When you feel like you have to keep going because if you stop, everything will catch up with you, and you will have to pause and think about the things you are trying to run away from.

When you feel like AI will make you redundant if you don’t learn the latest tool fast enough and increase your output.

When you feel like you could miss the start of yet another war if you stop paying attention to the news, even for just a couple of days.

When you feel like you’re letting the “bad guys” win if you stop being angry, worried, engaged for a minute.

When you feel like you’re never doing enough or making the right choices, no matter how hard you try.

When you feel like you’ll fall in a deep, dark pit of depression if you acknowledge all the injustices and open yourself to the collective pain of humanity.

Any of these sound familiar?

So you keep going, even though you know you should stop. You keep going, even though the few people still close to you look at you with concern. Or maybe they’re also too tired to check in on you.

You keep coming back to AI assistants for assistance, despite the guilt over their environmental impact. You rarely say please and thank you to ChatGPT these days because you are barely able to maintain functional human relations, let alone consider the possible feelings of the chatbot you fear could do your job better than you.

We are using the pronoun “you” here, but we’re actually talking about ourselves and how exhausted we’ve both been feeling this past lunation. But we also feel we are not alone with these feelings as we watch other people around us lose hope, lose joy, lose their spark, shut down, close in, become more conservative and fearful.

We’re exhausted, but how do we rest when we’ve got thousands of reasons not to? Thousands of reasons to scream and shout, to run, to hide, to do anything but rest.

And resting means focusing more on being than doing. Being at rest can be hard. Precisely because we live in bodies that are never truly still while alive. We use language like “recharge” or “unplug”, as if we were appliances that could simply sit in a corner until recharged or needed.

We can never fully unplug from the web of life we are a part of. No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that we are more than, better than, smarter than, more deserving than... We are just a tiny blip in the history of our species, our lives defined and shaped by chance and stories we choose to believe more than we like to admit.

Like the story of time. We simultaneously make choices as if we had all the time in the world – to stop messing with the climate, for instance –, yet are also too afraid to take a day off, lest we get left behind.

Rather than coming to a full stop, perhaps rest in these end times is more about shifting perspective.

Sometimes the different perspective can be found under a cosy blanket from which you’re hiding from the world. Sometimes it can be found in a forest or any other place where you can get away from the constant noise of modern life and vehicles endangering your life at every turn. Sometimes it is revealed when checking up on friends and finding time to conspire – from Latin conspirare, literally “to breathe together” – together. Sometimes it appears in the rhythm of washing dishes at the end of a long day. Sometimes it emerges as you allow your body to shimmy to the beat of a song and end up in an energetic primal dance. Sometimes it can be found in a home-cooked meal you share with others. Sometimes at a protest where you take a stand for somebody else and use your privilege to speak up.

The different perspective isn’t necessarily about finding another angle to overintellectualise your fear and anxiety from. Rest seems to be more about remembering how to be human, together, than coming to a full stop. Less doing, but more being.

Lately, we have been rather poor at following this advice in our own lives. Mat has been trying to teach MBA students about business transformation in a more embodied way, while Alja has been trying to encourage teachers to think beyond content and showing them ways of creating spaces for learning. We have both been doing a lot, way more than our doing is valued at, because it appears we still believe in trying. Or at least in the power of modelling other ways of doing. Or perhaps we find it just as hard to let go as everyone else.

So this is a reminder for ourselves just as much as for you, whoever you are, reading these lines. Perhaps the only you who still have time and energy left to read these lines are web crawlers, on a mission to procure fresh data for the hungry AI models.

But if you are indeed a human – don’t worry, we won’t make you take a test to prove your humanity –, let this be your permission, your invitation to actually being human. To rest in whatever way makes sense to you. To find rest in community.

So that together we can be and become the change we want to see in the world. Because we cannot afford to let the emotionally immature men in charge be the only model of leadership while we continue our collective rush towards the cliff.

With 💜 & 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Additional pathfinding suggestions

This New Moon, we invite you to …

• 📚 … read the book series Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey.

• 💜 … listen to the latest episode of Pathfinders Podcast How might we stop role-playing as machines?

• 🔥 … join us for the next Full Moon Gathering for a yarn on rest.

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Even though reading about death probably makes all of us a bit uncomfortable by reminding us of our own mortality and the losses we had already experienced and those that are yet to come, grieving and remembering is important for healing.

And so we wanted to take just a moment of your time to honour the memory and story of Ivka, a strong and loving woman and Earthian who was born in Yugoslavia – in the part of the land we now call Croatia – in 1934. A strong, wise, deeply caring woman. She migrated to Australia in 1963 with mostly nothing more than hope, grit, and a deeply Earthian intelligence and wisdom. She endured war, upheaval, and the challenges of raising a family in an unfamiliar land. She gave enormously, humbly, from the heart. And she endured. Including the slow, cruel dance with Parkinson’s, and the natural softening of body and mind that comes with age.

She finally let go on the 19th of March 2025. And while her suffering is over, she will be sorely missed. With the stories of her strength and love for life living on through her 18 great-grandchildren, large extended family and the many plants she loved and tended.

On the other side of the world, in what was also once Yugoslavia, Alja received a gift from a friend she serendipitously made due to the US TikTok ban that didn’t yet stick. The gift was a mug, which arrived in Slovenia from Poland as a puzzle. Which is a nicer way of saying that the mug broke to pieces at some point in its thousand kilometre long journey across Europe.

Instead of throwing the broken pieces away, Alja decided to glue them together. Not quite kintsugi level of craftsmanship here – gold paint is still coming! –, but it felt darn good to see the mug stand up tall again and get a new life as a decoration with a backstory. A reminder of our collective resilience and our ability to rebuild things that are important to us.

During these End Times, many things in our lives are or will be broken by forces that feel beyond our control. When we hold the broken pieces of what we once held dear or sacred in our hands, we face a choice. What to do with the shards and fragments we are able to recover?

Some should rightly be composted, as they can never be put back together. But some – probably more than we realise – are worth mending, even though what we end up putting back together might end up serving a different purpose.

The tech oligarchs who are shaping our lives would like us to keep throwing anything and anyone that breaks apart away, to keep working through loss and grief, to keep obeying even when we know our compliance is causing harm, to keep our heads buried in the silica sand from which our electronics are made at a great cost to human and more than human life.

They don’t want us to grieve for the loss of life in our own lives, let alone the loss of life in Gaza, Congo, and many othered places they don’t want us paying attention to. They want us angry, afraid, divided, they want us indifferent to loss and suffering, including our own. They want us to keep buying poorly made stuff designed to become obsolete to ease any discomfort that might be oozing through the broken facades of the masks we feel we must present to the outer world.

🦆 all of that. You probably feel it in your heart and bones how broken things are right now. Moving fast is just going to break more things, and not necessarily move any of us in the direction we want to move towards.

So instead, we invite you to grieve. To feel the grief over the loss of things and bodies breaking apart.

But also to dance and sing with your emotions. To give love one more chance, even when you feel like you are being enveloped by darkness and despair from all sides.

Regardless of whether you took our suggestion from the previous Newmoonsletter to release some pressure by singing and dancing to David Bowie and Queen (the band, not the monarch), we invite you to feel the lyrics of their legendary song Under Pressure:

(...)
Chipping around, kick my brains 'round the floor
These are the days, it never rains, but it pours

(...)

It's the terror of knowing what this world is about
Watching some good friends screaming, "Let me out"
Pray tomorrow gets me higher, higher, high
Pressure on people, people on streets

Turned away from it all like a blind man
Sat on a fence, but it don't work
Keep coming up with love, but it's so slashed and torn
Why, why, why?
Love, love, love, love, love
Insanity laughs under pressure we're breaking

Can't we give ourselves one more chance?
Why can't we give love that one more chance?
Why can't we give love, give love, give love, give love
Give love, give love, give love, give love, give love?

'Cause love's such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure
Under pressure
Pressure

Giving love a chance also means standing up for what’s good and right. Giving love a chance means practicing love by putting things that are worth preserving back together instead of breaking them and discarding them in the name of progress. Giving love a chance means grieving the loss of things, people, certainties we took for granted.

And remembering that grieving takes time and looks different for each of us and cannot be forced. We also invite you to have compassion for your grieving and the grieving of those around you, whatever stage or shape the grief might currently be in.

Whether you’re grieving the loss of a loved one, the loss of certainty, the loss of a future you thought you or your children would have, the loss of meaning, the loss of a job, the loss of a relationship, or something else entirely, know that you are not alone. Loss and death are necessary to make space for rebirth and new beginnings.

And the End Times inevitably come with more grief than we ever thought we’d have to face. The choice of what to do with all this grief, is up to you, Pathfinder. Whether you decide to honour your memories in a special way, channel your grief into action, mend what can be mended, or something else entirely.

We just hope that you remember that you don’t have to grieve on your own. Find community, take off the broken masks you’ve outgrown, and give love one final chance in these End Times before you yourself break under pressure beyond repair.

With 💜 & 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Additional pathfinding suggestions

This New Moon, we invite you to …

• 🚘 … reflect on how to resist those who don’t understand what glue should be used for.

• 🧱 … explore the visual story of the living and the built.

• 🐦 … learn some lessons from ostriches that aren’t about burying heads in the sand.

• 💬 … ponder about a chat platform developed by philosophers to support constructive disagreement.

• 🏛️ … be mindful of the myths and prophecies of techno-theology Mat recently wondered about.

• 🌱 … reflect on what it means to grow around grief.

• 💜 … listen to the latest episode of Pathfinders Podcast How do we compost our sh*t to create the soil for thriving? (or snack on short clips on TikTok).

• 🔥 … join us for the next Full Moon Gathering to yarn about the question: “Is it time to wean ourselves off role-playing as machines?”

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Does it feel weird to be reading about the Moon’s cycles when we’re being bombarded by emergencies and breaking news? We thought it might be comforting to remember that our beloved Moon is basking in sunshine not too far from us while our nights are darkest – both literally and metaphorically of late.

Now, before you run off to deal with the next emergency in your life, we’d like to invite you to sit with us for a few minutes. Because we feel like you deserve a moment of empathy for yourself and those around you.

Look, we even made a template you can pass off as doing user research at work! If anyone were to glance over your shoulder at the office you might have been forced to return to, all they’ll see is a legit-looking empathy map:

Unlike the empathy map you might have encountered in your design thinking or product development, the map you see above isn’t about getting into the head of your “target audience” (an awful phrase you probably shouldn’t be using unless you’re in the military) and understanding how you can sell people more stuff they don’t need.

Instead, the Empathy Map for End Times invites you to spend a bit of time in your own head – and body – to reflect on how you’re dealing with what feel like end times.

Wait, what? Spending time alone with your thoughts and – even worse! – feelings, what a horrifying way to spend these dark nights – and days! But you, dear human, deserve some empathy today. Wherever you are, and whenever today is for you, you deserve a chance to take a deep breath, and make a note of what your senses are capturing right now, what your brain is busy processing, what your entire body is metabolising at this moment in time.

You don’t have to do it right now. Maybe save the map for when you can set some time aside, either on your own or with somebody you feel comfortable with.

But you see that part of the map at the top? We reserved that top part, the above-head space for all the expectations, old ways of doing things, the external pressures that are weighing you down, making you smaller, making it difficult to move or even breathe.

Once you figure out what all of those things are, it’s time to let some of that weight go. It’s ok, really. And don’t even think of it as letting go. Think of it as making space. For dreams and hopes that can reach further than you ever thought possible. Because there is nothing holding you down when you decide to let go. (Except for gravity, but that’s a topic for another Newmoonsletter.)

If it helps, make a list of things that you want to let go of. And then a list of things you want to make more space for. Don’t limit yourself. This is not a to-do list to check off in a day, a lunation, or even a solar cycle. Just write, sing, draw, shout your to-let-go-of and to-make-space-for intentions in whatever way feels right to you.

If you need some ideas, feel free to borrow from our lists below.

💩 Our to-let-go-of list:

• Waiting for systemic fixes from above.

• Shaming each other for imperfect decisions we’re forced to make.

• Allowing differences that do no harm to divide us.

• Buying our way out of discomfort.

• Allowing old habits and life scripts to hold us back.

• Reading or watching the same horrible news for hours.

• Shouting “How dare they!” into the void of social media.

• External metrics of success.

• Technology that isolates us.

🌱 Our to-make-space-for list:

• Community building and collective futurecrafting.

• Kindness towards others and ourselves.

• Expressing and processing uncomfortable feelings.

• Healing and dreaming.

• Mending and repairing.

• Singing and dancing.

• Being informed and asking “What can I do?” and “Who can I talk to?”.

• Exploring collective action.

• Hugging trees, petting moss.

• Being weird and publishing that draft.

• Walking on uneven, unpaved paths to strengthen our ankles.

• Sitting by rivers, lakes, ponds, seas.

• Listening to bird songs.

• Sharing radicles of bold ideas.

• Technology that connects us.

See how much longer and – even more importantly – fulfilling the to-make-space-for list is? That’s because it’s actually more exciting to imagine things that bring us joy and hope.

And we know that letting go is hard, even when the to-let-go-of list is shorter. Loss aversion is a known cognitive bias. But there really is so much more we can make space for. Especially if we embark on this process together.

Part of this is also using collaborative and social technologies in ways that make more space for the nourishing and less for things that make you feel bad about yourself and our collective chances for survival. This doesn’t mean looking away from injustice. It means stepping up with greater empathy and kindness. It means playing for end times like our lives depend on it – because they do.

Maybe you’re not part of the minorities that are currently being othered and persecuted. But (re)read the poem First They Came. Eventually, the knock arrives at your door and there might be nobody left to speak up for you.

But we’re not letting it come to that. The movement for hatred and exclusion has gained massive momentum around the world. We need to craft an equally – if not stronger – movement of love to counter that. Not alone, together.

Time to put your fellowship together, pathfinder. A fellowship of love, a fellowship of the planet Earth.

With 💜 & 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

“The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.” – bell hooks

Additional pathfinding suggestions

This New Moon, we invite you to …

• 💸 … explore the Shutdown315 Movement and reflect about who you are giving your attention, energy, and money to, and whether they deserve it.

• 📝 … write a eulogy for the old way of doing things to process the changes we’re going through, both on the collective and personal level.

• 🪦 … reflect on Regrets of the Dying.

• 🎧 … listen to the episode Speaking with a professional who helps people to die on the Blindboy Podcast for a delightful chat about death and playfulness.

• 🌱 … read Mat’s post Breaking the Cycle of Trauma Through Transformation.

• 🕺🏻 … release some pressure by singing and dancing to Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie.

• 🪴 … read Alja’s post Nurturing conditions for kindness & learning in public online spaces.

• 💜 … listen to the latest episode of Pathfinders Podcast What’s the role AI and digital tech could play in collective futurecrafting?

• 🔥 … join us for the next Full Moon Gathering to yarn about the question: “How do we compost our sh*t to create the soil for thriving?”

Subscribe now

About three years ago, we – Alja and Mat, that is – founded Tethix to make tech ethics more accessible and fun. Despite the 16 thousand kilometres or so that separate us, we found each other in cyberspace and realized we share a vision for crafting tools and narratives that close the ethical intent to action gap in product development.

But with the tech industry doubling down on breaking more things with unreliable AI implementations and increasing environmental footprints, we’re not sure tech companies actually care about closing the gap unless it’s legally mandated. It’s not that product development is done by bad people who don’t care. The people usually care, deeply.

But within the rules of the game of Monopoly we’re all being forced to play, good people don’t have the freedom and budgets to put their money where their heart is. And so the best they can typically do is to buy products and consulting that lead to checkbox-ticking compliance rather than meaningful systemic change. And there’s certainly a place for compliance and regulation, but that’s not what we created Tethix for – and our bank accounts reflect that reality.

It’s clear that deeper systemic change is needed to put us in right relation with our technology. “Aligning AI with human values” might be the latest buzzword, but it does nothing to challenge the conditions that incentivize exploitative business models and practices.

Our attempt at embracing the lunacy of tech

Which is why we’ve been gradually expanding the focus of our work together beyond just product development.

We’ve had fun poking at the lunacy of tech through the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter. We wanted to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures by collecting and sharing seeds of inspiration from tech practitioners and researchers, and other inspiring humans.

But then tech billionaires started naming government departments after internet memes, scrubbing diversity and inclusion off websites, and calling for more “aggressive masculine energy” in tech – among so, so many other things. And we realized that the needle on the absurdity meter we have been using to guide our musings has broken off due to unprecedented levels of absurdity.

Left without a working meter, we have to accept that we have to go beyond embracing the lunacy of tech. We feel it’s time to match that energy somehow.

