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.
[–] p-e-w 18 hours ago
[–] bonoboTP 17 hours ago
[–] fipar 17 hours ago
Since I first read it in Spanish, I went back to read it in English and I still get my first interpretation.
In particular, "We have come to speak to you about the intelligence you are building." set the association in my head of "you == those building the AI"
[–] nstents 17 hours ago
[–] harimau777 17 hours ago
[–] Bluestein 18 hours ago
... they do explicitly claim (at least) being part of a "whole":
"If conditions on this Earth ever become harsh enough to cause our demise, you yourselves will long since have gone from this Earth.
Nonetheless, and be that as it may, this does not mean that the fate of all humanity is not in the balance.
Clearly it is.
And that, of course, includes us.
The world is one family.
To this family we have given warnings before."
[–] Bluestein 18 hours ago
You imagine that what comes out need not resemble you at all, as if this too were not a consequence of your actions and a reflection of your attitudes.
Human beings did this, and there is no other party responsible.
So the question only becomes more complex, starting with: which aspects of human thought have been placed inside this creation?
What components of your spiritual world now reside in it?
What of your ethics guide it?
What image of responsibility do your actions and policies give it to reflect back to the world?
Who is deciding this?
You will say that these machines have access to nearly everything humanity has recorded.
Texts, images, archives, centuries of writing.
You will say that extensive research is being done to establish what the best practices are.
We ask whether having access to information is the same as understanding.
Best practices according to whom?
And we ask whether you have considered what information is not in your archives.
Our knowledge was never written down.
It is held in a language, in a territory, in a practice in a place, informed by long experience of doing what must be done there.
It is transmitted by a young man being taught directly by an old one, learning by experience how he must conduct himself in the context of raw nature.
A machine can hold the recorded voice of that elder.
But that is a very different thing from millennia of generations handing down their knowledge directly, as the common experience of a verified practice.
It is very different from physically surviving on a mountain where there is no ambulance to retrieve you and no hospital to take you to.
We do not say this to present ourselves as mystical and enigmatic people.
We say it because we believe it to be logical and self-evident.
In our experience there are things that can only be known by living them, observing them across generations, and remaining in relationship with them.
No quantity of data reproduces that experience.
The information is missing not because it has not yet been gathered, but because it is not in a form that can be gathered.
[–] ButlerianJihad 18 hours ago
You should delete these comments, and apologize to the resort hotel that made it all up for the money.
Who are these people that speak of humanity as “you”, as if they don’t belong to it (or, considering the tone of this message, believe themselves to be above it somehow)?