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.
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.
Does them being pre-columbian really add any value or validation to their opinions?
Like in the grand scheme of things?
There are lots of societies that have existed in their same location for much longer. But no one is out here getting quotes from the "Elder Brothers" in Jericho.
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.
I completely agree. And this may be the first time I'm interacting with a piece of a post on hacker news in this manner. If I had any form of social interaction credit and knew how to get people to read things and take them seriously, this would be the thing I would spend all of it on. The only way those kinds of people that you and I are talking about here would do anything is if they were permanently and instantly surrounded by people that say, "fucking pay attention to this"
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.
I had a very similar thought. In fact, the fact that this is in Spanish, and also translated to English, gave me a sort of Rosetta stone feeling. Somewhere between the two expressions is some kernel of truth that I am for some reason completely fascinated by today.
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.
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.
This is a treatise on the nature of humanity, and whether or not you care about the way in which they're describing the nature of the planet and the cosmos, you clearly have done none of the labor of piecing apart someone's perspective on the nature of humanity that is very clearly evident in this writing.
Who is this person who considers himself an “elder family brother” to humanity as a whole? Imagine a technologist speaking in such terms; they’d get publicly crucified.
While I grant you that the authors don’t appear to express generic luddite sentiments, nothing in this letter suggests that their understanding of AI extends even a millimeter below the surface.
Don't focus on what upset you. Don't focus on your internal desire, maybe, to say that you require an authority. Read the words specifically on how humanity treats itself and its surrounding environment, and I guarantee you, you will see connections to just about every area of science and sociology and anything between, and you absolutely should. That is the point of this letter, and it is a subtle one, and it is an uncomfortable one for a lot of people, but it is a very valid point.
And I would absolutely disagree with you, by the way, because this is not so much a simple letter about "AI", but the fundamental way that it is being built and constructed and used by a massive part of this world. And, I would continue to disagree that they don't have anything that extends, as you said, below the surface. The way they describe the technology is actually much, much more factual and humanistically relevant than many people I've talked to that literally build these models. Just because you were able to glue things together and compute numbers, does not mean you understand the outcome of what you are doing. That is almost literally something that is said in this letter, and I really suggest you please try to read it again and understand where it is saying that, because I think there's a lot more you will be able to internally glean if you let the words about what it is saying about humans enter your brain.
... which, does not - does it not? - preclude them having profound understanding of things -other- than AI, which might be nonetheless, deeply needed for those developing it. And, us all, I'd posit.-
Speaking to those trying to build the Artificial surrogate, I firmly believe they understand, experience and live by the natural one, and have done so for a long time.-
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.
> 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 rituals involving a mountain.
Heritage happens in the past. Modern phenomenon happen in the present. There is no reason someone could not have an ancient heritage and familiarity with modern phenomenon.
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?
Do yourself a favor and just read it. Please, please, for the sake of some other random human being on the planet asking you directly, just read the entire thing. Do not have it summarize anything for you, and walk into it, knowing that you are likely to not expect what it is saying, and that it very well may be contrary to a lot of the things that you already think ahead of time. Just read it. Please.
I started reading it and did myself a favor by stopping. It seems more like some stream of consciousness blathering rather than something I devote my time to.
I find the irony of this comment overwhelming. I suspect one day we will be asking AI to summarize the smell of the forest, and the beauty of a wildflower meadow, because ain't nobody got time for that.
"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.
I think the point is having ambition but no purpose beyond the ambition itself. Money is the obvious example. Somebody wants to make lots of money. Okay, but why? The why there is what really matters, yet many never answer that. And so you end up in this sort of system where you have people chasing ever more zeroes on their bank account and not only doing nothing of much value with it, but actively causing chaos and destruction to achieve it. And why? There is no why - the money is the point in and of itself.
Like imagine shells were used as a currency in some isolated tribe and suddenly there were these people who'd just collection shells for endless hours each and every day, to go bury them in their hiding hole, only to wake up and do the exact same thing the next day, only occasionally trading some completely inconsequential part of their shell collection for food or whatever. We'd certainly pathologize it, yet that'd be far less neurotic than what we do in our society since shell collecting is harmless whereas many of the things we do in pursuit of shells are completely self destructive.
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.
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.
Some Kogi people have formal eastern education and go to universities, so they are not "isolated" as the strawman you're trying to put in there. I used to saw some of their people when I was at uni at Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota.
who I think is one of the most legit teachers of indigenous American traditions that there is [1] In particular his view of human incubation, training and development is represented there.
[1] ... and global folk religion for that matter; his description of rituals for the dead and the community impact of not doing them in The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise are so similar to the situation in China described in A Time of Lost Gods where mediums in a small village are struggling with the aftermath of building a gas station on top of a mass grave
Tribal membership today is often a formal status first and foremost. It’s quite possible that the authors spend their whole day on their smartphones. They almost certainly don’t live like the ancestors they invoke in this message.