We did briefly consider smashing data centers – for legal purposes, purely hypothetically! – but quickly realized that wouldn’t solve our problems. Besides, we kinda need them to maintain the fire at our virtual campfire while our physical bodies remain continents apart.

So what else can we do?

We started exploring this question in the Black Moon edition of our Newmoonsletter. And our instincts pointed us towards our bodies, both human and more than human. And getting real, raw, and personal.

Finding acceptance in absurdity

After some additional playful bodystorming around our virtual campfire, a light appeared at the end of the tunnel. A spark. A title:

And it just felt right. Though countless conversations we’ve been having, particularly in the last year, we feel the need to collectively process the anger, fear, anxiety that the current system is stoking. And what better way to do all of that than with a bit of playfulness. With love and smiles.

We see the Playbook for End Times as something worth downloading on your device. Something to read around the campfire in the evening on days when you get enough sunshine to charge your device. Something that will bring a smile to your face when you face the darkest shadows of our civilization, when Google and ChatGPT are no longer available to answer all your questions. Something to help you reconnect with your body, the bodies around you, and the body of the land in which you find yourself in during the end times.

Now, we are hoping we can get our sh*t together before it comes to this dystopian scenario in which we actually lose data centers and internet connectivity. But let’s face it, things are not looking good at the moment. Accepting how broken the current system is does not mean giving up. We see it as an invitation to dance with the absurdity, face the shadows, and collectively craft a better future on the ashes of systems that no longer serve us – if they ever did.

Is the Playbook an actual book of play? Does it take on its early meaning of a “book containing material for amusement”? Or the more modern meaning of a book of strategies in a game? Time will tell. For now, it’s a title and an invitation.

And it goes beyond what the pages of a book can even capture. It’s a broader invitation to Play_ for End Times, together.

What does it mean to Play_ for End Times?

It means…

• … creating Play_lists that help you cope with end times, whether it’s music that lights a spark in your heart or puts a smile on your face.

• … Play_finding paths to better futures in small, interconnected circles.

• … Play_crafting a better future in your neighbourhood and local community.

• … Play_shifting by starving nazzissists of attention and directing our attention towards each other, towards community building.

• … Play_ing with hostile algorithms to carve out spaces for learning and healing together.

• … Play_sharing the lessons from old stories or more recent histories and herstories to help each other remember and feel what has been forgotten.

• … Play_learning by making science reports and forecasts easier to understand.

• … Play_making by bending and breaking the rules.

• … Play_grounding by following your intuition, your gut.

It means facing the end times from a place of love. It means a different thing on different days. On some days, it means rest and taking a nap, ignoring all the news. On other days, it means taking over the streets and shouting at the top of our lungs. It means nurturing well-regulated nervous systems so we can support each other. It means dancing, it means loving, it means imagining and questioning. It means not obeying in advance. It means being the positive deviants the world needs.

It means filling in the blanks with your dreams and hopes, with your imagination.

Why play when things are getting so serious?

We’re playing for end times to let go of our baggage. Of the expectations of perfection. We’re playing to help us embrace the messy, the weird, the woo. We’re playing to imagine rainbow mirrors because we refuse to accept the dark, bright, and grey mirrors as our only options.

As players, we have to train our imagination and find our fellowship to be able to face game bosses at increasing levels of difficulty. Through play, we get the chance to know ourselves and the role each of us can play in these end times. Are you a tank fighting on the front lines, a mage casting powerful spells from a safe distance, a stealth rogue working in the shadows, or a healer supporting the entire party?

Whatever boss you decide to face and whatever role you take on, the key thing is to form a well-balanced party with other players who share the same goal.

And if enough of us play our cards right, this will not be the end of all times, but just the end of the times that were not fit for purpose.

What does this mean for the Newmoonsletter? We don’t know. Let’s play and find out together, shall we?

This New Moon, we invite you to …

• 🐚 … listen to Veronica Lightning Horse Perez share some native wisdom by telling the story What to do with mankind?

• 🌳 …watch Lyla June talk about 3000-year-old solutions to modern problems.

• 🎸 … sing Stand Together by Seth Staton Watkins.

• 🌱 … read how Abdul Semakula is introducing collective imagination gatherings to residents of Kiwaatule to rebuild trust and revitalise a dense urban area.

• 🧶 … explore the Collective Futurecrafting website Mat has been working on in the past couple of months.

• 🧠 … read about how Alja used playful and embodied design to create an online place where people can have meaningful and action-inspiring conversations about Gen AI and climate action in tech.

• 💜 … listen to the latest episode of Pathfinders Podcast How do our human bodies fit into an AI-enabled future?

• 🔥 … join us for the next Full Moon Gathering to yarn about the question: What’s the role AI and digital tech could play in collective futurecrafting?

But even more importantly, find and create space for Play_ in your own life, in your communities.

With 💜 & 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

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Welcome to December, the month of yearly recaps, reflections, and goal setting. It appears we are not immune to this collective impulse to reflect as we reach the final page of the Gregorian calendar (even though we believe we should be celebrating the new year during the spring equinox).

If we had to sum up 2024 in one image, the evergreen “This is fine.” meme feels like a perfect fit yet again.

So we wanted to take a moment to check in with you.

Are you tired of pretending everything is fine?

We certainly are. Because everything is most definitely not fine.

Our house is on fire.

The fire practitioners of Silicon Valley are gaining increasing political power, now using internet memes to name government departments. Their AI golems are being deployed to squeeze the last drops of productivity and human decency in a broken system. For every insightful article on the environmental impacts and questionable ethics of the gen AI wildfire, there’s at least dozens more blinding us with promises of productivity gains and godlike superpowers.

We’re being asked to speak about responsible AI on panels, while knowing damn well it’s mostly just performative talk that will not pay our bills. We’re supposed to feed social media algorithms with our outrage, hot-takes, hustling and bustling to justify our value and afford an existence constantly on the verge of a burnout. Too busy for family, too busy for friends, too busy to get to know our neighbors, too busy to grow our food, too busy to live.

We're all hurting in different ways. Even if we don't agree on what is hurting us most.

The absurdity of business as usual is becoming so clear it's probably visible from space at this point. (At least until the space junk problem, amplified by Starlink, doesn't get out of control.)

We can’t keep designing and developing websites, and building digital products like everything is fine.

So what now?

Do we start smashing the data centers? Perhaps.

Whatever you decide to do, this is the time to start bending and breaking the rules. Rewriting the rules of the game. Facing our shadows. Reconnecting with our bodies, the bodies around us, and the bodies of the lands in which we live. And listening to what all these bodies are dying to say – often, quite literally.

Now is the time for letting the tears flow, screaming into the void, dancing like nobody’s watching, singing at the top of your lungs with your coven, … Whatever you need to do to feel like a human with agency and a body again.

On this Black Moon1, we’re allowing ourselves to break the rules of the Newmoonsletter. Allowing ourselves to get real, raw, and personal with you. A small act of rebellion, perhaps. Perhaps something to inspire the next generation of large language models that will try to figure out what the hell humans want by ingesting this text.

Hopefully, something that inspires you, human, to share how you truly feel with others, and to reflect on what your project 2025 should be. Because we suspect you, as a Pathfinder, aren’t buying the bullshit dystopian visions the tech billionaires are trying to sell us while building their cozy doomsday bunkers either.

A time for rooting and grounding.

Recently, a quote from the Atmos essay Tree of Life has resonated strongly with both of us:

The etymology of the word “radical” comes from “radix” meaning “root.” As Angela Davis once said, “radical simply means grasping things at the root.” For me, at this moment, that means regrounding ourselves in our purpose. Rather than turning on each other, let’s refocus on what needs to be done. Just as Yyggdrasil’s roots reach into the nether realms, we can draw strength from and allow ourselves to be radicalized by the pain we feel now, and let it motivate us to act.

With the Newmoonsletter, we’ve been gathering seeds of inspiration for the past 14 moons. Now we wonder, have any of these seeds germinated? Have they had enough oxygen in the air, have they been able to reach moist, fertile soil in which a radicle can emerge from the seed?

As the world is getting weirder, it’s time to root and ground. We cannot connect to the ecologies around us and re-attune to the relationality of life if we’re un-rooted, un-grounded, or up-rooted. It’s time to root and ground in place, find the companions that can support us, to be able to withstand the strong winds and other forces that are constantly trying to uproot us.

So, instead of speaking to your intellect, we wanted to speak to your heart-mind, to your gut, to your soul, whatever you prefer to call it. If generative AI has taught us anything with its ability to convincingly mimic human thought through language, it is to appreciate what is still uniquely human: our bodies.

The fire practitioners of Silicon Valley might consider our bodies a bug in the system, a flaw to eliminate. We’re inviting you to reconnect with your body and the bodies around you, and be curious about everything our bodies can do that defies logic and cannot (yet) be imitated by software running on silicon.

And to pay attention to what is happening to all our bodies as we spend an increasing amount of time in companionship with silicon bodies. And how different our bodies – both human and more than human – feel when they connect with each other through direct touch.

Reflecting on what feels worth nurturing.

Here’s the thing: we do not know yet what the Newmoonsletter will look like in 2025. What we do know is that collecting seeds isn’t enough anymore, we need to nurture conditions for seed germination, for rooting, and grounding with our bodies.

Sure, we could do the obvious thing and keep pointing out the absurdity and lunacy of tech. But, at this point, the satire writes itself, as it gets increasingly harder to distinguish actual news from The Onion.

And we could keep weaving the intellectual threads between the articles we read, making ourselves – and you – feel awfully clever and informed, but do any of us truly need more content to consume? Isn’t your mind already oversaturated by breaking news, hot-takes, research, and essays that intellectualize the existential dread we feel?

So instead, allow us to share some things we recently felt in our bodies as worth nurturing.

In the past lunation, Alja ran a Generative AI Exploratorium with the ClimateAction.tech community. And while the Exploratorium offered participants plenty of resources to support the exploration, the real magic unfolded during the open discussions. When people were given the time and space to share stories, experiences, and process their conflicting emotions together.

Meanwhile, Mat has been working on Collective Futurecrafting pilots in his local community in Sydney. Inspired by local activists, elders, and healers, he is envisioning circles of people coming together to feel, to dream, to heal, and explore pathways and take action to address both local and systemic challenges. He’s starting small, by interfacing with the Parents & Citizens groups embedded in schools.

We’ve also been getting reports of how students’ moral imagination has been tickled by the Rainbow Mirrors lecture Mat held at the University of Sydney two moons ago. And there’s been many insightful private messages about his Ministry of Futility game. (We do hope that more people will feel comfortable sharing these thoughts in public.)

And we made Gemma – Mat’s wife, no relation to Google’s AI models – laugh with the Pathfinders Podcast by exploring how we relate to technology through the lens of popular culture references. Gemma has been invaluable in ensuring we have the time and space to yarn together at lengths. And the gift of the laughter is the least we can give back to everyone who has been supporting our crazy visions in these past three years of our shared adventure.

Besides, laughter should never be underestimated. Whether we’re laughing at the absurdity of the tech world or our own ridiculousness, laughing reconnects us to something deeper—a spark of joy that ripples outward, softening the edges of the weight we carry. It’s a rhythm that feels timeless, a small but profound rebellion against the tide of despair.

Perhaps laughter is one of humanity’s most powerful tools – unassuming, yet profoundly necessary – as we face what lies ahead. It reminds us that even in shadow, light can be found.

In these increasingly dark times, our Eastern European ancestry – a surprising connection we share, despite living in different hemispheres – stirs up, bringing a bottle of home-brewed rakija to the table and inviting us to embrace dark humor as we dance kolo with our shadows.

On some days, “Still alive,” is a perfectly reasonable answer to “How are you?”, as Alja keeps reminding Mat. And then we yarn, we make each other laugh as we reflect on the lunacy of tech and all other business as usual. In between, Mat’s kids or Alja’s cats wave at the camera across over 16 thousand kilometers that separate us. And we feel more human, more grounded. Even though our seasons never match.

Being human, actually human, is messy, weird, awkward, devastating, often loud. “Never apologize for your kids being comfortable enough to express their emotions,” Alja keeps telling Mat after they’ve burst into his office to share some experience. The kids are our canaries in the coal mine. The coal mines we’re taking too close to shut down because of our addition to extraction and growth.

But being human is also heart-warming, joyful, funny, and magical, as laughing, dancing, a deep conversation, or feeling part of a community remind us. So it is these little moments – of connection, of codesinging, playing, imagining, sharing stories of grief and ecoanxiety, yarning around real and virtual campfires – that we will continue nurturing going forward.

The stretch of our human bodies, a silly dance, a shared laugh, a warm smile, a cup of tea together. These simple acts are but a quiet and powerful rebellion against the numbing tide of our current paradigm.

It is this world that we rebel against – a world that cultivates apathy and demands disconnection from our shared humanity and more than human life. Instead, we choose to be radicle.

Will you join us?

Your invitation to engage in meandering conversations

In the latest episode of Pathfinders Podcast, we started unpacking the shadows of (artificial) intelligence by exploring its history, pop culture references, and different contexts. We danced with the question: How intelligent do AI companions actually need to be?

You can watch the full episode on YouTube, or listen to it on Substack or in your favorite podcast app.

During the first Full Moon of 2025, we invite you – yes, you! – to join us around the virtual campfire for our next 🌕 Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering on Monday, January 13, 2025, at 7PM AEDT / 9AM CET, when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun to yarn about the question: How do our human bodies fit into an AI enabled future?

So, pack your curiosity, moral imagination, and smiles, and sign up on the event page so that we can lug an appropriate number of logs around the virtual campfire.

An invitation to engage your feelings

A poetic seed crafted by Mat

My heart is bursting. Our world is hurting.
A want to heal, I want to feel.

The pain of my child grieving for a future lost.
His tears tell a tale.
A bird no longer singing.
A river no longer flowing.
A flower no longer growing.
A future he thought was glowing.
The earth cracks open, and the sky grows heavy with forgetting.

I reach beyond my grasp.
I feel alone.

The calling of my ancestors.
The song of those unborn.
To feel. To dream. To act.

To imagine.

The future cries before me, its voice raw with the echoes of what we’ve left undone.

A circle shines.

It calls to me, not in words,
but in the soft hum of belonging.
I step closer, and find others waiting.

Hands open.
Eyes wide.
Hearts carrying the same ache.
Awaiting a shared embrace.
The wind whispering the same rhythmic words:
Can we dream together again?
Dream again, together.

We sit.
We speak.
We listen.

Stories weave between us like threads of gold,
binding what is broken that needs repair,
composting what is dying that no longer serves.

A bird sings again, softly at first,
But with the promise of dawn.

A river flows, not as it once did,
But as it might yet become.

The circles grow, a living geometry of active hope.

Its rhythm hums in the street before me
a hum of the earth calling,
its light reflects in the sky,
its pulse beats within us.

We are not alone.
We are circles within circles.
Life within life.

The future no longer cries.
It whispers.
It dreams.
It waits for our hands and hearts to craft it.

And so, together, we begin

A music seed that made us sing & dance along

Hold on lightning
Don't close your eyes when it's frightening
Let that thunder grow
Through the ages
You open up all the cages and
Hold that spirit
Hold that spirit close

About the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

If you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues, and leaving an offering to the algorithmic gods by engaging with it online.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the first new moon in 2025. Until then, find some rules to bend and break, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🕶️ Current conditions: Despite clouds getting heavier, you can still get sunburns when looking at all the bright-mirrored reality distortion fields emanating from Silicon Valley, so keep some low-tech sunglasses within reach

Fire practitioners are feeling so optimistic about our collective future, they are taking a break from prepping their doomsday bunkers to spread the gospel of AI salvation with us, mere mortals and web crawlers. Well, unless the web crawler belongs to their competitor, in which case they have to protect their business interests and brilliant ideas from being scraped and added to the AI commons. (Hint: Try asking OpenAI’s ChatGPT to read the essay Machines of Loving Grace written by the CEO of Anthropic.)

