The question I'm asking, and I want to keep attempting to answer, as I record these episodes, is whether, given the forces behind AI today, it can be transformed or alchemized into a force for the benefit of the larger human and non human world. Can AI be created or repurposed to subvert the very Apollonian and Windigo ethos that it arose out of Welcome to cosmic intelligence, a Podcast where we explore the intersection of philosophy cosmology, consciousness and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. If you're new here, I'm Chad, a philosopher, technologist, product manager, yoga teacher and attorney based in Los Angeles. Can we create an AI for the people by moving from Empire technologies to humane technology innovation and human stewardship? That's what I want to explore today on the podcast. My intention here, as always, is to speak as honestly, directly and humbly as I can as a decent human being. If what I'm saying sounds radical, it's because that's the way the terms of the debate have been framed by the long standing paradigms of the subject object, split and frantic, endless growth for its own sake. In my ongoing exploration of what's rotten in Silicon Valley tech innovation and the ideologies that are driving that innovation. Last time I talked about the pandemic of what I call the Apollonian mind virus, this tendency throughout the modern world to favor cold, disembodied, hyper rationality and cognitive intelligence over all other ways of knowing and being, over intuition, emotional intelligence, embodiment and wisdom. This Apollonian orientation towards nature has ushered in what Sam Altman has dubbed the intelligence age. So Apollonian for me, describes the worldview and the theories of intelligence that are behind the current approaches to AI today I explore an adjacent pandemic of the mind, or sickness of spirit that is insatiable, extractive and exploitative, the Hungry Ghost of the Wendigo. I argue that current approaches to AI are largely the result of these two features of the modern Western ethos, the interwoven helix of the Apollonian mind and the Windigo soul sickness. I will then close this episode by beginning to explore whether there is a better way to innovate and evolve. Collectively. As a reminder for those who are new, here, I am examining the Silicon Valley ideologies that are driving artificial intelligence innovation today, because I think there is a better way to build an engine for creating a more human future. I agree with anthropic CEO and founder Dario Amadei that AI should be a force for human progress. I just think the word human should represent all of humanity that's alive today. To be explicit, the questions I am attempting to answer on this podcast and on my sub stack and on my YouTube channel are the following, first in light of the fact that technology innovation is the perfection of our Apollonian worldview and a voracious, extractive colonialist force that I and others call the Windigo, I'll talk about that more in a second. Can we find a way to make technologies like aI serve humanity rather than forcing humanity to be more machine like second is an evolutionary, liberatory and humane interplay between conscious technologies like kriya and meditation and material technologies like AI and the internet. Possible. Third and finally, how can we become more fully human alongside technological innovation, instead of outsourcing our evolution to machines, all of these questions arose within me in a single moment during a conscious AI retreat in Northern California this year, when I realized in horror that a majority of the attendees were perfectly willing to outsource their Evolution to machines to see humans as mere algorithms and to follow the current extractive approach to AI innovation wherever it leads, if these self styled Buddhists and conscious technologists with good intentions are afflicted with the Windigo sickness I describe in a second, what can we do? So this episode is another step toward answering the many questions that arose at that retreat, and is primarily focused on the first one, addressing this Windigo mindset that drives technology innovation today. Okay, so what is the Windigo as an American man of European descent, I am intensely curious about why. Alongside the scientific and industrial revolutions, the nation state, civil and common law and capitalism, the lasting legacy of Europe is colonialism, or maybe alongside is the wrong word. Maybe those are all various strands of a unified force or ethos. After all, they are all instruments of distancing the human from nature and exerting absolute control over the natural world, of exerting what Joanna Macy called power over Native American writers like Jack D Forbes and Robin wall Kimmerer call this extractive consumptive force behind colonialism. The Whitey go or windy go after an Algonquin myth about a voracious, insatiable ghoul who wanders the world, devouring everything and everyone it encounters, for these Native American thinkers and activists, this Wendigo force is an epidemic of the mind, or Spiritual sickness characterized by insatiable greed, aggression, domination and objectification. Author Paul Levy has also written about the Indigo as a mind virus and a pandemic. So you know, a voracious, insatiable, extractive force, I think, also describes the ethos behind artificial intelligence innovation pretty accurately. In other words, where AI itself is a sort of echo of the Apollonian mind that I talked about last time, this unpredictable, schizophrenic savant, the arrogant, bellicose ethos behind it is the Windigo, this hungry ghost of unbounded extraction and consumption for its own sake. One of the books that got me thinking about all this this year was empire of AI by Karen Howe. In the book, Karen Howe argues that major AI companies operate much like the imperialist empires of the age of discovery by engaging in digital