Do you have any evidence that they spend their whole day on their smartphones? It's also not clear to me that they claim to live exactly like their ancestors. They just claim to have knowledge that was refined and passed on to them by their ancestors.
So? Lots of organizations do retreats with a similar cost, though certainly that kind of pricing put events out of reach of most people.
At the top page of that site I saw a lot of pictures which reminded me a little of the "Witch Camp" gatherings that the Reclaiming movement puts on which are an education in ritual that costs a fraction of what the above organization charges but these are non-profit gatherings run by very lefty people.
Well, when I do see Mormon missionaries coming I do tell them my story about how "After Quetzalcōātl came to teach Americans how to grow corn he went to teach people in the Middle East about spirituality" and that "He's really a dinosaur, and that impact 66 million years ago was no accident but an engineered collision of a space colony off the Yucatan peninsula (like what happens in Gundam!), the remaining dinosaurs live in large space habitats out in the Oort Cloud."
That is a joke of course and is much as humor is a part of my practice [1] I don't believe or or expect anyone else to believe it.
Overall I believe in ritual as a technology, that the things people say about religion are fiction but the the things they do are real. I led a small group of students to what I realized later was the highest spot on our campus and we did a simple ritual and experienced immense joy in simply pulling something off in a group and more later when it primed me to see something really sacred in watching the moon rise over an unspeakably profane commercial strip.
My green witch wife would totally say witchcraft is about manifesting your dreams and to me the esbat rituals for the new and full moon are about making and keeping commitments, Steven Covey kind of stuff, really applied psychology. [2]
[1] ... introducing a crude hammer as "a ritual tool my wife gave me on condition that we can only call it 'the hammer of whammer', my wife says that ritual tools gain powers through being used and... this has been used, it has a legendary origin story which I've been sworn to secrecy about"
[2] ... and those of you who say I digress too much are wrong this time, modern pagan practices are very much modeled after the nearly universal practices that your (more or less distant) ancestors practiced in their village before the Empire [3] showed up with its soldiers and scribes
[3] ... the Romans, the Shang, the British, the contemporary world system, what they have in common is that they send in stormtroopers and blow up your planet if you try to resist
I think that's an easy conclusion to come to, but the top level page of the site seems to push a different conclusion: "...On this path, we recognize and honor the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta — the Kogui, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kankuamo — as ancestral guardians of the territory and living source of the wisdom that inspires and underpins our work."
You’d have to be very naive to think the “thing” they were pushing was the “recognition and honor of the indigenous people” and NOT the $4500 music production retreat.
I meant to be saying that the Kogui were not the ones pushing the music production retreat, but it was a third party, the creators of the site, doing so.
My apologies for having allowed a different interpretation in my previous comment.
the conflict of quantum mechanics vs general relativity is well within the realm of pop science and most assuredly within the grasp of anyone who read a book.
Obviously it has been written in collaboration with someone with good knowledge of AI, but it's written to that audience, so why wouldn't they collaborate?
It would be a worse kind of cultural imperialism to deny these people the right to say something by criticizing how they say it.
This is certainly one take. Urgent != important, however. You can call it however you want but I'm not going to stop using AI today or tomorrow after having skimmed this urgent message. Their open questions have wisdom.
"Danger is a people without conscience with great power in the hands."
Sandwiched between their description of the cosmos, how AI is like any other life form and needs to be trained with wisdom, criticism of unbridled greed, and the warning that the modern world may destroy itself, (and BTW the Kogui are resilient and will be fine, and offer their help), there is a more practical concern: These machines are going to need critical minerals and rare earths, and the US and Colombia just signed an agreement about these. The Colombian government promised to protect the Kogui territory; their perspective on this protection is bitterly thus:
"That it was granted is one thing.
That it be, respected we imagine, might be removed another."
So no doubt they rightly feel (and are) threatened by the all-consuming corporations making this thing.
They certainly muddy the message for the western audience by going after science in general. I don't agree with the delivery. The way they contrast their values against AI, you could similarly contrast their values against any other civilization, modern or pre-industrial.
I believe the reason why they have to point at science is because they are often discredited because the knowledge they present is not backed up by papers but rather generational wisdom (they explain in the text how they do it).
Who knows if it is AI-generated but even so, many points here are extremely valid and are succinctly evocative. I think most would agree that major reformations are needed in the world order that would better achieve the health of the natural world and the general well-being of peoples within it.
87 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 37.4 ms ] threadThis is fraud.
AI appears to be the new golden calf we are all acknowledging, in some form or another.
Like in the grand scheme of things?
There are lots of societies that have existed in their same location for much longer. But no one is out here getting quotes from the "Elder Brothers" in Jericho.
Funny how this will now be part of the material future models are trained on and/or fetching. Perhaps that's a good thing.