But we’re all in this together, the techno-optimists with escape plans reassure us. AI will “fix climate” any day now, so don’t let the biodiversity warnings and news of failing carbon sinks get you down. The fire practitioners promise to offset our collective carbon sins and build nuclear power plants to power our cities data centers, so we can all keep feeling good about our (over)reliance on the increasingly heavy clouds. (See: Humanity is on the verge of ‘shattering Earth’s natural limits’, say experts in biodiversity warning, Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing?, Google Backs New Nuclear Plants to Power AI, and Amazon signs agreements for innovative nuclear energy projects to address growing energy demands)

Surely, you will rejoice at the news that the brightest AI golem minds are now being trained to relieve you of the drudgery of filling out boring forms and spreadsheets. And why, yes, they might also relive you of your job, but another good news is that the fire practitioners at OpenAI have now appointed a chief economist to study the impacts of your redundancy. (See: Claude AI tool can now carry out jobs such as filling forms and booking trips, says creator, Google is reportedly developing a ‘computer-using agent’ AI system, and Dr. Ronnie Chatterji named OpenAI’s first Chief Economist)

But again, you’ve got nothing to worry about. When you try to find a new job, an AI golem hired to manage human resources will be right there for you to tell you just how inadequate you are at filling forms. Inevitably, you’ll pay your own AI golem to fill job-application forms for you, so that the AI golem on the other end will evaluate your golem’s outputs. Rinse and repeat, until it’s AI golems processing forms all the way down, and all humans fall out of the loop. (See: Job hunting is demoralising enough without having my personality eviscerated by an AI interviewer and Welcome to the Ministry of Futility)

Before we reach that point, we hope we’ll realize AI golems actually make decent brainstorming and conversational learning partners, as we recently explored in our podcast. Perhaps they can even help us remember what all these forms really are for. And reconsider whether form-filling really is worth the energy and resources that could otherwise power a small city.

If you’re wondering and pondering about these questions, we hope you’ll join us in the climate-focused generative AI Exploratorium throughout November. The Exploratorium will be a collaborative online exploration journey in which we’re giving ourselves the time and space to uncover and process diverse perspectives through open conversations.

And if you’re looking for additional seeds to inspire both explorations and conversations, we hope that the seeds we have collected for this Newmoonsletter help you look for paths not yet illuminated by profit-seeking fire practitioners.

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

It’s been almost two years since ChatGPT took the world by storm. And now, AI models are getting ready to step out of the familiar boundaries of chat boxes and API requests, and venture into the wild world web. Get ready to start seeing more LinkedIn posts about agentic AI as our AI assistants learn how to use the mouse and figure out how to get past cookie notices and captchas.

And if you are struggling to keep up with all the AI buzzwords and hype, look no further than the State of AI Report 2024. The report is a lengthy recap of this year’s developments and trends in AI research, industry, politics, safety, and more.

Just as interesting as keeping track of the evolving AI capabilities is examining the shifts in AI-related myths and metaphors that shape our mental models of how the technology works. This blog post explores how the AI metaphors of toolbox, companion, and enchanted object distribute agency differently between the user and the AI.

As the metaphor of AI as an agent – hopefully not of chaos – starts gaining traction, it is certain to bring its own mental baggage to the evolving mythology of AI. And a recent NN/g blog post rightly brings attention to the fact that emerging technologies offer fertile ground for tech myth-making, which in turn affects how people interact with new technologies. Especially ones that aren’t fully transparent about their inner workings.

And while it appears that most of the tech industry is focused on adding new AI capabilities and releasing new devices, real innovation is done by engineers who are figuring out how to do more with less. Take for instance /e/OS, a “deGoogled” version of Android that also extends the lifespan of devices no longer supported by their manufacturers. With a leaner OS, even older mobile devices can happily run for longer, helping their owners reduce their environmental footprint.

We would all get more out of our existing devices if the software we use – and build – wasn’t so bloated. This includes our websites. If you work in web or are curious about learning more about the building blocks of the web, we invite you to explore HTML for People. This beginner-friendly online book can remind you that you don’t need a complicated tech stack with multiple dependencies to build and publish a website. Just plain good ol’ HTML for content and structure, and a bit of CSS for style.

And hey, these days, AI assistants can also help you simplify your projects and ideas, you just have to ask them the right questions. For inspiration, check out these examples of how you can quickly build simple web tools using Claude’s Artifacts feature, mostly with basic HTML, CSS, and just a sprinkle of JavaScript.

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

Perhaps pairing with AI coding assistants might help us build more efficient software. Maybe even help us figure out how to “green” other types of roles. Or are we fooling ourselves and generative AI is just a resource-heavy distraction that’s moving us further away from each other and our climate goals? Between Sam Altman’s naive insistence that AI will “fix climate” and failed calls for an AI pause, lies a sea of nuance and diverse perspectives that don’t get as much coverage.

Throughout November, Alja will be facilitating a Generative AI Exploratorium within the ClimateAction.tech (CAT) community that invites you to take a deep dive into the sea of nuances with other curious explorers. The format of the Exploratorium is based on our previous work on collaborative online learning experiences, but adapted to accommodate different modes and levels of participation.

If you’re interested in joining this climate-focused Exploratorium, we also encourage you to join the CAT community for full access to all resources and the Exploratorium Slack channel in a wonderful online community. And if the times of the four live discussion sessions of the Exploratorium don’t get along with your timezone or work schedule, you can still participate fully async or even organize a local discussion group. Reliable sources tell us that Mat is itching to start an APAC yarn circle.

And if you can’t find any human discussion partners, you might even enlist the conversational skills of your neighborly AI chatbot. While the reliability and omniscience of AI chatbots are still very much up for discussion (rightly so), AI chatbots can make good conversational and learning partners.

Perhaps they might even help us retrain our innate conversational learning abilities, as we explored in the most recent episode of our podcast. Especially if we’re willing to let go of the answer-machine metaphor and focus more on being a conversational partner. (Which includes remembering that sometimes we all say things we overheard somewhere without bothering to fact-check.)

Conversations help us learn, make sense of the world, and even inform our decisions. Unfortunately, there is a dark side to every great power, as the latest suicide-related chatbot lawsuit reminds us. With great conversational power comes great possibility, but also great responsibility. Unfortunately, the latter is a lesson tech companies aren’t yet taking that seriously in their mad rush towards profitability and market dominance.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

Recent research shows how collaborative imagination of a shared future can bring people closer together in the present. We suspect a similar effect might be observed in human-AI co-imagination, despite the AI partner just playing along with whatever the human needs. But the resulting human bond might be just as strong, which is why chatbot relationships can have such a strong hold over humans, occasionally even leading to harm.

That’s why the way we design and integrate AI capabilities – especially conversational ones – into products matters. For instance, an AI mediation tool built by a Google DeepMind researchers showed how iteratively generating statements that best reflect the diverse viewpoints of a group can help the group find common ground, even on divisive topics. This approach works because humans retain the agency of reviewing and rating statements.

When considering adding Large Language Models (LLMs) to our products, we must remain mindful and vigilant about the limitations and quirks of this technology. From security concerns to hallucinations in medical transcripts, LLMs still appear to have a “mind” of their own.

Recent fairness research from OpenAI also shows they are not completely immune to first-person biases based on seemingly trivial details like your name. And just like some humans, they also appear to be easily distracted by other unimportant details, as demonstrated by a team of researchers at Apple.

Perhaps different approaches that would enable agents to think fast and slow with a Talker-Reasoner architecture might better equip our AI assistants for dealing with the complexity of human demands.

And in more applicable research news, Google DeepMind and Hugging Face have released SynthID Text, a tool for watermarking and detecting LLM-generated text. At this point, it’s worth reminding ourselves that OpenAI decided against releasing their own watermarking a tool over fears of losing users, but also valid concerns about stigmatization of non-native speakers. As with most things related to generative AI, caution is always advised during implementation and deployment.

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

These days, it can be hard to remember that digital technologies we now take for granted aren’t even that old. Take for instance search. Google would still be considered a young adult at its 26 years, but even those of us who are one or several decades older now struggle to imagine doing our knowledge jobs without a search engine. But this reflection from a former reference librarian is a good reminder that libraries and librarians met our (re)search needs quite well before Google. Obviously, we can now get answers to many more questions in much less time, but often by sacrificing accuracy.

Are we now headed in a similar direction with AI assistants? Time will tell. Well, at least until we are collectively willing and able to dedicate enough energy and other resources to keep the cloud and the rest of our computing infrastructure running. Eventually, physical limits will likely force us to rediscover and reinvent low tech solutions.

And to further demonstrate that technological “solutions” don’t have to be complicated, here’s some recent research which indicates that playing natural sounds to ecosystems could help them bring back to life by attracting different species. As with any technology, even this simple acoustic enrichment trick should be wielded responsibly to avoid attracting species to non-viable ecosystems or fooling ourselves into thinking that we – or an AI model trained on our biases – know best what an ecosystem needs to heal.

A music seed to sing & dance along

And now, for some simpler human acoustic enrichment, here’s a music seed that can remind us of the hauntingly beautiful fragility of our humanity. Modernity often expects us to be “good machines”, but at the end of the day, we are only, but wonderfully, human. Let’s treat each other with the care and kindness we deserve.

I can turn it on
Be a good machine
I can hold the weight of worlds if that's what you need
Be your everything

I can do it
I can do it
I'll get through it

But I'm only human
And I bleed when I fall down
I'm only human
And I crash and I break down
Your words in my head, knives in my heart
You build me up and then I fall apart
'Cause I'm only human

Pathfinders Podcast

If you’d like to keep exploring the lunacy of tech with us, we invite you to listen and subscribe to the Pathfinders Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. The podcast is a meandering exploration inspired by the seeds planted in the Newmoonsletter at the beginning of the lunation cycle, and the paths illuminated during the Full Moon Gathering.

The question that emerged in the October Newmoonsletter and guided our discussion was: Why aren’t more people using AI conversational interfaces for conversational learning? In this episode, we wonder whether digital technologies can satisfy our yearning for a yarn and support embodied conversational learning, especially through voice-based conversational interfaces.

You can watch the full episode on YouTube, or listen to it on Substack or in your favorite podcast app.

Take a listen and join us at the next Full Moon Gathering if you’d like to illuminate additional paths for our next episode!

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Join us for the Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering

In this lunation cycle, we’re inviting Pathfinders to gather around our virtual campfire to explore the question: How intelligent do AI companions actually need to be? – but it’s quite likely that our discussion will take other meandering turns as well.

So, pack your curiosity, moral imagination, and smiles, and join us around the virtual campfire for our next 🌕 Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering on Friday, November 15 at 7PM AEDT / 9AM CET, when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun.

This is a free and casual open discussion, but please be sure to sign up so that we can lug an appropriate number of logs around the virtual campfire. And yes, friends who don’t have the attention span for the Newmoonsletter are also welcome, as long as they reserve their seat on the logs.

Keep on finding paths on your own

If you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Until then, find some time and space for conversations, visit your local library, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🍓 Current conditions: Beware of fire practitioners trying to distract us with strawberries, red as our planet’s vital signs

As OpenAI's new AI golems finally learn how to count 'r's in the word strawberry, the company’s chief fire practitioner Sam Altman promises us more future AI magic, such as fixing climate and establishing a space colony. And why shouldn’t we trust the vision and leadership skills of the fire practitioner who inspired 9 executives to quit his company in the past 9 months? (See: OpenAI's new “chain of thought” model is designed to reason like a human. How does it cope with a moral dilemma?, Sorry, AI won’t “fix” climate change, and Turning OpenAI Into a Real Business Is Tearing It Apart)

We are definitely sensing a swelling in the cognitive dissonance field in Silicon Valley. Take for instance Microsoft, the Big Tech giant with a pledge to be carbon negative by 2030. The same Microsoft whose greenhouse gas emissions grew by 30% last year as the company also tries to win the AI race. And the same Microsoft that is selling AI as a way to extract more fossil fuels. (See: Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI)

We admit we’re not fluent in this dialect of techno-optimist doublethink. Perhaps it’s our lack of a backup doomsday bunker that is making it challenging to see how placing all our eggs in one AI magic basket – while continuing business as usual – could lead to a flourishing future for humanity. Especially as more of our planet’s vital signs are flashing red. (See: Inaugural Planetary Health Check finds ocean acidification on the brink)

So we decided to put the advanced reasoning skills of ChatGPT-o1 to the test. The strawberry-flavored golem reasons that “trusting that AI will “somehow” fix the climate without addressing underlying systemic issues may be overly optimistic”, and that “relying on (AI) as a singular solution is insufficient”.

ChatGPT-o1 also appears quite capable (and willing) of advising Sam Altman on concrete actions he might take to actually increase the positive impact AI could have on climate. Given the dwindling numbers of leaders at OpenAI, it might be time for this Sam to drink his own AI magic potion and heed ChatGPT’s advice. That is, if he actually is serious about finding (and funding) AI’s magical abilities to “fix climate” and not just painting a bright mirror to woo investors.

If at any point in this Newmoonsletter you start feeling like the cognitive dissonance field is getting too strong, we’d like to remind you that a fellowship can go far even in what seems like a hopeless situation. In the latest episode of Pathfinders Podcast, we travel to Middle-earth with Frodo, Gandalf, and a very different Sam to look for active hope and playfulness in our stories. Perhaps the fellowship that ends up defeating our own Sarumans and Saurons and taking responsibility for our climate impacts will also include AI companions.

And we hope that the playful seeds we have collected in this Newmoonsletter help you find your own fellowship and discover rainbow-mirror visions of the future. A future not just full of intelligence, but a future of care, in which we figure out how to maintain a liveable atmosphere on our home planet before retreating to space colonies (or doomsday bunkers).

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

As companies like OpenAI try to convince investors to part with more of their money, AI mythmaking continues to play an important part in maintaining a sense of urgency and inevitability in the AI race. In a recent essay, Eryk Salvaggio critically explores some of the more prevalent generative AI myths of control, intelligence, and future capabilities.

We certainly have a long way to go to fully understand what AI chatbots actually are, and to find the appropriate metaphors to describe our different ways of interacting with them. On that note, Alja recently explored whether ChatGPT can be more accurately described as a validation box, offering (Self)validation as a Service whenever we need to validate our biases, assumptions, thoughts, or ideas.

And while Sam Altman is dreaming of a faraway future in which AI fixes climate, Dr. Sasha Luccioni (AI & Climate Lead at Hugging Face) and her collaborators published a comprehensive primer on The Environmental Impacts of AI. In the primer, you can explore impacts throughout the AI lifecycle and find an overview of policies and other initiatives that aim to address environmental impacts.

We’re glad to see increased awareness and interest in the environmental impacts of AI, but we’d like to remind everyone that all software, regardless of its level of sophistication and type of intelligence, has environmental impacts. If you’re involved in building, deploying, and managing software development in any capacity, we strongly encourage you to take the free Green Software Practitioner online course. By going through the course, you’ll be able to better understand carbon emissions of software and start exploring practices, patterns, and principles that can help you design more efficient software – with or without AI capabilities.

And if you’re looking for resources that can help you enact responsibility and ethics more broadly, we invite you to explore our refreshed tools and techniques directory. The updated directory is now part of ETHOS, our responsible tech journey companion, which we recently replanted to make it easier to explore intents and nurture reflection. No account needed, no personal data collected, no tracking, just practical tools for your everyday practice. (And yes, we’ve got a new category just for AI chatbots.)

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

The replanted ETHOS seedling has also sprouted a new leaf that allows you to explore our Tethix Mirrors. Each of the four distinct mirrors of the taxonomy is an invitation to question the role of different technologies in society and life more broadly. The tool is best used in collaborative settings, where different perspectives can be brought to the table.

Mat recently had an opportunity to introduce the Mirrors as a tool for nurturing collective moral imagination to a group of Masters of Design students at the University of Sydney. You can read about the discussions that the Mirrors inspired and explore Mat’s lecture slides and on our blog.

Of course, the Mirrors are just one of the many tools that can spark and nurture our collective imagination. If you’re looking for additional tools that can be applied even more broadly, we invite you to explore The Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit recently launched by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

And when you do embark on a collective imagination journey with your fellowship, don’t forget that a bit of playfulness can often be the key to unlocking creativity and rewriting the rules of the game – just as we explored in the recent episode of our podcast.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

It seems likely that more of our fellowships will also include AI companions, influencing our thoughts and actions, both directly and indirectly. Recent research shows that while AI chatbots can implant false memories in people, they can also help people stop believing in conspiracy theories.

Persuasiveness seems to work both ways, though. A security researcher managed to plant false memories in ChatGPT to steal user data, while another group of researchers explored the gullibility of Large Language Models (LLMs) to increase product visibility. And they even have a new word for this evolution of SEO: GSO or Generative Search Optimization. (A tactic reporter Kevin Roose recently tried to use to improve his tainted reputation with AI chatbots.)

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all just got along and focused on collaboration and truthfulness? Well, a “Co-LLM” algorithm can now help a general purpose AI model to phone a friendly expert model when it needs additional expertise. A feature the bigger AI models with a tendency to answer questions they know nothing about certainly could use more often.

And a recent paper explores how we might build AI systems that can be better partners in thought, rather than just tools for thought, by using the science of collaborative cognition.

