We know you like to think that these machines can be taught from something other than human example, from goals you set for them, from their own processes, or from material they generate themselves.

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.