colonialism, extraction of resources, exploitation of labor, and the concentration of power and wealth under a unifying, self justifying ideology. She doesn't call it the Windigo, but in her book, she thoroughly documents the symptoms of this sickness among AI companies in terms of extraction. Howe shows in her book that large language models like Chad, GPT or Claude require enormous physical resources in the form of energy and clean water, to the detriment of local ecosystems and communities, and this urgent, voracious consumption of resources by multiple companies is justified by what is primarily an unfounded promise of future benefit. After all, llms are not likely to lead to AGI or super intelligence, as I've talked about before, and have so far offered minimal benefits for customers and companies who are using it, especially in proportion to the resources that are required. Not only that, but these AI systems are trained on the creative work of millions of humans in an extractive way, ignoring, for example, intellectual property rights, to put it more plainly, the unrealized promise of super intelligence and some future automation Utopia has fed a self fueling investing frenzy where AI companies are round tripping over a trillion dollars. Furthermore, as Howe illustrates in her book, AI models are primarily trained on the hidden, cheap and traumatizing labor of labelers and content moderators in the Global South, workers in places like Kenya, Venezuela, India and the Philippines are treated as undervalued and expendable by the AI companies. All these externalities are hidden behind a smoke screen of utopian visions and economic necessity, where the good guys of Silicon Valley must defeat the bad guys in China in this kind of zero sum game you so inspired by the work of Forbes and Kimmerer and how I have come to see the Silicon Valley innovation ethos as deeply Windigo. In other words, technology innovation today is driven in large part by this kind of like mental illness or spiritual sickness. What else would explain the release of an app like open AI Sora or Marc andreessen's Techno optimist manifesto, or Peter thiel's rants about the arrival of the Antichrist and not wanting humanity to survive. It's no accident that Peter Thiel is describing opposition to the Windigo essentially as the Antichrist. These are archetypal forces that have been at odds ever since the dawn of civilization. But to the Windigo mind slowing down to regulate technology or consider the needs of the earth and all the people on it stands in opposition to thiel's mechanistic messianic mission other billionaires like Elon Musk and. Mark Zuckerberg are also infected by this Windigo sickness. Why else would billions of dollars not be enough to satisfy them? Why else would they envision a mechanical future where humans exist only as simulations in the cloud, and why would they behave like sociopaths, completely lacking in humility and empathy, whereas the hyper rational, Apollonian mind is a legitimate way of approaching the world, so long as it's balanced by the creative, intuitive Dionysian, this Indigo tendency is nothing more than a sickness. There is nothing redeeming about the Windigo mentality. I'm so curious like, why are we like this? As Robin wall Kimmerer reminds us this Indigo tendency lives within each of us, but gazing back over human history, it seems to have metastasized primarily in Europe and then in the European colonies. So where did this European Windigo come from? Like? Why was Europe so industrious, belligerent and colonialist for so long? There are a number of sort of interlocking factors that kind of led to this Windigo mentality in Europe over the centuries. Scholars think it was a combination of essentially like ecological precarity, like deforestation and these cycles of drought followed by harvest followed by drought, but also this kind of othering, you know, the the viewing of people who are not Greek or Roman as barbarians, the ways that wheat farming led to rapidly growing populations who developed standing armies with access to bronze and then and then eventually iron. In other words, the causes were sort of environmental, cultural, political, philosophical and technological. So these factors are all interwoven, and it's hard to point to just one kind of spark or original sin. You could say, for example, deforestation led to soil erosion, which then created these endless cycles of scarcity and starvation, and that justified seeking more natural resources beyond the borders of your country. This happened in primarily Greece and Rome, but this deforestation was the result of the need for raw materials for shipbuilding and metallurgy. So it's kind of a vicious cycle. But if I had to point to one cause for this Wendigo illness, I think it's this idea of civilization versus wild nature and the savage other. Although Jack Forbes points out that the Windigo originated with the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Persians, it was the post Socratic Greeks in particular who perfected this othering, being as they were, obsessed with reason, order, law and control the Greek city and the cultivated field were reflections of this Apollonian kind of Greek orientation. In contrast, the wild forest represented to the ancient Greeks the dark, threatening other containing these chaotic natural and supernatural dangers, like wolves, bandits, barbarians, monsters and the Dionysian satyrs and mateds indulging in debaucherous ecstatic rituals. Oh, my, speaking of barbarians, the Greek word Barbaros was originally a neutral term used to describe anyone who didn't speak Greek. Basically foreign speech to the Greek sounded like bar, bar, bar. You know, so, so barbarian, barbarian. So initially it was an it was a neutral term, but this changed dramatically in the fifth century BC, with the Greco Persian Wars, suddenly the Greek identity became that of a sophisticated, liberated