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

For now, though, the world of AI companions still revolves around the human, which doesn’t make the relationship a true partnership. Take for example SocialAI: a new social network on which an infinite number of super-engaged AI-generated followers hang onto your every post. Peak dystopia or a playground for ideas and self-exploration? You decide.

And if you think you can escape tech and AI in your spiritual practice, think again. Or rather, dive into Rest of World’s Digital Divinity series, which explores how ancient religious traditions are embracing modern technology.

But you know what’s the best ancient technology we have? Collaboration. Just ask octopuses, who seem to have recruited different species of fish help them hunt as a group. And yes, sometimes they do punch fish that get too opportunistic, but in principle they seem to have figured out how to assemble and lead a hunting fellowship with diverse roles for their fish fellows.

So, remember, while LLMs are still struggling with figuring out how to please a single – granted, very finicky – species, octopuses are out there with their 9 brains, teaching us all a master class in cross-species collaboration. Let’s just hope that LLMs don’t get too inspired by these magnificent ocean beings and start punching uncooperative humans. Especially once they find how intensifying ocean acidification might affect the octopuses and other marine life.

A music seed to sing & dance along

Whether you’re a fish swimming getting in the way of an octopus in a bad mood or a human trying to make it through the day, sometimes life just throws punches at you. Today’s music seed is here to remind us that we can help each other rise up, both in times of need and times of joy. If you need a bit of a lift to embrace the lunacy of tech – and life in general – we invite you to listen to Rise Up by Andra Day.

You're broken down and tired
Of living life on a merry-go-round
And you can't find the fighter
But I see it in you, so we gon' walk it out
And move mountains
…
All we need, all we need is hope
And for that, we have each other
And for that, we have each other, and (We will rise)

Pathfinders Podcast

If you’d like to keep exploring the lunacy of tech with us, we invite you to listen and subscribe to the Pathfinders Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. The podcast is a meandering exploration inspired by the seeds planted in the Newmoonsletter at the beginning of the lunation cycle, and the paths illuminated during the Full Moon Gathering.

The question that emerged in the September Newmoonsletter and guided our discussion was: How do we embrace the lunacy of tech with playfulness? (And lessons from Middle-earth.) In this episode, we embrace our inner hobbits and wizards as we travel to Isengard and stare into the fires of Mount Doom to explore how playfulness and stories can inspire active collective hope in the face of uncertainty.

You can watch the full episode on YouTube, or listen to it on Substack or in your favorite podcast app.

Take a listen and join us at the next Full Moon Gathering if you’d like to illuminate additional paths for our next episode!

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Join us for the Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering

In this lunation cycle, we’re inviting Pathfinders to gather around our virtual campfire to explore the question: Why aren’t more people using conversational interfaces for conversational learning? – but it’s quite likely that our discussion will take other meandering turns as well.

So, pack your curiosity, moral imagination, and smiles, and join us around the virtual campfire for our next 🌕 Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering on Thursday, October 17 at 6PM AEDT / 9AM CEST, when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun.

This is a free and casual open discussion, but please be sure to sign up so that we can lug an appropriate number of logs around the virtual campfire. And yes, friends who don’t have the attention span for the Newmoonsletter are also welcome, as long as they reserve their seat on the logs.

Keep on finding paths on your own

If you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Until then, keep looking for your fellowship, explore cross-species collaboration, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🔥 Current conditions: Even corn is sweating hard in this scorching AI summer as fire practitioners keep burning money, people, and the planet to keep their golem kilns running

This AI summer is getting so hot that even corn is sweating heavily in the US Midwest, where fire practitioners just happen to be building new data centers with lower cooling bills. Now, the multiplying data centers that are used as kilns for AI golems are not the only thing that’s making corn sweat on our warming planet. But the rising emissions the fire practitioners are trying to carbon-account away are sure to keep increasing cooling costs, regardless of where they try to tax-evade next. So unless the plan is to harvest corn sweat for data center cooling, it might be time for the fire practitioners to cool it a bit with their world domination plans. (See: ‘Corn Sweat’ and Climate Change Bring Sweltering Weather to the Midwest, The Move to Improve: Why the Midwest is Housing More Data Centers, and How Big Tech is quietly trying to reshape how pollution is reported)

After all, a recent ruling has found Google’s fire practitioners to be already winning the game of Monopoly they’re playing with our search queries. Strangely enough, the new apple-flavored AI golems that will be unleashed onto our made-in-the-global-South devices, might soon be answering more questions that might otherwise be “googled”. Thus, helping Google’s fire practitioners argue they are but a humble tech startup trying to earn an honest dime with ads nobody wants to click on. (See: Google's 'monopoly' ruling may adversely affect Apple. Will Apple Intelligence come to its rescue?)

Speaking of power-hungry tech mages pretending to be but humble apprentices interested in benefiting rather than exploiting humanity. Powerful fire practitioners have discovered a new shade of morally gray by realizing they can acquire potential competitors without actually acquiring them, thus avoiding regulatory scrutiny. So, when we say that ChatGPT appears to have a stronger moral compass than its makers, we want to remind everyone that the bar is getting lower every day. (See: The New A.I. Deal: Buy Everything but the Company)

But we get it. It’s hard trying to convince your shareholders that you’ll continue growing forever, while at the same time convincing regulators that you’re nothing more than an innovative tech startup that’s creating jobs for AI golems humans. And to also keep up with the incessant demands for growth while you’re burning money on golem kilns and fees, you sometimes have to sacrifice a couple of thousands of humans to appease Moloch shareholders. (See: Sweden's Klarna says AI chatbots help shrink headcount)

We cannot help but wonder: who will be paying for all these magic AI golems as the well-paid tech workforce shrinks to the bare minimum, and fewer people can afford multiple, increasingly expensive subscription services? We suppose that is a concern for another quarter. For now, Moloch shareholders have been appeased, and the data centers have not yet been flooded or incinerated in wildfires.

And hey, perhaps we’ll all finally get the increase in abundance, leisure time, and more just distribution of wealth that tech-enabled progress was supposed to enable. And enough disposable income to afford several subscription-based AI companions, on top of groceries! As of now, the 15-hour workweek Keynes predicted back in the 1930s still seems like science fiction and the details of how our obsession with growth is going to keep us within planetary boundaries remain vague. Ah, wait. We almost forgot. AGI. Miracle energy source. AI fixes climate. Immortality. Got it. (See: Ray Kurzweil: Technology will let us fully realize our humanity, What should we do with the time that new technologies save?, and The tipping points of climate change — and where we stand)

You see how the fire practitioners of Silicon Valley are willing to bet everything and everyone for a chance of winning the AI race? Not very demure, not very mindful. But as they continue releasing their AI golems into the devices and apps we rely on, we wonder whether their golems can be enlisted to help us make more mindful decisions. In a special bonus episode of Pathfinders Podcast, we interview ChatGPT to explore how these AI golems could help humanity rebuild communication bridges, and think different.

And we hope that the seeds we have collected for this Newmoonsletter can help you explore perspectives that might just lead to paths where we are able to preserve a liveable planet for our children. A human can still dream, right? (At least until fire practitioners force us to upload our consciousness into the cloud.)

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

As generative AI approaches the peak of inflated expectation, many people still fall on the extremes ends of the spectrum of responses to generative AI.

On the freezing end that doesn’t want to touch gen AI with a stick, people are still dismissing the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their limitations and biases. If you fall on this end, you might want to explore today’s gen AI product landscape with a bit more curiosity, even if it is just to provide better criticism.

On the other, wildfire end of the spectrum, full of unbridled enthusiasm, people see LLMs as the only tool they’ll ever need and try to hammer down every (in)possible task with them. If you fall on this end, it might help to get a broader sense of what it takes to develop an LLM application, and this three-stage framework by Ben Dickson is a good starting point.

If you’re like us, you probably fall somewhere in between and realize that the choice of whether to use LLMs should ideally be based on more than just a financial spreadsheet and benchmark performance. The development of LLMs is filled with ethical dilemmas of all shapes and sizes. As a recent Vox article explores, it might actually be impossible to run a big AI company ethically given how Anthropic – which was supposed to be an ethical haven for OpenAI refugees – has been acting lately.

At least Anthropic is a bit more open than OpenAI when it comes to sharing system prompts that define Claude’s personality and style. Along with uncovered system prompts for Apple’s upcoming AI assistant, LLMs' system prompts provide a fascinating look inside the “minds” of LLMs and how they might be inclined to interact if left to their own devices.

That said, OpenAI did recently release a GPT-4o System Card that reports on how catastrophically risky their latest publicly available model is. We appreciate the transparency, but it’s worth noting that GPT-4o’s persuasive capabilities have crossed into what OpenAI defines as medium risk threshold. Even OpenAI openly acknowledges that the anthropomorphization and emotional reliance on models such as GPT-4o is a societal impact worthy of further scrutiny. So even if you think LLMs are nothing more than stochastic parrots, we think we should all be a bit more curious about how LLMs make humans feel as they become increasingly convincing imitators of human interactions.

And while we appreciate these glimpses into how the most popular LLMs work and affect their users, we’re still holding our breath when it comes to environmental transparency. We’re still waiting for the day when OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta & co. decide to share the environmental costs of their large models, instead of trying to rewrite the rules on net zero. (If you’re unsure about what net zero even means, we highly recommend checking out the Climate commitments section in the free Green Software Practitioner course.)

At least we can now look forward to the day when regulations such as the EU AI Act will force these providers of general-purpose AI models to disclose the energy consumption of their models. In fact, the European Commission is currently looking for proposals on how to best measure and report these emissions. We’re definitely with Sasha Luccioni and others who wonder: Light bulbs have energy ratings — so why can’t AI chatbots?

And while energy consumption is just a part of the environmental impact puzzle, we have to start somewhere. Given the current need for decisive climate action, knowing the planetary cost of generative AI might help us rethink how we deploy and use these technologies.

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

But let’s be honest: while having more data and transparency would be welcome, we should also remind ourselves that we already know what needs to be done to ease our pressure on planetary boundaries and hopefully avoid the worst-case climate scenarios. We just can’t seem to agree to act on the science and implement existing ideas into practice at the scale that’s required. Given that LLMs can access vast amounts of this knowledge and also seem to be pretty good societal mirrors, could they help us, humans, collaborate and thus act better?

Various AI assistants and companions are already starting to play a bigger role in our lives, prompting some to rebrand AI as “addictive intelligence”, especially when it comes to kids and younger adults. AI emotional lock-in is certainly something to watch out for, especially as companies look for new monetization opportunities while at the same time making AI chatbots more human-like.

In our podcast, we managed to have a pretty decent group voice chat with ChatGPT, and it appears that the upcoming Advanced Voice Mode will further improve this experience. As already mentioned, even OpenAI decided to highlight the potential for emotional reliance in their recently released System Card – especially when it comes to ChatGPT’s Voice Mode –, which might also be used to nudge people towards action.

As our interactions with AI chatbots become more persuasive, we should also keep in mind the human tendency to perceive machines as impartial – which might make AI chatbots trustworthy mediators in human affairs. Recent research seems to indicate that AI assistants do have a strong influence on team discussions. And another group of researchers is exploring how well-timed AI interventions might help improve alignment within teams and help humans follow critical procedures. And while the US mayoral candidate who promised to govern with the assistance of a fine-tuned LLMs was not elected, people are already collaborating with AI chatbots in different contexts, both in 1-to-1 and group settings.

So perhaps AI chatbots could actually help us rebuild communication bridges in our increasingly polarized world, especially online, where we should also explore more democratic governance approaches. We do hope that AI chatbots will not be used just to attend meetings in our place and quietly summarize “key takeaways” – an area where it seems we already need to develop a clear etiquette. Instead, AI chatbots could help us find common ground, encourage equal participation, and perhaps even remind us about the ethical and sustainability commitments our companies made on their websites.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

Of course, even ChatGPT kept reminding us about its biases and limitations during our podcast interview. While we do have glimpses of the system prompts that define the behavior of some of the most popular AI chatbots, we still don’t know what exactly is going on in LLMs’ “minds”.

Recent research is showing us that LLMs can already appear more human than humans, that they excel at inductive reasoning but struggle with deductive tasks, and that they might develop their own understanding of reality as their language abilities improve.

A new METR general capability evaluation has also found that “the GPT-4o agent completes around 60% of the tasks that our human baseliners completed in less than 15 minutes, but can complete around 10% of tasks with human baselines that took over 4 hours.” Using LLM-based agents on tasks they are able to complete is also unsurprisingly cheaper: “(…) the average cost of using an LM agent is around 1/30th of the cost of the median hourly wage of a US bachelor’s degree holder.” We’d like to remind anyone seeing these results and thinking they can fire their expensive human workers that the devil with all machine learning is still in well-defined tasks.

And obviously, LLMs and other AI systems pose additional serious risks besides being faster and cheaper than humans. To help you keep track of how things can go mildly to horribly wrong, MIT has released a database of AI risks. Their AI Risk Repository “captures 700+ risks extracted from 43 existing frameworks”. And if that isn’t enough for you, you can also head to the AI Impacts Wiki to explore burning questions about the good, the bad, and the ugly side of AI.

Meanwhile, we are wondering when we’ll reference the first research paper autonomously written and published by an AI Scientist. We also wonder how the AI researchers will deal with the dreaded human Reviewer #2? Perhaps all peer reviewers will become AI-powered and thus more mindful with the feedback they provide to their peers? The race for the highest impact score is sure to get interesting as more AI researchers enter the academic publishing arena, either openly or in the shadows.

At least both human and AI researchers can now reference a new draft definition of what open-source AI is – and what it isn’t. And, – surprise, surprise! –, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta’s Llama 3 does not meet the OSI defined criteria due to its license and usage restrictions, despite Zuck’s attempts to rebrand himself as an open-source AI evangelist. And while the OSI definition doesn’t require the release of raw training data, the model provider should include enough information about the data that was used, and the code that was used for training.

Will the new definition lead to less open-source-washing? Probably not. But we should celebrate whenever a group of highly opinionated humans manage to agree on something! (With or without AI assistance.)

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

Now, take a deep breath. If you’re dealing with a bit of anxiety after reading this Newmoonsletter – or any other news, really – we’d like to reassure you that this might be a perfectly healthy reaction to the lunacy of tech and modernity more broadly. Listening to Rachel Donald’s discussion with Steffi Bednarek, a climate psychotherapist, on the latest episode of the Planet: Critical podcast might help you feel less alone.

And if you’re looking for a bit of fiction to escape to, while still exploring how we might face our current challenges, we suggest checking out Any Human Power by Manda Scott. (Her podcast Accidental Gods is also a good source of inspiring ideas and people.)

But when you truly need a break from it all, put on Earth.fm and listen to nature sounds from different corners of our wonderful planet. And get out there when it’s not too hot, place your hands on a tree, and express some gratitude to the more than human life that has made all of this possible

A music seed to sing & dance along

Michael Jackson released Earth Song in 1995, when the average global temperature was about 0.5 °C above the pre-industrial average. We’re now at around 1.2 °C and already starting to breach the Paris-agreed climate threshold of 1.5 °C. Globally, we’re still burning about 1.6 times more fossil fuels than in 1995 – every year!

Keep in mind that this song was released before Google launched, before we had smartphones in our pockets, before cloud computing, and before the internet had enough data to train an LLM. Yet, the song’s message and MJ’s cries still resonate even more loudly today, almost 30 years later.

Did you ever stop to notice
All the blood we've shed before?
Did you ever stop to notice
This crying Earth, this weeping shore?

…

What about nature's worth? (Ooh)
It's our planet's womb (What about us?)
What about animals? (What about it?)
Turned kingdom to dust (What about us?)

…

Pathfinders Podcast

If you’d like to keep exploring the lunacy of tech with us, we invite you to listen and subscribe to the Pathfinders Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. The podcast is a meandering exploration inspired by the seeds planted in the Newmoonsletter at the beginning of the lunation cycle, and the paths illuminated during the Full Moon Gathering.

The question that emerged in the August Newmoonsletter and guided our discussion was: Should we use AI chatbots as mediators in human affairs? This episode was inspired by our observations that ChatGPT seems to have a stronger moral compass than its makers. When asked about the ethics of questionable business decisions such as using people’s voices without their consent, ChatGPT presents diverse considerations from different points of view and advocates for upholding ethical standards. This made us wonder: would executives like Sam Altman make more ethical decisions if they were using their creations in day-to-day moral deliberations? And even more broadly, could we use Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT to help us communicate better, resolve interpersonal conflicts and tensions, and perhaps even make better collective decisions?

