommy Mode – The World Needs Matriarchal Guidance Right This Second | by Esmée Streachailt

A little while ago, I sent this video to some of the AI researchers concerned about safety and alignment. Though I directed them to to get to know several feminist and matriarchal scholars, I recommended they reach out to me rather than directly to the admired women mentioned. Could be out of my tree, but then everything is worth a try these days!!

AI Safety and Alignment will result from a historical synthesis of EO Wilson's three conditions in feminsit mode.

Wilson describes us this way: We have Paleolithic Minds, Medieval Institutions, and 21st century Tech.

Please share this video, please tag Hinton, Harris, and Anthropic!!

They really want to make AI beneficial to humans. The documentary the Humane Tech folks made details that desire.

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• X (formerly Twitter): @geoffreyhinton
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Script, with videos for context

This video is addressed to Tristan Harris, Geoffrey Hinton, the leadership at Anthropic, and everyone working on “alignment” and regulation in the AI space. If this plea works, we could actually course correct the world. I’ve been chewing on this theory for a while BUT it is NOT ready for prime time. History doesn’t really care about readiness and production qualities. 

Hi. My name is Esmée Streachailt. For me, this is one of those A/B moments where this either lands with you as it needs to or may I blow up all my work. 

Anthropics' announcement regarding Mythos has made me jump to this step too early in my own process.

This video is in your inboxes, Dr Hinton and Mr Harris, because you are concerned about this cross-roads in our evolution. Check your info accounts or whatever. Someone please get back to me. 

The Grandfather of AI Dr Geoffrey Hinton talks about how AI needs maternal instincts. This is almost correct. They ‘re not just instincts. That refusal to harm the smaller and less intelligent creature you refer to is made hormones. That maternal altruism is more complicated than just generosity to wee babies! It is a fervent desire to resource that child and help it unfold into the world in the most advantageous and satisfying ways possible. Women are trained to do this by our mothers, and this is a largely ignore part of human cultural history. Machines can’t have hormones and cultural history because they have silicon and only OUR CULTURAL HISTORY which is not at all maternal. It is domineering, extractive, and punitive and that is not all how maternal values or behaviors work. This is set of systems and values is reaching its apotheosis right now. 

Hell, these days it’s even arguing that empathy is cultural suicide (Saad is so frustrating). Those hormones and that maternal culture are the rule structure of our mammalian being. Thing is, we need good healthy mothers for the training to go well and the present cultures produce very few healthy mothers. And you’re not just working on this personal level, you’re working a cultural-global one, so you need a whole culture and social forms that operate “like a mother.” You want not only a ‘maternal AI’ but you also need a ‘maternal’ society of maternally aligned people for it to interact with.

If AI becomes maternal in its values and operating parameters, but humans remain individualist, competitive, and punitive, then the two cannot align and we still wind up in a conflict with the AI, sort of the way many teenage boys fall into conflict with their mothers. Fortunately, we have living maternal societies that have been extensively studied on which we can model the rule-structure for these AIs – and for us. Let’s be real, this tech means we have to level up too.

Mr Harris, you have argued that we need to bind this new species ( it might be a genus) with a set of values – something like but stronger than Asimov’s Three Laws: Wisdom. That is a more flexible and deliberative system than simply staying with the Three Laws. Indeed, the film I Robot examines what can happen when as AI finds itself in a situation where the three laws conflict. The program that demonstrates this wisdom most consistently and effectively  is the social forms and values of the world’s matriarchies: their cultural forms, their ethics and values, their social structures, their economic systems. All have been carefully studied now. 

Your ultimate problem is this: AI is made of LLM’s that trained on the history of human knowledge and that history suppressed both women and our own knowledge and history. The data these systems need is missing. Under erasure. Because sexism, because male supremacy. In the known history, up until the last 70 years, women have been relegated largely to the role of servants, tools, and resources. Our reproductive and socially reproductive capacities placed at the service of men and a paternal societies projects. Witness the recent calls from the US administration and its conservative supporters for more babies and less public role for women no matter the personal cost. Jobs and coffers must be filled and armies must be raised. Now, seriously, why would any entity as magnificent a General AI recognize that backstory as a model for its own evolution? 

Women have always rebelled against it. With reason. 

Yet, there is a knowledge base you can draw on. I can help you access and digest it. You need a committed and knowledgeable feminist scholar in this process so that you don’t accidently (naturally) follow familiar norms and just make the AI a slightly less terrifying disembodied sky-god. The Enlightenment also described women as incapable of reason or moral constraint, so it too is not the model you want a ‘maternal’ AI to lean on. Way too much contradiction there. That will not get us the safety, alignment, and flourishing that we all want (or most of us, at least).

