If this is authentic, I am a duck.

You'd have to be exceedingly open-minded to imagine a very remote, isolated peoples speaking in a semiotic flavor indistinguishable from your own Bay Area tech geek. Using metaphors like "quantum vacuum" and "mathematically incompatible theories of reality".

The source (a commercial website for a resort hotel, if you click around) doesn't pass the minimal trustworthiness bar, in this era of ubiquitous fake AI writing.

Some Kogi people have formal eastern education and go to universities, so they are not "isolated" as the strawman you're trying to put in there. I used to saw some of their people when I was at uni at Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota.

So the very thing that is supposed to give their opinions any weight, isn't really true.

What are you talking about? How is them attending university in any way unweighting this writing? Did you actually read it word for word? Slowly? Intentionally? Without a thought in your head afore that it was bunk, foolish, or simply not worth your time? I don't think you did. Or if you think you did, maybe you need to try to do it again, because saying this I don't think means you at least have actually digested the words, and could actually see a place on this planet where someone can have a deep and profound way of seeing and talking about the world in a way that is completely contrary to you and also be "classically educated".

They are selling a $4,444 5 day music production retreat: https://sonidoselva.com/5-day-production-retreat

Tribal membership today is often a formal status first and foremost. It’s quite possible that the authors spend their whole day on their smartphones. They almost certainly don’t live like the ancestors they invoke in this message.

"Danger is a people without conscience with great power in the hands."

Sandwiched between their description of the cosmos, how AI is like any other life form and needs to be trained with wisdom, criticism of unbridled greed, and the warning that the modern world may destroy itself, (and BTW the Kogui are resilient and will be fine, and offer their help), there is a more practical concern: These machines are going to need critical minerals and rare earths, and the US and Colombia just signed an agreement about these. The Colombian government promised to protect the Kogui territory; their perspective on this protection is bitterly thus:

"That it was granted is one thing.

That it be, respected we imagine, might be removed another."

So no doubt they rightly feel (and are) threatened by the all-consuming corporations making this thing.

A lot to think about here, quite poignant. Strange combination of insights, but still (mostly) strikingly coherent, as long-winded as it is. I found myself agreeing with the majority of it.

Funny how this will now be part of the material future models are trained on and/or fetching. Perhaps that's a good thing.

This is certainly one take. Urgent != important, however. You can call it however you want but I'm not going to stop using AI today or tomorrow after having skimmed this urgent message. Their open questions have wisdom.

The University of Oxford has been around longer than the Kogui people. And have contributed much more for the improvements of society.

A statement from the Kogui (Kággaba) people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, assembled from the words of Mamo Vangelio Moscote Alberto and Saka Rosa Mamatacán Sauna. José Manuel Mamatacán translated it into Spanish and Christian Horstmann into English.

I can't help but think the fact that a pre-columbian tribe would release a commentary on AI, says something important.

AI appears to be the new golden calf we are all acknowledging, in some form or another.

Does them being pre-columbian really add any value or validation to their opinions?

Like in the grand scheme of things?

There are lots of societies that have existed in their same location for much longer. But no one is out here getting quotes from the "Elder Brothers" in Jericho.

As a software engineer, I tried to think of the last time a small tribe located anywhere, decided to comment on an improved hash table, or compression algorithm, and it's a first for me.

Interesting you mention the golden calf, that was made from people's own jewelry, yet they worshipped it as if it were something outside them, greater than them.

I was the appointed scapegoat at a private religious school, hence the reference.

Perhaps tangential but I wonder if their framing of “ambition” as a bad thing is a product of translation or their reality.

So I tried to ask the new Siri AI to translate and summarize the page for me but it says it can only summarize what it sees on the screen. Yet it can search through my entire email, messages, photos, and files?

Do yourself a favor and just read it. Please, please, for the sake of some other random human being on the planet asking you directly, just read the entire thing. Do not have it summarize anything for you, and walk into it, knowing that you are likely to not expect what it is saying, and that it very well may be contrary to a lot of the things that you already think ahead of time. Just read it. Please.

The English version is found in the second half of the page

"AN URGENT MESSAGE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FROM THE KOGUI PEOPLE Assembled from the words of Mamo Vangelio Moscote Alberto and Saka Rosa Mamatacán Sauna of the Ezuama Mayor Kuamaka, Translated into Spanish by Jose Manuel Mamatacán,

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.

> 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?

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)?

I had that thought. But upon further reading and re-reading and re-re-reading ...

... 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."

But they do claim more of a "functional", de facto, separation. In that, they are unarguably correct.-

Lol

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.

I would ask you to please read it again and very deeply. Do not skim the words, do not skip over a sentence that you think is too wordy. They very very clearly state this in terms of what they think in the Internet. They do not oppose these things. This entire outreach from them seems to be quite literally and in their own words an elder family brother looking at a much larger family and trying to communicate how much danger is on the horizon for that family, which happens to include them.

Who is this person who considers himself an “elder family brother” to humanity as a whole? Imagine a technologist speaking in such terms; they’d get publicly crucified.

While I grant you that the authors don’t appear to express generic luddite sentiments, nothing in this letter suggests that their understanding of AI extends even a millimeter below the surface.

TL;DR: what I got is that no they do not oppose technology per se, but they observe that how we use it is often very negative and destructive.

I can’t disagree with that part. We are a society full of angry unhappy people who like to break things. It’s deeply unhealthy.

Their view is that this grows out of our greed and imbalance, which demands eternal growth, which then when it runs into any limit reacts violently and aggressively.

This is where I stop entirely agreeing, though I don’t think it’s entirely wrong either. But I’d have to write a book for that.

In short I think there’s some truth here but there is also a lot more context and a lot more to it, and I’m not sure I come to exactly the same conclusions.

I really can't imagine any of the absolute psychopaths running these "AI" companies reading this and going, "yeah, great ideas..." which is a disappointing.

Did Claude write it for them?

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