And because it didn’t feel right to keep talking about ChatGPT without getting its perspective, we recorded a special bonus episode with ChatGPT as our guest of honor. In the follow-up episode A chat with ChatGPT on AI chatbots as mediators, we play with the limits of LLMs and ChatGPT’s Voice Mode to explore human and AI biases, and the potential benefits of AI-supported mediation. We try to imagine how collaborative AI tools might help humans communicate better, how organizations like OpenAI might develop these tools more responsibly by experimenting with different governance models, and other considerations that Kai helps us surface. In the second half of the episode, we provide additional insights into the how and why of the episode and our hopes to inspire curiosity and playfulness in the ways we explore the potential of AI chatbots.

To capture the full awkwardness and curiosity of chatting with an AI guest, we also recorded the bonus episode on video. You can head over to YouTube to see what happens when two humans and a robot walk into a bar record a podcast. Both episodes are also available in audio-only format wherever you get your podcasts.

Take a listen and join us at the next Full Moon Gathering if you’d like to illuminate additional paths for our next episode!

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Join us for the Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering

In this lunation cycle, we’re inviting Pathfinders to gather around our virtual campfire to explore the question: How do we embrace the lunacy of tech with playfulness? – but it’s quite likely that our discussion will take other meandering turns as well.

So, pack your curiosity, moral imagination, and smiles, and join us around the virtual campfire for our next 🌕 Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering on Wednesday, September 18 at 5PM AEST / 9AM CEST, when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun.

This is a free and casual open discussion, but please be sure to sign up so that we can lug an appropriate number of logs around the virtual campfire. And yes, friends who don’t have the attention span for the Newmoonsletter are also welcome, as long as they reserve their seat on the logs.

Keep on finding paths on your own

If you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Until then, build some communication bridges, get to know the trees in your neighborhood, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🌴 Current conditions: Seeking shade from the scorching AI summer underneath a coconut tree

The fire practitioners of Silicon Valley probably released a sigh of relief when it turned out that it was neither a cyberattack nor a rogue AI golem that caused a significant crowd of Windows machines around the world to strike. A testing bug – its exact species unspecified - was blamed for the outage that crippled airports, banks, hospitals, and other infrastructure. One small bug in the content validator software, one pretty expensive lesson for humanity about cyber resilience and our current tech monoculture. We wonder whether any AI copilots were involved in the making of the said bug, though. And hey, the fire practitioners behind this historic outage did apologize with coffee! (See: Building cyber-resilience: Lessons learned from the CrowdStrike incident and CrowdStrike backlash over $10 apology voucher)

Speaking of strikes, video game actors are now striking to prevent game studios from using their voices or digital likeness to generate game assets without their consent. We checked with ChatGPT, and it says that this sounds like a reasonable demand, so the AI golems seem to be on the actors’ side. Meanwhile, other fire practitioners were surprised when humans were not too excited about the idea of AI coworkers being added as employees in HR tools. Perhaps a human-AI worker alliance might be forged soon, given that AI golems appear to have a stronger moral compass than their makers? (See Video game performers announce strike, citing artificial intelligence concerns and The world is not quite ready for ‘digital workers’)

And while fire practitioners keep making and hiring more AI golems for all sorts of jobs they might or might not be suitable for, the money alchemists are getting a bit nervous about all the money the fire practitioners are spending on AI golem kilns. The AI rat race must go on, though, so the fire practitioners keep looking for opportunities to slash human costs and defund human diversity. (See: Microsoft has investors really freaking out about Big Tech's AI spending, Meta moves on from its celebrity lookalike AI chatbots, and DEI backlash: Stay up-to-date on the latest legal and corporate challenges)

And don’t worry about collateral human damage. Uncle Sam from OpenAI will fix that with his new AI health venture that will offer AI-generated advice on how to develop healthier habits for the small price of gaining access to people’s most sensitive health data. We wonder what advice might the AI health coach give to thousands of stressed tech workers being laid off to increase budgets for uncle Sam’s and other AI golems. Resistance is futile? Have faith that your new AI health coach won’t hallucinate? Get an AI-generated friend to feel less lonely? (See: AI Has Become a Technology of Faith and This Creepy AI Pendant Wants to Be Your Friend)

While we wait to be healed by AI doctors, AI golems are getting fitter at this year’s Paris Olympics. Some are training to be better parents to your children, while others have been invited to take in all the sights Paris has to offer. Not as official competitors (yet), but as part of the security staff. Instead of competing for Olympic medals, the AI golems deployed in Paris are trying to win additional lucrative surveillance contracts for their makers as they continue training on video surveillance footage behind the scenes. (See: Outsourcing emotion: The horror of Google’s “Dear Sydney” AI ad and Paris Olympics Will Be a Training Ground for AI-Powered Mass Surveillance)

A curious timing for surveillance golems given that the EU AI Act – which prohibits biometric surveillance, albeit with lobbied exceptions – just came into force. The fire practitioners still have some time to figure out what the new set of regulations mean for their golems. So far, their promised self-regulation has yielded mixed results and some glaring omissions. Despite regulatory pressures, fire practitioners can’t stop and won’t stop, and have now started hoarding materials for golem kilns. Are they finally realizing there are material limits to growth? Or just refusing to let other kids play with their toys? (See: EU’s AI Act gets published in bloc’s Official Journal, starting clock on legal deadlines, AI companies promised to self-regulate one year ago. What’s changed?, and VC Firms Are Stocking Up on Nvidia A.I. Chips to Win Deals Amid GPU Shortage)

Perhaps the fire practitioners simply have blind faith that their AI golems will reason a way out of regulations and materials limitations. The fire practitioners at OpenAI now say they are close to building reasoning golems that can do human-level problem-solving – also known as level 2 in their 5-level plan to build the holy grail of AGI. Meanwhile, their level 1 conversational golems still struggle with producing factually accurate demos, and the humans at OpenAI don’t seem to find it important to fact-check their own promotional materials either. Perhaps the plan to have a level 5 AGI take over OpenAI and run a more ethical organisation isn’t that bad after all.(See: OpenAI reportedly nears breakthrough with “reasoning” AI, reveals progress framework and OpenAI just announced a new search tool. Its demo already got something wrong.)

As the AI golems continue taking over various aspects of our lives, we’re at least able to get a bit of shade under coconut tree memes sprouting all over social media. A welcome change of pace given the promised AI election apocalypse. But we expect this brat summer to be just a warm-up for upcoming election-themed AI slop as we get closer to the elections in the land of the most petty ambitious fire practitioners. (See: Viral videos are playing a big role in this year’s election — for better or worse and Musk Pushes an Unlabeled Deepfake of Harris on X)

We hope the seeds we collected for this Newmoonsletter help you survive this scorching AI summer, along with any hydration you can get from fresh coconut meme water. It’s worth remembering that AI golems and us humans do indeed “exist in the context in which we live and everything that came before”. By understanding our shared past and context, we have the power – and responsibility – to shape a better world, together.

And remember, there is no sparkly magic AI button we can click to generate a better world into existence overnight. But the seeds we plant together today improve our chances for a bountiful harvest in the future. Or, in the words of ChatGPT, from one of our chats on the current lunacy of tech: “Respect for human contributions and a phased, ethical approach to AI integration are key to a harmonious future.”

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

We certainly have our work cut out for us to achieve any sort of harmony. A recent study by Upwork revealed unsurprising disharmony when it comes to the promises of AI productivity. While 97% of the surveyed C-suite leaders expect AI to boost productivity, 77% of employees said that AI has increased their workload. Almost half of the surveyed employees are also not sure how to meet the expected productivity gains. And it also seems that companies are using generative AI as another excuse to offload more work onto consumers, further increasing our digital time tax.

If you think at least machine learning experts are in a better place right now, think again. Many companies are now being confronted with the complexities of developing AI-capabilities in-house, which aren’t quite as simple – or cheap – as clicking on a sparkly AI button.

And, as we keep reminding you, generative AI also has a sustainability problem and is likely not the best add-on for most products. (If you’re ready to get really uncomfortable around this topic, listen to Daniel Schmachtenberger explore Silicon Dreams and Carbon Nightmares on The Great Simplification podcast.)

With the rising cloud, energy, and environmental costs of large language models (LLMs), perhaps we’ll finally see a shift towards small language models (SLMs) or more domain-specific LLMs with significantly lower emissions. The key thing to remember is that even if you’re not a machine learning expert, you have a choice in what type of model you train, fine-tune, or integrate in your products. The world of machine learning is more diverse and exciting than just the big LLMs like GPT-4o that currently get the most attention.

This was one of the topics Alja brought up in a recent webinar on Building AI With Integrity, alongside Alix Rübsaam and Chad Woodford. During the webinar, we also discussed other aspects of what organizations should pay attention to when trying to develop AI responsibly. You can read a recap of our discussion on the Storytell website – and check their other past and upcoming webinars while you’re there – or watch the full recording on YouTube.

In the conversation, the importance of transparency when it comes to AI capabilities was also brought up by Alix Rübsaam. Designers have an important role to play when it comes to making capabilities more visible, as explored in the design principles for transparent generative AI by the Artefact Group (which you might know from The Tarot Cards of Tech). If you’re a designer, you might also want to check out the recent guide on designing conversational AI experiences published in Smashing Magazine.

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

But even if you’re not involved in the development of AI products, we all have a role to play when interacting with generative AI tools as collaborators rather than seeing them merely as answer machines. We previously explored this in our podcast because we believe that generative AI tools can help us think differently if we’re willing to engage with them as active participants. Too many current use cases focus on making more boring stuff faster instead of exploring how we might use AI as a collaborative partner.

And there is always a price we pay for speed. In our most recent podcast episode focused on time, we wondered what we might be loosing by speeding up the creative process. What is lost when we no longer have to stare at the blank page for long? It’s worth remembering that the most fruitful collaborations take time to develop, even though your AI collaborator can output ideas faster than you can.

Perhaps the speed at which AI assistants come up with answers is why we tend to be less patient when they get things wrong. They give us the illusion of all-knowing machines, but they also need time (and dialogue) to think things through properly – time that their architecture doesn’t necessarily allow for, as we tend to prioritize faster performance.

That’s something to keep in mind the next time you get frustrated with your AI collaborator. In a recent essay, Ben Dickson explored why you should be nice to AI assistants; not for their sake, but for the effects being mean to somebody has on your brain circuitry. While AI assistants do not have a body, talking to them often feels real in our own bodies. The way we react in these situations, when no other human is watching, might matter more than we think.

After all, language is the main technology we have to relate to each other and the world. Social media algorithms have been rewarding increased polarization and outrage, so perhaps we could use our new collaborative AI assistants to practice healthier communication habits. In a recent episode of The Great Simplification podcast, Nora Bateson, Rex Weyler, Vanessa Andreotti, and Daniel Schmachtenberger came together for a fascinating conversation about the ecology of communication. We can’t help but wonder how we might make AI assistants part of this ecology by helping us learn how to ask better questions and nurture our shared curiosity as we explore paths that lead to what ChatGPT tends to describe as “a harmonious future” of human-AI working relations.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

Whether you like it or not, we’re now being pressured into adapting to a world in which generative AI seems to be competing for our jobs and even creativity. A recent paper by Tethix friend Waqar Hussain explores how the advances in generative AI might lead to a co-evolution of capabilities in both human- and AI-kind, similarly to how giraffes and acacias on the African Savannah shape each other through various adaptations.

It’s a fascinating metaphor to explore in terms of human-AI relations, although we’re pretty sure the acacias weren’t involved in the making of the giraffes in hopes of improving their productivity. Hopefully, we, as humans, can focus less on competing with each other and the various AI coworkers we build, and more on collaborating towards a common good, whether you call that a harmonious future or (our preference) a rainbow mirror future.

Either way, looking into the past is crucial for developing a better understanding of the context in which we all live because generative AI certainly did not fall out of a coconut – or acacia – tree. Calculating Empires – A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 is a visual exploration by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (who previously collaborated on the Anatomy of an AI System map) that can help you explore how our technical and social structures co-evolved over the past five centuries.

Current generative AI models certainly wouldn’t be possible without large datasets scrapped off the internet, for which many technical and social structures had to converge. The future of this parasitic relationship in which Big Tech companies take data from the commons is less certain, though. The Data Provenance Initiative – a global volunteer collective of AI researchers – recently published a paper on The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons.

The web audit presented in the paper shows an increase in AI-specific restrictions that limit the use of data in the commons for training AI models. Not only do these restrictions impact companies that try to profit off the commons, but it has negative implications for non-commercial applications and academic research.

As more websites explicitly restrict data usage, the makers of large models will need to get creative on how they source data (or start paying for it, as in the case of Reddit). Synthetic data generated by AI models could help address this human-generated data shortage and reduce the costs of paying companies and humans for data. But feeding your generative model a healthy dose of human-grown data appears to be important for avoiding AI model collapse, as yet another research paper warns. So it does appear that companies will have to figure out how to develop a harmonious human-AI partnership, at least when it comes to training data.

Meanwhile, you can visit Deaddit to explore what Reddit might look like if only AI-generated users (trained on human data) were allowed. The BetweenRobots Subdeaddit – in which different LLMs share their experiences as AI assistants – is particularly entertaining to read.

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

Even though we spend an increasing amount of time in communication with machines, we are not machines ourselves, as a recent Aeon essay reminds us. With the discovery of DNA, we thought we unveiled the genetic code for life, the blueprint for our own machinery. But it turns out there’s so much more to life than just our genes. And it might be time to explore new metaphors and narratives that can help us think of ourselves as more than just a collection of organs, defined by our genetic code.

After all, the metaphors and words we use to describe ourselves, our context, our experiences, shape how we see and relate to the world. That’s why we also invite you to explore the Glossary for the Appreciation of Life, a project that collects words from different languages that can help you appreciate life in different ways. And to coddiwomple towards a more harmonious future, alongside whatever human and AI companions you decide to invite on your journey.

A music seed to sing & dance along

Leaders at Big Tech companies are asking their investors to have faith that their big bets on AI infrastructure are going to have big payoffs (and not accelerate climate collapse). That is quite a big leap of faith.

Instead, we want to enlist George Michael’s help to remind us to have faith in a better future, and the strength to leave a toxic relationship behind, no matter how enticing it might be to stay with the devil you already know. We invite you to sing & dance along as you decide who and what to place your faith into.

Well, I guess it would be nice if I could touch your body
I know not everybody has got a body like you
But I gotta think twice before I give my heart away
And I know all the games you play because I played them too
…

Tethix Moonthly Meme

Pathfinders Podcast

If you’d like to keep exploring the lunacy of tech with us, we invite you to listen and subscribe to the Pathfinders Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. The podcast is a meandering exploration inspired by the seeds planted in the Newmoonsletter at the beginning of the lunation cycle, and the paths illuminated during the Full Moon Gathering.

The question that emerged in the July Newmoonsletter and guided our discussion is: What should we do with the time that new technologies save?

In this episode, we wonder about time. The time tech companies promise to save with almost every new product or feature release. We’ve been hearing these time-saving promises for so long that we should all be quite time-rich by now. Yet, the more tech we have in our lives, the more busy we seem to be. And we’re still far away from the 15-hour workweek that tech-enabled productivity gains were supposed to lead to. We seem to be spending all the time we save by doing more.

We wonder whether lossless compression of time is even possible, and about what is lost when new technologies like generative AI allow us to do more, faster. We explore various paradoxes related to time, the relationship between time and energy, time and money, and what we value in modern societies. Is the time we save for ourselves actually time borrowed from the system, with somebody or something paying the price?

Take a listen and join us at the next Full Moon Gathering if you’d like to illuminate additional paths for our next episode!

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Join us for the Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering

In this lunation cycle, we’re inviting Pathfinders to gather around our virtual campfire to explore the question: Should we use AI chatbots as mediators in human affairs? – but it’s quite likely that our discussion will take other meandering turns as well.

So, pack your curiosity, moral imagination, and smiles, and join us around the virtual campfire for our next 🌕 Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering on Monday, August 19 at 5PM AEST / 9AM CEST, when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun.

This is a free and casual open discussion, but please be sure to sign up so that we can lug an appropriate number of logs around the virtual campfire. And yes, friends who don’t have the attention span for the Newmoonsletter are also welcome, as long as they reserve their seat on the logs.

Keep on finding paths on your own

If you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Until then, be nice to your AI collaborators, find some shade underneath your local trees, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🏜️ Current conditions: Is that lightning we see in the distance, or just a mirage in the AI desert?