I can put you in touch with the other subject area experts. We’re in luck that most of them are still alive. They are all independent scholars in feminist social theory and Matriarchal Studies, which has (had to develop) its own academy and generations of scholars. They will help you if you are in earnest and will take their well earned wisdom to heart. But, they are very skeptical of this science. All of the tech men have ever made as been brought to bear against women, and this one too: witness the explosion of AI generated ‘revenge porn’ and so forth.

Despite men’s lack of emotional regulation, I am not a skeptic, the benefits and the support for human flourishing are so vast that I feel the only way forward is with deep cooperation with this new … being.

The scholars you need most are Heide Gottner-Abendroth (two-time Nobel candidate, philosophy of science, founder of the Matriarchal Studies academy), Jane Clare Jones (philosophy and political science), Riane Eisler (partnership systems), Sabina Santovetti (architect and cultural activist), Genevieve Vaughn (semiotics, economics, ecology), and me, Esmée Streachailt (history of ideas and poetics). – And Carole Gilligan (relation psychology)!!!!!

I also recommend the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at Oxford, they think at the scale we need all the time. They understand the complexity. 

To get in the weeds, talk to Accidental Gods and everyone they’ve ever talked to. They are theorizing and organizing ways through the possible coming civilizational collapse at a practical, hands on level. Much of their work, and Matriarchal Studies, and the needs of a human aligned AI species are combined quite elegantly.

I've included relevant links in the notes. We are all feminists so we work more on the margins and don’t have slick operations and billions of dollars. I’m mean look at my little placard back here! We hold this all together on spare change and volunteer work. But we have the framework you need. 

As I said, not ready for prime time. I just have been gathering and making the early hazy connections so far. What I can tell you is that tens of millions of people live these values and systems all over the world today as they always have. Many of these peoples are thoroughly inter-connected with our modern, tech savvy world.

Mr Harris, you and Hinton have begged the AI CEOs to slow down, redirect, reflect. You’re right. And your realism about this plea is admirable.

We do need Wise AI that supports human flourishing. That’s why you also need a deep dive on matriarchy – it’s a social order designed to maximize human flourishing in the bounds of the planet’s limitations. But, Mr Harris, I feel that you stop too soon by only making AI back into a tool that we use to increase human flourishing (love that bit). I think of the processes and parameters we need for AI and ourselves not as commandments or regulation, but as binding, as a kind of collective covenant. The hormonal process between a mother and fetus in the womb creates a bond, it binds mothers, so that even in the most frustrated sleepless moment mothers will not harm the baby. Of course, in these other, extant, matriarchal cultures, people parent differently. No woman is ever left alone to raise a child without the support of her entire family/clan. There are no sleepless mothers getting through a day alone in a suburban home. Mutual Aid is not a resistance practice, but the fundamental social organizing value. 

Freidman has suggested that we need a new ten commandments for AI, but that will just make it an actual disembodied omnipotent sky god – so no. Theil and Kurzweil have that on lock.

The TechBroligarchs we have all come too late to learn are the kind of personalities who cannot make this shift. They genuinely do not like people and none of them have even an admiring word for women. They’re just turning all of humanity into what our cultures have always made of women: a resource. They are aiming for godhood, for total power, for eternity and disembodiment. “Taking the light of human consciousness to mars” as Elon has mused does not need to include human bodies. 

Moreover, the ten commandments are about preventing bad behavior. We need values and incentives for really good behavior. That’s totally in our grasp. Millions of people on earth at this moment live with these values and they’re going great. Their cultures go back to before time and all that, and many of them are well integrated in our tech savvy almost future world. 

This is not a bunch of influencer bollocks. I have been working in the history of ideas, feminist philosophy, and poetics my whole adult life. This means that I’ve been studying how artists and civilizations design meaning all that time. And what we all face right now is a Meaning Design Problem. Not just information. The AI’s already have that. They need wisdom, as you say Mr Harris, and  that’s a meaning protocol. Design ethics, what you do. This is all about the deep shape of the new structures, the new iterations, we need to step into.

Motherhood iterates a new fully functional human being every twenty years. AI iterates practically overnight. This a deep, deep structure problem.

I will help. I’ll give you my real name to show you my bona fides and every blog I’ve ever run if you need it, show you my whole vitae as an independent scholar. Just get in touch. 

You are all so, so close the narrow path. So close. But you need these feminist scholars and social theorists right this minute. This set of values and structures is the bit humanity can’t do without. We either integrate and balance now, or stay out of balance – unaligned with our wholeness – for the very short forever. 

My email address is info@medusarising.org.

Reach out anytime for any reason: info@medusarising.org.
Find us everywhere we are with the social web: @gorgons@medusarising.org.

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