The Buck Moon and Artificial Intelligence
This evening I was out on my patio, staring at the moon. I saw a post on Facebook from a distant connection, one of so very few that I follow in this way. She’s a person that unbeknownst to her, sits somewhere softly within me, because she represents a whole lot of why I ended up staying where I was for the past 25 years. She’s an unabashed individual, a child of the 60’s, a drop-out hippie, who, like a handful of others, randomly came across one of the most amazingly beautiful mountain towns, and simply decided to land there. She then went on to become a significant part of the community, and contributed greatly to what it has since become. The remnants of a ghastly but booming mining town from the Gold Rush era still echoed in the valley then, while its original inhabitants had been violently relocated many years ago, their trail of despair still somehow echoing whenever the winds blow through the mystical canyon that will always hold their stories.
The details about how and why she arrived in that place in the early 70’s are unknown to me, but it became her home and she became an integral part of the town. I just know that by the time I landed in that special place years later, she was a cornerstone of community activism, the organic kind. She was in the right place and the right time, and the seedling of her being was beautifully germinated there. The flower that bloomed from within her and a handful of others was a local radio station where none had existed for miles and miles. It’s a station that still exists independently to this day. It remains a pillar for the locals, an open door for those who want to transmit any bit of information or personal input to the world, without sponsors or censorship, a microcosm of an open society. And even though much of the place and its residents have grown up and away from this fundamental organization, it still exists.
And so I randomly look at her posts, and today it was a blurb about the new moon that’s rising in the next few days, called the Buck Moon. For those who follow this stuff, it’s significant, a “super” moon one which will facilitate a “major energetic reset , leading to renewal”. I am intrigued by connections like this, all the ways and means of the natural world, our planet, and how we humans exist amidst and within it. I know very little about this stuff. But the post went on to say there will be a “clearing and restoring of imbalances from 33 years of Karma”. That number, the 33 years, resonated with me, as it relates exactly to the beginning of the relationship I recently ended. That is random, uncanny, relevant or irrelevant, I have no clue. I just know that this new moon, the Buck Moon, seems particularly meaningful to me at this precise moment in my life. Another sip of wine, and then I am listening to a podcast.
My host is a beautiful woman, a thinker, a reader, a seeker, who has offered up her conversations on a podcast with intellectuals, artists, scientists, writers, spiritual humans for years. And today she was speaking to a computer scientist and artist who has written a few books about technology and the rapid advancement of what computers are doing to us and for us in modern times. His take on this is heavily researched and philosophic. My nutshell take on his view is that we need to think about AI as the next step that can, ironically, one might say, bring us back to our connection to the natural world and our place in it. It’s fascinating and complex, but the juxtaposition of these two fairly random interactions that I chose to engage in this evening, through the conduit of my computer, is compelling.
It seems to me that all we really want to do is figure out why we’re here and what we should do to make our moment in this place and time, somehow meaningful to us. Indeed, that’s really all we can do, right?
Two seemingly different contemplations were served to me this evening, and when I think about it, they are really quite similar. Ironically, I don’t think I would’ve otherwise had the opportunity to think about these two concepts simultaneously without the facility of my laptop. Indeed, we humans created this machine we call a computer. And with some knowing, along with a sufficiently blind eye, the tendrils, the prolific vines that are emerging from it, crawling up and over and beyond it, and us, we have both readily, and often without much thought, have integrated our daily lives. Simultaneously, like in a sci-fi movie, we fear the implications of this integration, of what we somehow consider “the other” on a cellular level, even though it was we ourselves, who created it! It’s because of this paradox that I believe this author and thinker may be on to something.
We are just like the universe, indeed we are part of it, and our capability to think big, expand and implode seems inevitable. Maybe this is my karmic breakthrough after 33 years. Indeed, it feels like the power of a super moon to me!