people living in a simple, austere democracy, in stark contrast with the supposedly decadent yet savage tyranny of the Persian Empire, and then, as the Romans took over as the dominant European empire, they borrowed this concept of the barbarian as an instrument of Imperial propaganda justifying the violent conquest of the supposedly savage and lawless Gauls, Celts, Iberians and German tribes. The Romans saw it as their duty to bring peace, order and civilization, a sort of kind of Pax Romana to the rest of the world. In ancient Europe, savagely installing peace outside one's territory was seen as a form of civilization. And how we begin to understand Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk's fascination with ancient Rome and the larger Rome bro phenomenon, and thus began the long standing practice of othering and projection, where every accusation is a confession, an unconscious habit perfected by a maga today, for those afflicted with the Wendigo sickness, violent consumption of land and exploitation of labor is civilization and progress, whereas the reciprocal, sustainable lifestyles of indigenous people is pathologized as barbaric, savage and primitive. The savages are accused of practicing human sacrifice or being cannibals, while the civilized slaughter untold millions of indigenous across the globe. Job in the name of civilized European nations, Forbes pointed out the hypocrisy of his attitude, saying, few, if any, societies on the face of the earth have been as avaricious, cruel, violent and aggressive as have certain European populations. The rise of the Windigo was also an accident of geography, because of its steep, rocky landscape and intensely hot and dry summers, the Mediterranean basin is especially vulnerable to deforestation once the trees covering a hillside are felled, the sun bakes the soil into a hard crust, then the winter rains hammer this crust, rushing over the surface instead of being absorbed. So then plowing and overgrazing make this worse. In a way, it was this vicious cycle that the spreading civilization never recovered from because of the relentless pressures of a growing population and the need for fuel and building materials. Deforestation only accelerated across Europe in the Middle Ages, by 1086, only 15% of England was wooded on the eve of the Black Death. A few centuries later, that figure had plummeted to 6% by the 14th century, only 10% of Europe's land was forested, and this then led England and other parts of Europe to switch to coal as a source for fuel, which then led to worsening pollution and so on. In short, alongside its trademark arrogance, the European psyche became one of resource scarcity, zero sum logic and therefore, of conquest by the age of discovery, the mindset and machinery of imperialism also had a powerful moral and legal justification. In the 15th century, at the start of the Age of Discovery, two successive popes in Rome issued a series of Papal bulls, these decrees that gave Christian nations a theological and legal right to conquer the savages who now had no rights to land or sovereignty. And this became the white man's burden to civilize the heathen peoples of the world, thereby saving their souls and giving them culture. You might say that Christianity, by then, was the operating system of colonialism about as far from the humble love your neighbor message of Jesus's teachings as you can get. And now Peter thiel's framing of anything opposed to this, when to go tendency as the Antichrist comes into clearer focus. Thiel's Antichrist is not a horned figure with hooves and a spiky tail, but degrowth regulation and Greta Thunberg, precisely because those ideas are antithetical to the crazed Wendigo mind. Again, I'm not saying that this sickness is inherent to being of European descent or within the European tradition, it is a spiritual sickness that can infect anyone. Although Silicon Valley today has elevated it to an art form in the way that it approaches technology innovation, it's more than a desire to invade other countries, either overtly or covertly. It's a way of thinking, a way of life that thinks hyper rationally of voracious expansion for its own sake, and looks to malignant growth as the solution to every problem. And this is why Latin American and Indian scholars talk about the need to decolonialize hearts and minds to cure the infected, which is all of us now. So as we can see, the lasting legacy of European civilization is not Christianity or secular rationalism, but the idea of endless urgent growth and expansion at all costs. It's this means justifies the ends, ideology. And of course, it goes without saying that America kind of took up the Windigo mantle from Europe after World War Two, if not after the Spanish American War in 1898 so although the Windigo fuel for centuries was Christian ideologies of superiority and a future salvation with the arrival of the Apollonian mind during the European enlightenment, it found a more pure form of ideological fuel, now human reason, Science and Technology replace God as the agent of salvation, leading humanity toward this techno scientific utopia. So instead of the Second Coming, we now have the singularity, where our digital soul will not ascend to heaven but to the cloud. It is these two intertwined mindsets or worldviews that have dominated modern civilization and become the twin strands of the current approach to artificial intelligence. For those of us concerned with the current direction of AI innovation, what can be done the as a countervailing force against the Wendigo, the Native American scholars I talked about earlier recommend a return to indigenous principles and an indigenous worldview, one that. Not dissimilar to the philosophically idealist yoga Danta worldview that my longtime listeners will be familiar with, briefly, the Native American worldview, and that of many other indigenous traditions, is one of kinship and