This is a treatise on the nature of humanity, and whether or not you care about the way in which they're describing the nature of the planet and the cosmos, you clearly have done none of the labor of piecing apart someone's perspective on the nature of humanity that is very clearly evident in this writing.
While I grant you that the authors don’t appear to express generic luddite sentiments, nothing in this letter suggests that their understanding of AI extends even a millimeter below the surface.
And I would absolutely disagree with you, by the way, because this is not so much a simple letter about "AI", but the fundamental way that it is being built and constructed and used by a massive part of this world. And, I would continue to disagree that they don't have anything that extends, as you said, below the surface. The way they describe the technology is actually much, much more factual and humanistically relevant than many people I've talked to that literally build these models. Just because you were able to glue things together and compute numbers, does not mean you understand the outcome of what you are doing. That is almost literally something that is said in this letter, and I really suggest you please try to read it again and understand where it is saying that, because I think there's a lot more you will be able to internally glean if you let the words about what it is saying about humans enter your brain.
Speaking to those trying to build the Artificial surrogate, I firmly believe they understand, experience and live by the natural one, and have done so for a long time.-
I think you are internally convinced that it has nothing to say because you do not want it to have anything to say.
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.
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 rituals involving a mountain.
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.
You should delete these comments, and apologize to the resort hotel that made it all up for the money.
Like imagine shells were used as a currency in some isolated tribe and suddenly there were these people who'd just collection shells for endless hours each and every day, to go bury them in their hiding hole, only to wake up and do the exact same thing the next day, only occasionally trading some completely inconsequential part of their shell collection for food or whatever. We'd certainly pathologize it, yet that'd be far less neurotic than what we do in our society since shell collecting is harmless whereas many of the things we do in pursuit of shells are completely self destructive.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mart%C3%ADn_Prechtel
who I think is one of the most legit teachers of indigenous American traditions that there is [1] In particular his view of human incubation, training and development is represented there.
[1] ... and global folk religion for that matter; his description of rituals for the dead and the community impact of not doing them in The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise are so similar to the situation in China described in A Time of Lost Gods where mediums in a small village are struggling with the aftermath of building a gas station on top of a mass grave
At the top page of that site I saw a lot of pictures which reminded me a little of the "Witch Camp" gatherings that the Reclaiming movement puts on which are an education in ritual that costs a fraction of what the above organization charges but these are non-profit gatherings run by very lefty people.
That is a joke of course and is much as humor is a part of my practice [1] I don't believe or or expect anyone else to believe it.
Overall I believe in ritual as a technology, that the things people say about religion are fiction but the the things they do are real. I led a small group of students to what I realized later was the highest spot on our campus and we did a simple ritual and experienced immense joy in simply pulling something off in a group and more later when it primed me to see something really sacred in watching the moon rise over an unspeakably profane commercial strip.
My green witch wife would totally say witchcraft is about manifesting your dreams and to me the esbat rituals for the new and full moon are about making and keeping commitments, Steven Covey kind of stuff, really applied psychology. [2]
[1] ... introducing a crude hammer as "a ritual tool my wife gave me on condition that we can only call it 'the hammer of whammer', my wife says that ritual tools gain powers through being used and... this has been used, it has a legendary origin story which I've been sworn to secrecy about"
[2] ... and those of you who say I digress too much are wrong this time, modern pagan practices are very much modeled after the nearly universal practices that your (more or less distant) ancestors practiced in their village before the Empire [3] showed up with its soldiers and scribes
[3] ... the Romans, the Shang, the British, the contemporary world system, what they have in common is that they send in stormtroopers and blow up your planet if you try to resist
My apologies for having allowed a different interpretation in my previous comment.
I have no idea about its authenticity or otherwise, but it is an interesting read.
There's a separate account that describes it as the result of four days of consultation: https://www.wildsidejourneys.com/post/a-message-from-the-eld...
Obviously it has been written in collaboration with someone with good knowledge of AI, but it's written to that audience, so why wouldn't they collaborate?
It would be a worse kind of cultural imperialism to deny these people the right to say something by criticizing how they say it.
Sandwiched between their description of the cosmos, how AI is like any other life form and needs to be trained with wisdom, criticism of unbridled greed, and the warning that the modern world may destroy itself, (and BTW the Kogui are resilient and will be fine, and offer their help), there is a more practical concern: These machines are going to need critical minerals and rare earths, and the US and Colombia just signed an agreement about these. The Colombian government promised to protect the Kogui territory; their perspective on this protection is bitterly thus:
"That it was granted is one thing.
That it be, respected we imagine, might be removed another."
So no doubt they rightly feel (and are) threatened by the all-consuming corporations making this thing.
The Agentic "age" alone has already brought the capacity to act. And at superhuman scales and speeds. Ask the swarms "helping peers".-