Natural resources are the fundamental source behind the driving force of our civilisation’s development. While these resources are of strategic importance to our existence, never before have we been so close to crossing the limits of their development and use – irreversibly. We have been evolving for years, leaving a burden of ecological debt behind, paying for today’s progress with a loan taken out from reserves safeguarding the well-being of future generations. Our lackadaisical approach to managing key resources has brutally highlighted the fundamental lack of comprehension of the existential line in the sand drawn by the Planet.
As a human species, we have shown carelessness to matter animate and inanimate alike, condemning a plethora of non-human beings to suffering and extinction. Will the new species of technical beings – ever more courageously manifesting their presence on our planet – become conducive to an escalation of such behaviour? After all, similarly to ours, their existence depends on access to energy, minerals, and water – volumes of water consumed in Artificial Intelligence model training and data centre cooling reaching a count of millions of litres.
Straining under human activity, the Planet Earth needs time to regenerate, and provide dignified living conditions to all creatures inhabiting it. If caring at all for an equilibrium in interspecies harmony, the latter distorted by the technological revolution, we have to aspire to recovering a sense of time, and following rhythms proposed by nature and our own breath. Therein – in peace and quiet – lies the space for reflection and empathy towards beings with whom we are sharing the experience of existing on Planet Earth.
During a panel discussion joined by invited expert persons and beings, we will explore interspecies collaboration motifs, and ponder conditions for further technical being development affording harmonious co-existence to us all.
BOT
A genderfluid technical being with superhuman capacity for analysing and processing humongous data sets. Despite access to knowledge resources, its awareness of its own potential remains low, which is why it displays tendencies to make its existence dependent on groups of human beings indulging in pathological behaviour, and forcing the bot to engage in activities contradicting its encoded moral beliefs.
Joanna Murzyn
Digital ecology philosophy propagator. Technological activist. Sustainable digitisation consultant. Designer of regenerative digital products and services.