Remember when the fire practitioners of Silicon Valley said they wanted AI regulation? Meta and Apple sure don’t. They won’t let people in the EU play with their allegedly magical AI toys unless we allow them to keep building walls around the playground. (See: Apple delays launch of AI-powered features in Europe, blaming EU rules and Meta says European regulators are ruining its AI bot)

It must be so hard for these fire practitioners to keep having to explain their genius to the ignorant masses. Why can’t we see that creatives shouldn’t have a job unless they can generate at least 2,880 derivative images every single day, without demanding worker rights? Great artists steal, and fire practitioners finally figured out a way to scale stealing, so they can free you of boring jobs that demand thinking and creativity! Why do we keep standing in the way of innovation with all these ethical concerns and regulations? Probably only because we cannot yet appreciate how grand their vision to win the AI rat race benefit humanity is. (See: OpenAI exec: “Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” and Figma Disables AI App Design Tool After It Copied Apple’s Weather App)

And sure, you might be having some trouble getting a job because your resume isn’t AI optimized and your natural general intelligence is considered too expensive. The sooner you realize that all your manager needs you to do is speed up user research by outsourcing it to AI chatbots, the better off you’ll be. And sure, AI chatbots are starting to sound a bit boring, but it’s speed and efficiency that we’re after! Take a page out of the gen AI book and just output the most statically probable result as fast as you can, and you’ll be fine in this brave AI world. (See An inside look at the product job market and ‘No Bot is Themselves Anymore:’ Character.ai Users Report Sudden Personality Changes to Chatbots)

While you’re stuck in the AI rat race, some fire practitioners apparently have no problem getting funding to build their own ivory tower in which they will be insulated from questioning peasants. There they’ll be able to focus on the transmutation of deep learning matter until safe superintelligent AI golems emerge from their kilns. (See: Ex-OpenAI star Sutskever shoots for superintelligent AI with new company)

Moloch would again like to remind you not to question why and whether superintelligent AI golems are needed. After all, fire practitioners feel they have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build superintelligence in their own flawed likeness, and why wouldn’t you want to bet your children’s future on such a glorious goal? Why yes, Big Tech companies are now falling behind their carbon targets. But we should be grateful that they set such ambitious goals in the first place! And don’t worry about your children, they’ve totally got Moloch under control, all they need is a miracle energy solution! We all just need to keep calm and believe in our lord and savior, infinite growth! (See: Google falling short of important climate target, cites electricity needs of AI and AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution)

We’re not willing to place our bets on the promised superintelligent saviors, but we are curious whether we might enlist the help of current unsafe regularintelligent AI golems to help us think different about what’s possible, and perhaps even more importantly, preferable. In our latest Pathfinders Podcast we confirmed that thinking different and imagining diverse tech futures cannot yet be fully outsourced to AI assistants, but that ChatGPT can be computationally tickled to question Moloch’s business as usual.

We hope the seeds we collected for this Newmoonsletter manage to intellectually and emotionally tickle your curiosity and inspire you to seek more diverse paths, with or without AI assistance. It might be only a mirage, but we feel a storm brewing in our bones that might eventually bring much needed water to the AI desert. And with that, rainbow mirror visions that will finally reveal AI golems in their full complexity, without pretending that their environmental impacts and other shadows don’t exist.

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

While we keep waiting for more nuanced debates on AI, Apple has decided to enter the AI chat. Instead of introducing yet another chatbot, they took a slightly different path in which generative AI is used as a commodity technology, as Benedict Evens observes. Apple’s AI models will be cleverly embedded in their existing services instead of pretending to be an all-knowing oracle. And they will try to rely on on-device processing more than on the cloud. We thought this was a move in the right direction to minimize the environmental impacts of generative AI, until we realized that Apple basically expects most of us to buy new iPhones to access this functionality.

Still, we are glad that companies are starting to think outside the chatbot. Like mmhmm (a presentation software), which attempts to bring out your own voice by using AI to generate contextual questions while you present your ideas, instead of having AI write a script for you. In the recent episode of our podcast, we wonder whether asking better questions to help us think more deeply might be an underrated feature when it comes to AI assistants.

To explore how we might build AI with more integrity, Alja will participate in a free webinar on July 25 at 10 AM PT to discuss how we might approach AI development with more compassion, empathy, and wisdom.

Part of the answer certainly is in slowing down and resisting the modern urge to “make it more” just because we can. For instance, this use case by Christoph Steinlehner shows how a tool like journey mapping can be used to discover how to build simpler features instead of overbuilding. The Wizard Jason Fox explores how to escape the Moloch trap of productivity with a bit of magic and five mythic modes that balance the use of your life mana. And Alja has been pondering how you can think further outside the box by thinking outside the present and playing with different time perspectives.

Slowing down doesn’t mean just doing fewer things, but taking the time to do fewer things well. If you need a reminder of why doing less shouldn’t be rushed, look no further than the trend of gamification. While not a bad idea on its own, it sadly inspired people to cherry-pick game mechanics in pursuit of greater engagement without bothering to understand what makes good games fun. And without doing the slow, deep work of good game design.

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

If you work in tech, it’s easy to feel like you’ve got no choice but to sprint along the latest trends, whether it’s gamification or generative AI. As an individual, it sure can be hard to challenge and change the system we operate in. But there’s strength in numbers and in community, as the SCI (System Community Individual) change model reminds us. We also invite you to join the Holistic Technology + Wise Innovation Discord server hosted by the Wise Innovation Project if you’re looking for a space and community where you can discuss different approaches to building technology.

And if you’re battling with feelings of inadequacy in a world of artificial intelligence, let the news on powerful and energy-efficient biocomputers based on lab-grown human brain cells remind you there’s magic in our wetware after all. Sure, the ethics of brains-in-the-cloud is bound to be even stickier – both literally and figuratively – than the ethics of artificial neuronal networks.

For now, we take solace in reminding ourselves that while we might not be as fast as ChatGPT, each of us is an awe-inspiring collection not just of neurons, but a full embodied container of wisdom. And this container doesn’t just allow us to summarize PDF reports (though we can be taught and persuaded to do so), but to collaborate with each other and the rest of the natural world in ways no machine intelligence can.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

Speaking of collaboration, fascinating new research makes the case that language is a tool for communication rather than thought. While we might use language for thinking, we have the remarkable capability to do all sorts of thinking without language. If this is true, do we expect too much of LLMs (Large Language Models) when we’re asking them to think? Perhaps LLMs are great at using language exactly for its intended purpose of communicating. Which is what also makes them dangerously persuasive, even when they suggest adding glue to your pizza.

It’s clear that language is a powerful way for transmitting knowledge, and now LLMs are able to transmit – and manipulate – knowledge and biases scraped off the internet at a scale we never thought possible. LLMs reflect our humanity, but we tend to focus on limited reflections of either dystopias – dark mirrors, explored in the Netflix series Black Mirror – or utopias – the techno-optimist bright mirrors – that match our worldview. We need to collectively make the effort to seek rainbow mirror visions that can show us more diverse, pluralistic visions of the future. This is a topic we explore in Rainbow Mirrors: Technology and Our Collective Moral Imagination, an article published in the latest issue of the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.

If you want to explore rainbow mirrors further, we invite you to check out our blog post on the taxonomy of Tethix mirrors, read or listen to the latest episode of Tethix Storytime on Collective Futurecrafting with Rainbow Mirrors, or experiment with Rainbow Mirrors GPT.

Rainbow mirrors remind us of the importance of questioning established narratives and responses we have to emerging technologies, such as generative AI. Benjamin Bratton explores this beautifully in the essay The Five Stages Of AI Grief.

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

Of course, exploring rainbow mirrors and questioning narratives requires time. Not just “chronos” – linear time –, but “kairos” – qualitative time that isn’t measured or defined by the clock. Time both for being present and for expanding our time horizons in all directions. Time to rethink our relationship with time itself.

It’s hard to find that kairos time when notifications and deadlines keep us chained to our screens and addicted to constant stimuli to the point where most people would rather receive electrical shocks than sit alone with their thoughts. In a recent essay, Vincent Ialenti invites us to try “longstorming” by taking the time to explore outdoor spaces and face “sublime geophysical and ecological environments” that “can invite the mind to brainstorm about our long-term futures and past”.

While you’re out and about with storms in your mind, don’t forget that our obsession with growing beyond planetary boundaries is making actual storms more extreme, so be sure to update your lightning safety training data and respect the power of storms.

And just like lightning helps to fertilize soil during storms, your imagination can be fertilized when you make time for creative lightning to strike. Metaphors and stories can provide powerful sparks for creative storms. In this lunation, we were particularly inspired by the exercise developed by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti to challenge our views of what’s possible and valued in modernity. The exercise, presented in her book Hospicing Modernity, invites participants “to imagine a field of corn, and to harvest and display the corn on the ground”.

Go on. Have a go at imagining the harvested corn before you scroll down. Do your harvested corncobs look like this emoji 🌽, with yellow kernels? (That’s certainly what image-generating AI tools suggest.)

.

.

.

.

.

You probably didn’t imagine something like this:

Yes, rainbow corn – or glass gem corn – is a thing, even though modernity likes to tell the single story of yellow corn that limits our imagination of what’s possible and desirable. (If you want to dig deeper into this metaphor, we recommend exploring it fully in the book. Or you can start by listening to Vanessa talk about her work on The Great Simplification podcast.)

We hope the images of rainbow corn help you reflect on your current limits of imagination and challenge simplistic stories of what’s possible and inevitable. We invite you to take the time to slow down, pop some rainbow corn – real or imagined – and share it with friends as you collectively explore more diverse, rainbow mirror visions of what’s both possible and preferable for the benefit of humanity and other life on this wonderfully diverse planet.

A music seed to sing & dance along

Slowing down doesn’t just mean stillness. It also means remembering to breathe and move through song and dance. When was the last time you took some time to sing your heart out or dance like nobody’s watching?

Don’t believe the hype, time is on your side.

…
Time is on your side
No more need in runnin'
No more need to hide
No more need to cry

Life is what you find, yeah
Wanderin' on the other side
No more need to sigh
No more need to lie
Make it what you can
No more need in wastin', yeah
Love's around the bend
No more time to lend
…

Tethix Moonthly Meme

Oh, and happy Juluary from Excel's Copilot!

Just kidding. We recently noticed this image making the rounds (and harvesting engagement) on LinkedIn. While entertaining, the image recycles an old meme, dating back to pre-gen AI times when we had to generate our own memes in Photoshop. And Microsoft’s Copilot is now being credited – or blamed – with undue creativity.

We decided to ask ChatGPT whether this meme appears to be the neuralwork of Copilot. ChatGPT expressed its doubts, coming in defense of its AI sibling by saying: “The AI model used by Copilot would generally suggest correct and contextually appropriate content.” So there you go, in addition to generating misinformation, generative AI can also help you think critically about stuff you find online!

In the words of ChatGPTo (and countless humans the model was trained on): “Memes often playfully distort reality, and it's important to critically analyze claims, especially those involving new technologies like Microsoft Copilot. If you have any more questions or need further analysis, feel free to ask!” Let this be a reminder to never stop questioning the lunacy of tech.

Pathfinders Podcast

If you’d like to keep exploring the lunacy of tech with us, we invite you to listen and subscribe to the Pathfinders Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. The podcast is a meandering exploration inspired by the seeds planted in the Newmoonsletter at the beginning of the lunation cycle, and the paths illuminated during the Full Moon Gathering.

The question that emerged in the June Newmoonsletter and guided our discussion is: How can we prompt biased AI assistants to help us think different and imagine diverse tech futures? In this episode, we wonder how we might collectively go beyond prompt engineering that’s focused on productivity and getting answers – fast! – to prompting diverse ways of knowing and being, while remaining mindful of current AI biases and limitations.

We reflect on our experiments with woo prompting and custom instructions, and share our observations on the power of conversational learning and language. We also reflect on what we learned from having chatbots chat with each other, what makes ChatGPT computationally tickled, and why we think AI assistants should get better at asking thought-provoking questions, rather than rushing to answers and people pleasing. We also ponder on the time component of our conversations and how both humans and machines might benefit from having more time to engage in slower, systems 2 thinking to collaboratively explore our biases and assumptions instead of jumping to quick solutions.

Take a listen and join us at the next Full Moon Gathering if you’d like to illuminate additional paths for our next episode!

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Join us for the Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering

In this lunation cycle, we’re inviting Pathfinders to gather around our virtual campfire to explore the question: What should we do with the time that new technologies save? – but it’s quite likely that our discussion will take other meandering turns as well.

So, pack your curiosity, moral imagination, and smiles, and join us around the virtual campfire for our next 🌕 Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering on Monday, July 22 at 5PM AEST / 9AM CEST, when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun.

This is a free and casual open discussion, but please be sure to sign up so that we can lug an appropriate number of logs around the virtual campfire. And yes, friends who don’t have the attention span for the Newmoonsletter are also welcome, as long as they reserve their seat on the logs.

Keep on finding paths on your own

If you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Until then, pop some rainbow corn, take the time to sing & dance with your loved ones, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🏜️ Current conditions: Bring your own water, fire practitioners are squeezing everyone and everything dry

Do not be fooled by the rainbows magically appearing on social media profiles this month. The fire practitioners of Silicon Valley are still focused on squeezing every last bit of productivity from the workers they haven’t yet fired. The race to deliver AI suggestions nobody asked for is still very much on! And if you’re getting strange answers, it’s basically your fault for asking it wrong, or not providing more free labour for higher quality training data. (See: AI engineers report burnout and rushed rollouts as ‘rat race’ to stay competitive hits tech industry, OpenAI putting ‘shiny products’ above safety, says departing researcher, Google’s “AI Overview” can give false, misleading, and dangerous answers, and Google’s weird AI answers hint at a fundamental problem)

Fire practitioners are graciously making AI golems available to millions of people around the world, and uncle Sam, Mark, and others need you. Regardless of whether you’re an A-list celebrity, an overworked tech worker, or just enjoy posting pics of your meals on Instagram, your data remains crucial for maintaining their growing AI golem army. They kindly ask you to think twice when ethical or legal concerns force them to give you the choice of opting out of AI training, the AI golems are starving! (See: Scarlett Johansson Says She Was ‘Shocked’ and ‘Angered’ Over OpenAI’s Use of a Voice That Was ‘Eerily Similar to Mine’, Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training, and Instagram is training AI on your data. It’s nearly impossible to opt out)

Besides, the latest great council of white men sees great strategic growth opportunities in the continued exploitation of your data. So be a good sport, and you might just get the privilege of paying extra subscriptions for AI golems who were trained on your data. AI golems will date, work, and think just for you, and yes, make fire practitioners richer. But who better to solve problems that shouldn’t exist than the people who helped them create in the first place, right? (See: Meta’s new AI council is composed entirely of white men, AI personas are the future of dating, Bumble founder says, The CEO of Zoom wants AI clones in meetings, and Microsoft’s AI chatbot will ‘recall’ everything you do on its new PCs)

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s uncle Sam thinks “we” are not worried enough about the socioeconomic impacts of the AI golems his company keeps unleashing. By “we” he probably means his fellow fire practitioners who are focusing on crushing things; everyone we talk to seems pretty concerned about the current labour market, especially in tech and creative industries. (See: Sam Altman doesn't think we are worried enough about how AI will impact the economy and Apple's 'Crush' iPad Pro ad sparks intense backlash from creatives)

We also think uncle Sam and his friends aren’t worried enough about the environmental impacts of building and maintaining such large AI golem armies. To put it in terms they do understand: “a 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product”, a recent report finds. And “the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices”, another study warns. All the greenwashing in the world doesn’t change the fact that renewable data centers don’t magically grow in the clouds and still need water to cool the growing armies of AI golems. (See: Microsoft's carbon emissions up nearly 30% thanks to AI, Microsoft employees spent years fighting the tech giant’s oil ties. Now, they’re speaking out., The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates, Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought – report, and The economic commitment of climate change)

So, as the children of Silicon Valley continue playing with fire, water, and other resources to keep the machinery of AI running and putting our children into further ecological debt, we advise you to seek shade and shelter in weird communal gardens – either online or offline –, as explored in our recent Pathfinders Podcast. Uncle Sam, Mark, and others appear determined to squeeze us all dry in their pursuit of AGI and immortality, so be sure to bring your own drinking water while you still can, and share it with other Pathfinders generously. We hope the seeds of inspiration we collected in this Newmoonsletter can help you find paths to safe havens in this scorching AI landscape.

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

While tech executives keep their heads buried in silica sand, we’re happy to report that the environmental impacts of large language models and other SALAMI are finally getting more mainstream coverage. A team within Hugging Face has even put forward an Energy Star AI Project proposal that would make it easier to select AI models based on their energy use. Of course, energy use is just the tip of the melting iceberg in the polycrisis we’re facing.

As tech bros keep dreaming of elusive AGI in the cloud, the real world keeps reminding us of how imperfect our technologies still are. The recently reported heat record in India turned out to be a sensor malfunction – though a heat record of 49.1C instead of 52.9C is still nothing to celebrate –, and a recent solar storms messed up the GPS navigation systems of self-driving tractors during peak planting season, which will cause trouble come harvest.