relationality, the idea that all of nature is part of a vast family of interconnected subjects, and that includes animals, plants, rivers and mountains. Within that view, the cosmos is made up of a web of relationships. Therefore, all of one's relationships are governed by this kind of sacred reciprocity, where one doesn't simply take from nature or from another person without giving back both the Native American and yoga Danta worldviews are fundamentally non dual in opposition to the materialist subject, object dualism of scientism, and they both see the cosmos as fundamentally conscious as the Anima Mundi, or world soul. For the ancient yogis, the cosmos is Shakti, or Brahma this divine play and creative dance. For the Native American tribes, the Earth is a living, conscious mother. Even their core ethics of reciprocity and karma are similar in that they underscore the fact that because we are all interconnected with other subjects in the cosmos, any action we take affects the whole, of course, the imminent Native American goal to live in harmony with the world as it is may seem to differ from some interpretations or manifestations of the yoga Dante goal of liberation from the cycles of birth and death, the yoga traditions that I follow are also imminent in this way of recognizing that there is nowhere else to be but in the manifest cosmos. Robin wall Kimmerer in particular, references an Anishinaabe prophecy of the eight fires. According to this prophecy, humanity is currently in the seventh fire, where the Fire Keepers retrace their steps in order to gather up the fragments of songs, stories and sacred teachings, so that the eighth fire can be kindled in a great coming together of peoples around the world to walk a soft path of wisdom, respect and reciprocity. Kimmerer characterizes this as a synthesis of indigenous wisdom from around the world, indigenous European knowledge, indigenous Asian knowledge and indigenous knowledge from the Americas. Despite the immense diversity of those traditions, for our purposes, we can boil down their varied manifestations into a synthesis that reflects the Native American and East Indian worldviews that I talked about earlier. So what does this look like in practical, concrete terms, especially in the context of technology innovation? Is there a way forward? In other words, now that we've recognized the general shape of the challenge, what can we do? The hurried, myopic gambler mentality behind the way AI is currently developed, where we have Sam Altman wanting to throw$7 trillion at large language models in the hopes that scaling will lead to an ill defined machine messiah of some kind. You know this? This mentality is just how business is done. This approach to AI is a sort of blitz scaling model that accepts ethical and social breakage as the cost of doing business. Who, in their right mind, would deviate from this tried and true path to the American dream of a frontier utopia? I mean, it feels like I'm proposing a revolution of some kind, right, or just being a total buzz kill. Like, Hey everyone, let's just, let's just do it a different way, like, let's not all make a billion dollars, right? But there is a growing consensus that we've hit the kind of too big to fail era of the AI bubble. I mean, we see Michael Burry of Big Short fame betting a billion dollars on the AI bubble bursting anyway. I think it's time for bold proposals in the same way that the explosion of large language models is forcing us to forcing us to confront philosophical and spiritual questions about what it means to be human and the nature of consciousness, I think it's forcing us to reevaluate other assumptions, like what makes for a good business model. Because, as I am arguing in this episode and in this series, AI is the apotheosis of the scientific revolution and its ideologies, it seems to be the tipping point into what Thomas Kuhn calls a paradigm shift that underpins scientific revolutions, except this time, it's the beginning of a revolution in worldviews, socioeconomic and sociopolitical theory and approaches to business. As Kimmerer suggested, we must walk back over where we have been in order to gather up only what is relevant for what's next, fragments of wisdom and sacred knowledge in order to shape this new paradigm. Paul Levy suggests that the antidote to the Wendigo virus is simply exposing it to the light, a kind of collective shadow work. And I think that's part of it. Robin well. Kimmerer proposes that we shift our worldview and move to a gift economy, which is also part of it, I think. And Jack D Forbes suggested something similar. So going back to the questions that I began with, can we find a way to make artificial intelligence that serves humanity, rather than creating a supposed Machine God and forcing humanity to be more machine like although these are big questions with no easy answers, I think we can address the challenges presented by the double helix of Apollonian thinking and this Wendigo sickness in three parts, each of which draws on a different part of my own background as a technology philosopher, attorney and software engineer, the first step is talking openly and honestly about the current state of affairs. That was the impetus behind this episode. It's crucial, I think, that we raise awareness of the harms of the Windigo tendency, and cultivate technology leaders who are devoid of the Wendigo sickness, leaders who understand that every participant in the human and non human world is interconnected, leaders who prioritize reciprocity. In other words, because technology reflects the consciousness of those creating it, I think finding or cultivating leaders and innovators with their heart in the right place is paramount in the same way that toxic startup founders create a toxic workplace culture that can never be fully remedied. Sociopathic innovation leadership will only lead us to a sociopathic future full of toxic, extractive