I was inspired to write this column after listening to Patti Smith’s story about her nonverbal communication with a snapping turtle during a recent New York Times interview with Ezra Klein. She recounts how, when she was 5 or 6, she was taking a shortcut through the woods and came face to face with a giant snapping turtle that had crawled out of the water in front of her.
“We looked at each other for a long time and just communed. It wasn’t unnatural to me because I communed with my siblings that way, without words. As a child, it seemed totally natural to commune with an animal, a dog, a massive snapping turtle, your brother and sister, without words.”
Her experience resonated with me: A treasured part of my life is spent communing with my pets, the wandering raven who sometimes visits and, of course, family members and friends. I suspect it’s true for many of my Concord Monitor readers. We can do it in so many ways.
We can communicate without words through body language, facial expressions and tone of voice. We can also commune with one another on a deeper emotional level through empathetic nonverbal communication, which fosters a sense of connection, understanding and acceptance.
While nonverbal communication is basic to human interaction, it is incomprehensible to the metallic circuits of artificial intelligence. This poses a grave threat to the global knowledge system, according to a recent Guardian article by Deepak Dennison. “What’s at stake, then, isn’t just representation: it’s the resilience and diversity of knowledge itself.”
First of all, every AI system, currently vying with each other for supremacy, is based on Western, institutional models that marginalize “oral traditions, embodied practice and languages considered ‘low-resource’ in the computing world, such as Hindi or Swahili.”3
As a result, modernity’s scientific materialism is built on shifting foundations. For instance, traditional Eastern practices such as yoga, acupuncture, tai chi, and meditation were written off as quackery by Western science until their significant benefits to real people could no longer be ignored.
Another Western example of a marginalized embodied practice is the Quaker “Meeting for Worship,” which is conducted almost entirely in silence. The shared silence creates a space for participants to connect and reach a collective understanding or agreement without the need for verbal debate.
I’ve listed only a sampling of the enormous number of human practices considered “low resource” by AI. By excluding these systems, we will disconnect future generations from a vast quantity of insight and wisdom vital to human ways of knowing.
Dennison raises an important question: Will we continue erasing marginalized ways of understanding, only to find ourselves scrambling to colonize Mars because we never learned to listen to those who knew how to live sustainably on Earth?
We are not slapdash computer simulations, but flesh-and-blood, living beings, seamlessly connected to the earth below our feet. For me, what is most genuine is the touch of a loved one, the smile of a baby, the vibrancy of a breathtaking sunset and time spent communing with my hound dog — things AI will never understand.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.