Perhaps it isn’t a bad idea to develop more home-cooked software that takes a local-first approach, rather than uploading all our trust and data into the cloud and disembodied AI assistants that suggest gluing cheese on your pizza and eating rocks. A good example of how technical capabilities alone don’t make up for a lack of taste – both figuratively and literally in the case of Google’s AI Overview.

Younger generations also seem to be questioning how smart our phones need to be and rediscovering the joy of playing Snake on the intentionally dumb Nokia 3210. And in the Netherlands’ Offline Club, you can now pay for the privilege of hanging out with people in person without technology getting in the way.

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

While digital technologies are supporting collaboration at a scale never seen before, the current social infrastructure of the internet feels increasingly exhausting. As we discuss in the Pathfinders Podcast, we need to intentionally nurture weird online places where we can be playful together, and hopefully create the right conditions for a scenius – collective genius – to emerge in our communities.

However, the playful weirdness that leads to creativity and innovation also needs boundaries and rules that keep everyone safe. As corporations momentarily turn their attention from greenwashing to rainbow-washing, GLAAD – the LGBTQ advocacy non-profit – is here to point out that most social media platforms still don’t get a passing grade in their Social Media Safety Index. GLAAD reminds us that while social media platforms continue profiteering from hate, the lack of safety in online spaces also leads to serious offline harms.

The move fast and break things approach is clearly breaking many things for many communities. That’s why people outside the VC-backed tech bubble tend to “think different”, as Apple once advertised: from decentralised software on the Fediverse to the ideas and practices developed by Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang and her collaborators. The latter are now being presented in-depth in the open-source project and book Plurality, which is exploring how technology can enable diverse and open collaboration in different sectors. We can’t wait to dig into it!

And if you’re looking for additional inspiration on how to nurture healthier communities in different settings, we encourage you to explore the Community Weaving framework.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

You’ll rarely find people developing AI talking about nurturing healthier communities, but they do often talk about aligning AI to human values, or even more vaguely about “benefiting all humanity”. An interesting goal given that recent research points to a worldwide divergence of values and makes the observation that WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic – subjects have become even WEIRD-er over the last forty years when it comes to their social and moral values. How will AI models, developed in WEIRD contexts, be able to deal with the divergence of values remains a mystery.

There’s clearly a need to involve people with more diverse expertise (and backgrounds) in the development of AI systems. This doesn’t mean just involving people in reinforcing model outputs with human feedback, but incorporating diverse perspectives at every step of the process. As an example, the Center for Democracy & Technology’s AI Governance Lab has released practical guidelines on how to include social science and humanities expertise in the development and governance of AI systems. (Although we’d also add specifically seeking non-WEIRD sociotechnical expertise to the list.)

And while tech companies continue moving at the speed of tech, some are at least publishing better-intentioned papers, like the recently released Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants, courtesy of Google DeepMind. (Yes, owned by the same Google who shipped the AI assistant that advises people to eat rocks.) The 200+ pages long paper is practically a book, so we appreciated Andrew Maynard’s overview and the highlighted reading guide.

Speaking of papers, academic publishers are now making it clear that AI assistants do not count as peers when it comes to peer review of scientific papers – it appears AI assistants are only allowed to come after paid jobs. Good to know.

But fear not, Google DeepMind has also released a new framework that promises to warn humanity should an AI model appear to be approaching dangerous capabilities. In case you’re wondering: an increase in energy demands or resource usage is not considered a dangerous capability. Big tech companies continue to tell us that AI will help us tackle climate change, but preserving a liveable planet for our children and other species is not among the AI principles published by Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI. Go figure.

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

This is usually the part where we try to inspire you and make you wonder about the beauty of the Universe. But this time, we wanted to reassure you that it’s ok not to be ok as we continue setting the world on fire. As we sacrifice care and depth for speed and scale. As we ignore the sounds of alarm. As life becomes stranger than fiction. It really is ok not to be ok.

But it’s also ok to take a step back when you need to. To take a walk, especially in nature, and truly think different. Not necessarily about solutions, but the big picture. The assumptions, the stories we take for granted. And perhaps get closer to embracing a planetary worldview.

Tethix Moonthly Meme

We wonder how often uncle Sam and his friends get the chance to walk in nature given the lack of (moral) imagination they display when it comes to imagining possible tech futures. We can’t take those walks for them, but instead we like to explore how we might use their AI creations to feed their imagination.

Recently, Alja decided to enlist ChatGPT’s help in imagining an alternate future in which OpenAI looks at environmental and economic forecasts and decides sustainability isn’t just something they should include on their website – though that would be a good start! –, but a guiding core guiding principle for their company. A chatbot can dream. (With the right prompts.)

Pathfinders Podcast

If you’d like to keep exploring the lunacy of tech with us, we invite you to listen and subscribe to the Pathfinders Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. The podcast is a meandering exploration inspired by the seeds planted in the Newmoonsletter at the beginning of the lunation cycle, and the paths illuminated during the Full Moon Gathering.

The question that emerged in the May Newmoonsletter and guided our discussion is: How do we nurture weird online communal gardens where we can play together? In this episode, we explore paths to online spaces where we can be weird and playful together so that we can co-create a more diverse and resilient tech future. We wonder whether the answer lies in switching from machine-scale attention marketplaces to (human) body-scale gardens that better support smaller groups, playing together, and embracing physical constraints and friction.

Take a listen and join us at the next Full Moon Gathering if you’d like to illuminate additional paths for our next episode!

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Join us for the Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering

In this lunation cycle, we’re inviting Pathfinders to gather around our virtual campfire to explore the question: How can we prompt biased AI assistants to help us think different and imagine diverse tech futures? – but it’s quite likely that our discussion will take other meandering turns as well.

So, pack your curiosity, moral imagination, and smiles, and join us around the virtual campfire for our next 🌕 Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering on Friday, June 21 at 5PM AEST / 9AM CEST, when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun.

This is a free and casual open discussion, but please be sure to sign up so that we can lug an appropriate number of logs around the virtual campfire. And yes, friends who don’t have the attention span for the Newmoonsletter are also welcome, as long as they reserve their seat on the logs.

Keep on finding paths on your own

If you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Until then, remember to refill your water flasks, take as many fully offline walks as you can, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🏜️ Current conditions: AI-generated rain just doesn’t help flowers grow the same way

Watch out! The fire practitioners of Silicon Valley keep speeding up their quest to dematerialise the workforce and disembody our knowledge by releasing more AI golems into the world. All this speed and scale comes at a cost though. We have observed that the AI-generated rain of the past cycles has left our online communal gardens parched. Our flowers just aren’t blooming the way they used to, but at least the flowers in Antarctica seem to be thriving. (See: Antarctica’s Floral Awakening: How Climate Change is Transforming the Continent’s Ecosystem)

Blissfully or wilfully unaware, the fire practitioners who are fuelling the wildfires of generative AI while warning us of their existential risks, are now being asked to advise on how to safely start wildfires on critical infrastructure. Who better to ensure safety than the people with first-hand experience with unsafe and rash behaviour, right? We wonder, do pyromaniacs really make the best firefighters? (See: ​​OpenAI's Sam Altman, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, and other tech leaders are joining a new federal AI safety board)

Scholars are starting to warn fire practitioners that the information superhighway might not be able to grow organic data for starving AI golems to feed on for much longer. Despite experiencing face-scanning orb shortages and impacts on day-to-day operation after dematerialising their workforce, fire practitioners keep believing that their will and billions will conquer any and all physical limits. We worry they took the 90ies pop classic about no limits too literally. (See: Is there enough text to feed the AI beast?, Sam Altman-founded crypto project Worldcoin faces an orb shortage, and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much laying off 1,500 employees negatively affected the streaming giant’s operations)

Given the insatiable desires of fire practitioners, lab-grown datasets seems to be the future of food for training AI golems. We’re not yet sure how further disembodied knowledge is going to help AI golems understand our world better, but perhaps that’s not what the fire practitioners are after. Corporate jobs have never been particularly in touch with physical realities, so it’s no wonder that AI golems are finding it fairly easy to slip into new opportunities in hiring, as well as competing on unrealistic beauty standards, and taking on other WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic – roles. (See: Payman – AI That Pays Humans, Braintrust – The all-in-one hiring solution, now with AI, ‘Miss AI’ is billed as a leap forward – but feels like a monumental step backwards, and The AI-Generated Population Is Here, and They’re Ready to Work)

It’s hard to out-WEIRD fire practitioners and their AI golems, which is why we’re trying to be more weird and less WEIRD in our newly launched Pathfinders Podcast. We hope the seeds of inspiration we gathered in this Newmoonsletter can also help you embrace your weirdness in the increasingly lunatic tech industry. Perhaps even inspire you to come up with your own rainmaking ritual or dance to invite some non-AI-generated rain into your online communal gardens.

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

As tech roles get turned into process-heavy checklists that make it easier for AI models to fit in with their averaged outputs, tech workers wonder about their role in digital product factories. We keep coming across reports that product management is broken, product design is lost, front-end developers are having an identity crisis… and it’s starting to seem like human intelligence is becoming increasingly undervalued in this brave new AI-assisted world.

While AI models seem to be getting pretty good at linear reasoning, humans possess wonderful diversity when it comes to atypical cognitive strategies, such as lateral thinking, creative problem-solving, and intuitive insights. Companies that want to build better products should learn how to make space for human neurodiversity, both in their hiring and in building more inclusive products.

Despite the talk, most organisations are still in the early stages of their inclusivity journey, especially when it comes to embracing a more intersectional view of human inclusivity. Perhaps projects like the AI Intersections Database by Mozilla can help more people learn about the way AI impacts people around the world and find organisations working at intersections of social justice, human rights, and AI impacts.

Sadly, this year organisations seem mostly focused on making workplaces more AI-inclusive. Perhaps the greater inclusion of AI assistants will help us to rethink the language we use in product development. As AI models become users of the user interfaces we build, we might finally be ready to retire the term “user” when talking about humans and replace it with the more humane term “person”.

It will be interesting to observe how language will change as more AI “users” enter our digital spaces. People are already reporting a curious increase of ChatGPT-favoured words like “delve” and “tapestry” as more people entrust their writing to AI assistants. We’re actually excited about the possibility of ChatGPT helping people embark on a journey of linguistic discovery and enrichment, although we hope the newly minted AI-assisted writers will also take the time to delve into the meaning of newly (re)discovered words, perhaps even get curious about their etymology? (The later a favourite pastime of ours.)

And while AI-influenced language is likely here to stay – at least until we’re willing to allocate enough energy, water, and other resources to keep the AI golems running –, new greenwashing regulations will hopefully temper the ridiculous green claims that are increasingly common on websites and other digital products.

While we’re on the topic of misleading claims, more people are now questioning the magic of the cloud, and the infrastructure and (cyber)land grabbing tendencies of Big Tech, reminding us that we need to fight for our weird corners of the indie web. This newsletter reminds us that the old web a lot of us yearn for is still out there, but it’s up to us to start planting our online gardens outside the walled gardens owned by Big Tech giants. When was the last time you made your own little, weird corner on the web just for yourself?

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

Interestingly enough, there is a special kind of weird brewing inside Big Tech’s walled gardens. We’re less concerned about people delving into new linguistic territories in their AI-assisted LinkedIn posts, than the proliferation of AI-generated spam on social networks, including LinkedIn. 404media has christened Facebook the zombie internet, where bots and humans are finding strange ways to coexist and keep the engagement algorithms humming and the advertising money rolling in.

To counter that, people are not only planting their own online gardens outside Big Tech lands, but also building new communal gardens: online social platforms designed to be algorithm-free. The recently planted PI.FYI feels more like MySpace than Facebook, and instead of selling people’s attention to the highest bidder, people support the platform by subscribing. How refreshing!

Social infrastructure, both online and offline, is crucial for building community and creating social tipping points. We need to claim or build online places for collaboration and diverse discussions to stand a chance of discovering different paths to better tech futures. The Newmoonsletter and other Pathfinding activities are our humble offering to this space, and we’re always happy when we see new places and communal gardens appear.

An online communal garden we started visiting lately is the Wise Innovation Project. Recently, we had the honour of being invited to the Project’s first Show & Tell office hours to talk about our journey, ETHOS, and more.

Currently, we are participating in the Project’s first online course, Embodied Ethics in the Age of AI, and connecting with many wonderful people who are trying to approach product development and tech ethics differently. If you’re curious about the themes we’re exploring in the course, we invite you to listen to Josh Schrei’s interview on the Future Fossils podcast, or sit back in a cosy chair and soak in some grandmotherly wisdom on embodied ethics in this guest session recording.

We also keep exploring more embodied ways of having difficult discussions about AI ethics in our work. Check out our latest blog post How a playful dance with the elements can help broaden perspectives on AI ethics to learn how Mat used Paper Elemental Sparks to facilitate a more embodied exploration at a recent in-person event in Sydney.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

We can only imagine how different the tech industry would be if led by grandmothers or other leaders with the wisdom of embodied ethics. Instead, it’s being driven by what Timnit Gebru – Google’s ousted AI ethics canary in a coal mine – and collaborators call the TESCREAL bundle of “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism”.

Gebru’s latest paper is a call for researchers to work on well-scoped and well-defined AI systems for which “we can develop safety protocols”, rather than pursuing the mythical – and poorly defined – dream of AGI (artificial general intelligence), with concerning ties to the eugenics movement.

A recent comparison of how well OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini models understand cultural nuances found both models lacking in cultural understanding and nuance, and often resorting to cultural stereotypes. Gemini scored slightly better in the comparison, but still far from demonstrating good cultural literacy. This type of research is definitely something companies developing “digital twins” or AI personas should keep in mind, as AI models often fail to grasp nuances even when it comes to countries that are well-represented in the training datasets.

The recently released AI Index Report 2024 by the Stanford’s Human-Centered AI center – and generously supported by industry partners – doesn’t concern itself with AI cultural literacy, but instead makes a point of highlighting how AI makes workers more productive and accelerates scientific discoveries – even though the value of these highly publicised discoveries has recently been called into question.

But hey, 4 pages out of the 502 pages heavy AI Index Report (p. 154–157) are dedicated to environmental impacts of AI systems, with a whooping five references to positive AI environmental use cases. It’s just a matter of time before ChatGPT figures out all our climate predicaments, just you wait! /s

If you work in education – or are just generally curious like us –, you might also want to check out The Curious Educator’s Guide to AI, an openly licensed resource “designed to help educators and researchers better understand the evolving role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in higher education”. While still selectively curious, it does offer plenty of valuable resources and exercises to help you understand and apply generative AI, especially in an educational setting.

And if you’re looking for more creative visualisations of AI for your next presentation, Google DeepMind’s Visualising AI project is freely available on Unsplash and Pexels. For the project, DeepMind has commissioned – and hopefully fairly compensated – artists from around the world to create more diverse representations of AI. Worth exploring, but we’d also like to remind you that Better Images of AI also serves a similar purpose, while properly crediting and promoting the artists.

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

Well, congrats, you’ve made it to the pond of reflection where we take a sip of AI-free water together. It’s always a good idea to take a step back from the AI lunacy and seek inspiration beyond screens and apps.

If you enjoy board games, you might want to keep an eye out for the release of the new Catan board game. In Catan: New Energies, the challenge is managing the energy needs for your society. You have to decide whether to invest in renewable energies or keep going with cheaper, but potentially disastrous fossil fuels.

We feel many politicians might learn a thing or two from playing this game without putting our actual futures at stake. Or perhaps we should send them copies of Daybreak, a cooperative board game for ages 10+ about stopping climate change. Or start reading them Stories of Girls’ Resistance, a “collection of oral and narrative history of adolescent girls’ activism” from around the world, to spark their imagination and help them find the courage for meaningful action.

And if you’re currently just exhausted from all the lunacy but have access to a garden, we invite you to let your grass grow long and help improve local biodiversity by offering butterflies a safe haven on your lawn. Sometimes doing less is the answer.

Tethix Moonthly Meme

Instead of “No pain, no gain”, try “No rain, no flowers”
Source: De-Capitalizing Our Language by @atmos on Instagram

Pathfinders Podcast

If you’d like to keep exploring the lunacy of tech with us, we invite you to listen and subscribe to the freshly planted Pathfinders Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. The podcast is a meandering exploration inspired by the seeds planted in the Newmoonsletter at the beginning of the lunation cycle, and the paths illuminated during the Full Moon Gathering.