technologies, letting Peter Thiel, Elon, Musk and Sam Altman set the innovation agenda will only worsen the problems that I've highlighted in this episode. Okay, the next step is perhaps changing the way we do business. I mean, now that open AI has completed its for profit transformation, I think it's time to look in the other direction, not just at the nonprofit model, but to corporate structures for AI, companies and organizations that fundamentally change the incentives, including public benefit corporations or even steward ownership, if you're not familiar. Steward ownership is a purpose driven business structure that prioritizes a company's long term purpose and well being over maximizing short term profits for external shareholders, and it does this by separating voting rights, the control of the company, from economic rights or the profit to ensure that the company is guided by its mission and that those who are actively involved in Its operation are properly incentivized to hew to that mission. In other words, a steward owned company is owned by its purpose. There are no shareholders who can exert undue pressure on short term financial gains in steward ownership, the Voting Rights remain with those personnel who are actively managing the company and connected to its operations and purpose. And those rights cannot be sold or inherited. They don't generate any financial returns. Instead, they stay with the company over its lifetime as personnel change any profits generated by the business, and all the assets are held in support of the company's mission, so they are reinvested in the business to cover capital costs, or sometimes distributed to employees. For example, had open AI begun as a steward owned company, it would have been forced to stick to its original mission to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. Instead, we get Sora two and pleas from its CFO to have the US government guarantee its insanely risky investments, although steward ownership is a corporate structure that has been around for over a century, it is still pretty rare. One US based example is the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, who transitioned to steward ownership in 2022 they leveraged existing us trust and corporate laws, creating two entities, the Patagonia purpose Trust, which is the steward and the holdfast collective, this nonprofit that manages the profits and reinvests them back into the business, primarily to address the environmental crisis. No doubt, incorporating as steward owned is challenging. Not only is the corporate structure complex from a legal standpoint, but raising capital requires finding niche, mission driven investors who understand that there can never be an exit or massive returns on investment, let alone a say in how the company operates, still imagine the first AI models and AI company built with a sense of kinship and reciprocity and structured to remain that way, I think it would resonate with a lot of people And stand as an attractive alternative to the crazed Wendigo AI systems on offer today. Finally, what if we built technology itself on the unsold principles of kinship and reciprocity, instead of voracious extraction and consumption? We could call these alternative technologies hearth technologies, where Empire technologies like social media or Sora two extract value from the periphery and concentrate it in the center. A hearth technology radiates warmth outward instead of atomizing individuals. A hearth technology creates and empowers communities. A hearth technology implements reciprocity by cultivating lasting relationships built on trust and a kind of give and take, instead of on monopolizing attention and fostering addiction. Could an AI model or system be built this way? There are already a few indigenous AI systems that are trained ethically on indigenous data, primarily in Australia. I'll drop a couple examples in the show notes. But what about a general purpose hearth AI? Maybe we can draw inspiration from some of these new EU based models that are coming out of Europe, that were ethically trained and that are EU AI Act compliant. I don't know. These are all just kind of inchoate early ideas about how to make AI in a way that's not when to go anyway. We could take a sort of like negative inspiration from Elon Musk and how he's creating this, like anti woke AI with grok, and we could, we could create AI models and AI systems that embody an ensouled or indigenous worldview, and that could include interconnectedness, reciprocity and community. In fact, I've been talking recently to some friends and colleagues about creating just such an AI, and I know there are several inchoate attempts at a sort of like Gaia AI that are in the works across different groups around the world that I've talked to. I would also be interested in starting a sort of Think Tank to explore these ideas. So I'm going to keep talking about this and explore all that in future episodes. So I started writing this episode in an attempt to name and understand the consumptive extractive force, this Wendigo force that drives AI innovation, and honestly, I had no idea that it would lead to me talking about alternative corporate structures or hearth technologies. Like why does technology innovation have to run on these feast and famine cycles of exuberant hype and duplicative investment followed by enormous crashes. Why does technology innovation have to feel like gambling? I think it's because of these Windigo tendencies. My journey of stumbling into the myth and metaphor of the Windigo has been so enlightening, but also has only just begun. I know there are already organizations out there exploring these questions from an explicitly indigenous standpoint. So I want to offer gratitude and respect to all who have come before. My only intention here is to raise awareness and explore uplifting paths forward. More on all of this very soon, you you.