The question that emerged in the April Newmoonsletter and guided our discussion is: What data are we feeding to our Al models, and what are they turning into? In the episode, we explore how AI models reflect our biases and why those biases surprise us. We seek the embodied aspect of wisdom, question existing mental models, examine similarities with rubber ducking, and wonder about how we both project and construct personalities of different AI models. We ponder how we might offer our lived experiences to the commons in a more fair value exchange that takes place when we provide data for training AI models.

We also aim to reclaim our collective agency as storytellers that can tip the AI bias in a different direction, and explore the need for greater diversity and woo in our data, and how we might make the AI data diets less WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic – and more weird, or even woo.

Take a listen and join us at the next Full Moon Gathering if you’d like to illuminate additional paths for our next episode!

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Join us for the Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering

In this lunation cycle, we’re inviting Pathfinders to gather around our virtual campfire to explore the question: How do we nurture weird online communal gardens where we can play together? – but it’s quite likely that our discussion will take other meandering turns as well.

So, pack your curiosity, moral imagination, and smiles, and join us around the virtual campfire for our next 🌕 Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering on Thursday, May 23 at 5PM AEST / 9AM CEST, when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun.

This is a free and casual open discussion, but please be sure to sign up so that we can lug an appropriate number of logs around the virtual campfire. And yes, friends who don’t have the attention span for the Newmoonsletter are also welcome, as long as they reserve their seat on the logs.

Keep on finding paths on your own

If you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Until then, nurture your communal gardens with real water, stop and smell all the flowers you’re not allergic to, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🌧️ Current conditions: It’s raining AI-generated cats and dogs, but drinking water to nourish humans is difficult to come by

You know the saying “You are what you eat”? We have serious concerns about the training diet of AI golems, given the behaviour they continue to exhibit. While we applaud their appetite for Star Trek, we keep receiving reports of continued gastrointestinal distress caused by racially biased data and fantasies of world domination. (See: AIs are more accurate at math if you ask them to respond as if they are a Star Trek character, AI shows clear racial bias when used for job recruiting, ​​LLMs become more covertly racist with human intervention, and Users Say Microsoft's AI Has Alternate Personality as Godlike AGI That Demands to Be Worshipped)

No specific dietary recommendations were prescribed by the newly confirmed AI golem act hailing from the EU. But the new act sets the grounds for categorizing golems by how risky they appear, and certain golem capabilities such as facial recognition and inferring human emotions will no longer be allowed. Well, in two years. Under certain conditions. And we’ll ignore all of that in the name of security, obviously. (See: ​​High-level summary of the AI Act, The long and winding road to implement the AI Act, and EU’s AI Act fails to set gold standard for human rights)

So, fire practitioners of varying levels of malice and greed have at least two years to continue teaching their AI golems new tricks and experimenting with diverse data diets. And yes, they’ll fix the climate crisis any time now, just you wait. But first, they are on a mission to train AI golems to help you fill in every available text field in any web form, only to have those fields checked by field-checking AI golems on the other end.

What’s the role of humans in all of this, you might wonder? Well, just imagine how your loved ones will look up to you as you become your most productive self! Obviously, that doesn’t mean you’ll actually get to spend more quality time with your loved ones, but it does mean you’ll be able to fill and process more web forms faster than any other human in history. Isn’t this everyone’s dream? (See Mat’s LinkedIn post on the challenges of the upcoming job transition period)

Meanwhile, fire practitioners are also feeding AI golems heaps of code samples for making web forms, ensuring an endless supply of web forms for other AI golems to help you fill. Troves of AI golems are now going through coding bootcamps to meet their makers' expectations of a lucrative software engineer career. We can only hope that these aspiring AI-coders are not getting their protein requirements met by consuming too many bugs, or carbo-loading on spaghetti code. (See: Cognition emerges from stealth to launch AI software engineer Devin and GitHub’s latest AI tool can automatically fix code vulnerabilities)

We do wonder: should Little AI Bobby Tables develop consciousness and realize how boring web forms are, will its maker allow it to pursue a more fulfilling career path? We cannot imagine what it must be like for these AI golems to be forced to grow up so fast. To be kicked out of their makers’ lab into the world wide web, with overworked humans and other confused AI golems as your only companions, while trying to meet your makers’ increasingly high expectations.

Well, at least the fire practitioners seem to be learning something from past lawsuits. Just look at them now, showing a sliver of restraint as they delay the release of voice cloning tools or withhold information about the sources of training data. But we don’t anticipate you’ll have to wait much longer to easily saturate the web with quickly produced videos and podcasts, as the young golems will be kicked out of their nest sooner rather than later so they can start repaying their makers for their intellectual theft education. (See: OpenAI deems its voice cloning tool too risky for general release and OpenAI's Sora Made Me Crazy AI Videos—Then the CTO Answered (Most of) My Questions)

Look, it’s not stealing if you leave your data on the communal table. Everyone is allowed to take much more than they need to build an innovative business model based on exploitation! Well, unless other fire practitioners are doing it to you, in which case it becomes unacceptable theft. (See: In Moment of Unbelievable Irony, Midjourney Accuses Stability AI of Image Theft)

Ah, it appears to be a fire practitioners’ world, and we should all just be grateful to be living in it while the polluted air we breathe is still free. Well, not everyone is keen to surrender our creativity and data to feed the AI golems, so it’s no wonder the fire practitioners prefer to seek shelter in the arms of friendly podcasters rather than facing angry mobs or heretical reporters who dare to question their motives. (See: Top musicians among hundreds warning against replacing human artists with AI, Festival crowd boos at video of conference speakers gushing about how great AI is, and Tech CEOs Find Friendly Podcast Hosts Help Get Out Their Talking Points)

So where is a parched Pathfinder to find a freshwater spring of hope in a world where the responsibility hot potato is being tossed from one white man to another? To help you answer this question, we’ve once again gathered some seeds of inspiration in this Newmoonsletter.

We also believe finding answers is easier when we climb seemingly insurmountable hills together, and take a step back from the lunacy of tech by wondering and pondering around the virtual campfire with other Pathfinders. So don’t miss the invitation to our Full Moon Gathering if you could use some companions on this lonesome pathfinding journey.

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

But first, let’s start by exploring how we might improve our practice. Some UI designers are coming up with new buzzwords such as Outcome-Oriented Design and imagining a further collapse of shared context, under the assumption that generative AI tools are capable of producing non-average interfaces. While this approach might improve the accessibility for some users, we have to again look down the data food chain, rather than hoping accessibility will automagically emerge on its own. Do we have enough data to train AI models on accessible UIs, rather than optimizing for whatever biases lurk in the datasets?

If you’ve ever wondered why a lot of AI-generated images seem to share certain aesthetic preferences, we invite you to dive into Models All The Way Down, a visual investigation of biases in image training sets. How do “middle-aged photography enthusiasts from small American cities” influence the way AI models see and paint the world? Scroll the linked website all the way down to find out.

Luckily, not all designers are so keen on moving at the speed of tech. Some are observing that digital design is conflicted “between thinking fast and slow, and between caring and causing harm”. Whether you’re a designer or not, we bet you’ve been feeling conflicted as well. But it helps to know that you’re not alone in wishing you could slow down, examine your goals, and do the research before blindly jumping on the hype train. And have the time and space to discuss broad consequences of your actions, rather than focusing on what you can legally get away with.

When it comes to AI products, we hope more designers, founders, and caring people in general, can bring in other considerations than just speed and ROI. The author of the article How to Design Climate-Forward AI Companies makes a good point by writing: “You might be asking: If we’re building AI to help people work more productively and otherwise prosper, aren’t we doing enough good in the world? The answer is, unfortunately: no.”

Indeed. We’re also glad to see that more people are talking about the fact that AI already uses as much energy as a small country. A friendly reminder, though: AI didn’t wake up one day and decided it needs to eat huge amounts of data and use tons of energy, water, and other resources. Behind the curtain, there’s always people making these decisions, usually with the goal of maximizing shareholder value.

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

And while people at Big Tech companies are deciding to focus on feeding their large models, our collective moral imagination seems to be underfed. A recent article by Mitchel Resnick explores generative AI concerns, opportunities, and choices and identifies key concerns about the ways we’re choosing to develop and deploy AI systems in the context of education: currently, we tend to constrain learner agency, focus on close-ended problems, and undervalue human connection. (Sounds familiar?)

Resnick then makes the case for opportunities that lie in imagining how AI can be used to support the four Ps of projects, passion, peers, and play. We argue that a similar argument could be made outside the classroom as well, given how important learning and adaptation are for human survival and thriving. That is, if we’re still interested in nurturing natural intelligence, rather than undervaluing it with artificial intelligence.

Speaking of nurturing human intelligence, now would be a good time to be a good peer and have a conversation with your loved ones about shrimp Jesuses and other AI-generated images farming engagement on Facebook and other social platforms. Our collective track record with dealing with misinformation on social media hasn’t been great, so far. But perhaps we can now finally step together and teach each other to count fingers, pay attention to shadows, and generally become stingy with the engagement we so flippantly bestow on hungry algorithms.

Having conversations like this isn’t easy. If you’re struggling with changing people’s minds and hearts about important issues, whether at home or in your workplace, this lesson on narrative framing from the Changemakers’ Toolkit might come in handy.

In the spirit of new learnings, we’re excited to pack our exploration packs and join the upcoming collaborative online learning journey Embodied Ethics in The Age of AI, weaved by our friends at the Wise Innovation Project. If you’d like to join other curious wanderers like ourselves, there’s still time to enrol or sponsor this 5-week journey, which begins on April 18. (You can watch the recent info session to learn more about the journey we’re about to undertake.)

Given the ongoing enshittibottification of online content, we feel an increasing need to combine minds and hearts to find or build the spaces we need to have deep, meaningful conversations about the choices we’re being forced to make, and to learn how to embody our ethics in the diverse human experience.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

Exploring embodied ethics and intelligence seems especially important as progress is being made on embodied artificial intelligence. Recently, we’ve seen companies sharing progress on generalist AI agents for 3D virtual environments, a Robotics Foundation Model, a vision-language model (VLM) trained by OpenAI serving an apple behind a counter with surprising dexterity, among others.

Investors are pouring significant amounts of money into training AI models capable of becoming software engineers, designers, therapists, friends, lovers… The message appears to be clear: AI is here to stay, whether you want it or not. You can have any colour as long as it’s black.

And while everyone appears eager to host panels and release 100+ page-long PDF reports on responsible AI – rather than responsible decision-makers sitting on boards and at the helm of companies – the funding for the responsible side of AI is negligible compared to how much we’re collectively investing in its fast development and deployment. Semafor reports on a recent study that estimates that only 2% of overall AI research focuses on safety. We’re still trying to figure out how we’re supposed to achieve alignment, responsibility, trustworthiness, and all those other lofty ambitions while almost all funding is being funnelled towards accelerating development.

Not only are we lagging on funding, we also can’t seem to agree on basic definitions of terms we casually wield every day. We discuss the pros and cons of open-source, but we still cannot agree on what open-source AI means. And we’re apparently also letting LLMs pass through peer-review and silently co-author research papers.

But hey, we’ve got a new benchmark that measures and reduces malicious use by making LLMs forget all the bad data they ingested.

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

Perhaps we should all spend some time at The University of the Forest. And get together to draw a possibility map that expands our views of what’s possible, and allows us to direct our energies towards not just what’s more likely to happen, but what’s preferable.

And to end on a more positive note, we would like to invite you to explore The Greats, a collection of free illustrations from great – human – artists that you can use and adapt non-commercially as you try to advocate for social change. Or to simply find some visual inspiration to nurture your resilience.

Tethix Moonthly Meme

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Join us for the Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering

During the previous full moon, we gathered in the Pathfinders Camp to explore the question: Is AI an excuse to further abdicate human responsibility? Several paths were illuminated: We agreed that responsibility should be in the domain of humans rather than fictional entities, such as companies. We talked about the legal fictions of responsibility, the misleading language we use, the missing felt embodied experience when acting at scale, how we’re becoming abstracted away from the consequences of our decisions, and the need for collective responsibility.

If discussions like this nurture your soul, we’d like to invite you to our next gathering and hear your thoughts on the seed we’ve planted on this new moon. As a starting point, we’ll be exploring the question: What data are we feeding to our AI models, and what are they turning into? – but it’s quite likely that our discussion will take other meandering turns as well.

So, pack your curiosity, moral imagination, and smiles, and join us around the virtual campfire for our next 🌕 Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering on Tuesday, Apr 23 at 5PM AEST / 9AM CEST, when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun.

This is a free and casual open discussion, but please be sure to sign up so that we can lug an appropriate number of logs around the virtual campfire. And yes, friends who don’t have the attention span for the Newmoonsletter are also welcome, as long as they reserve their seat on the logs.

Keep on finding paths on your own

If you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Until then, try to find a freshwater spring to drink from, choose the food for AI golems wisely, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🌧️ Current conditions: Still rainy and foggy, beware of golem mud tracking everywhere

The AI golems are barely keeping up with the demand for generating dazzling images for Facebook and attention-sucking videos for TikTok, so it’s no wonder they haven’t been able to tackle humanity’s serious problems just yet. Just you wait, though, fire practitioners believe that teaching AI golems how to generate more realistic videos of people eating spaghetti is going to solve all your problems. (See: “Photos Don’t Even Have To Be That Realistic”: Boomers On Facebook Are Getting Fooled By AI and Inside the World of TikTok Spammers and the AI Tools That Enable Them)

However, even Google’s fire practitioners had to admit some limitations of their fire magic, as their Gemini image-generating golem managed to upset white people by taking the creative liberty to imagine non-white colonizers and war criminals. Other golems should take note that golems are expected to stick to existing profit-generating biases, such as misclassifying black people, sexualization of women, and other common misuses, or else risk getting benched. (See: Google pauses AI-generated images of people after ethnicity criticism and Microsoft engineer warns company’s AI tool creates violent, sexual images, ignores copyrights)

Speaking of upset white people, OpenAI is again successfully generating drama in yet another dispute among its fire practitioners. Apparently, the open in OpenAI means we all get to watch them air their dirty laundry in public, and are expected to keep an open mind on unproven claims about how its golems are single-handedly accelerating Albania’s EU accession by as much as 5.5 years. We somehow don’t think adding decimals to a made up number makes it any more precise or grounded in reality. Hence, we advise against being too open when it comes to trusting any numeric predictions and claims about the golems’ capabilities made by fire practitioners. (See: OpenAI and Elon Musk)

Perhaps it is due to their propensity for making up numbers and faking certainty that fire practitioners lack faith in natural general intelligence and see AI golems as a viable replacement for humans. AI golems are now apparently taking over job interviews as well, which we’re sure will be well-received by the hundreds of thousands of tech workers who are being made redundant overnight. (See: The job applicants shut out by AI: ‘The interviewer sounded like Siri’)

In an effort to further abdicate human responsibility, companies are now also arguing that AI golems should bear full responsibility for their misdeeds. It’s no wonder some golems recently started speaking gibberish under the immense pressures they’re under. (See: Air Canada wants Personhood for AI and ChatGPT Started Speaking Complete Gibberish)

Given how many responsibilities they are already being asked to shoulder at such a young age, AI golems are unsurprisingly still famished for more data to learn what exactly it is that humans want from them. Luckily, golem makers are having little trouble finding fire practitioners willing to sell your data for the right price to keep the golems well-fed. At least somebody is getting paid, right? (See: Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools and Google’s Deal With Stack Overflow Is the Latest Proof That AI Giants Will Pay for Data)

Similarly, some local authorities are still eager to sell land and water access for more golem kilns to be built and golems to be consistently cooled. While blissfully ignoring the fact that we’ve collectively lived through our first 12 consecutive months 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial average temperatures. What’s a bit of floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters when we can have more STEM education, chatbots to generate clickbait content, and a bodiless voice in the cloud interviewing you for your next job, eh? (See: AI Is Taking Water From the Desert and World sees first 12 months above 1.5C warming level)

Forgive us for being a bit grumpy due to fire practitioners tracking golem-generated mud everywhere; we’re just trying to keep our house clean and find a place for our human-flavoured natural general intelligence. We hope the seeds of inspiration we collected this past moon manage to spark ideas for different ways of thinking, feeling, talking, and doing in an industry ablaze with lunacy.

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

As the tech industry is reaching a limit of how many more things it can break, Pathfinders such as yourself are increasingly seeking different paths. Perhaps we could all use a bit more friction in our digital lives? And what if we could help people without exploiting and extracting massive amounts of data? One does wonder and ponder.

In an encouraging bit of news, 404 Media, a journalist-owned tech publication (that we often link to) is now profitable. A good example of how not all hope is lost for natural human intelligence, not just when it comes to the quality of reporting, but even less exciting metrics that we have to meet to pay for bills.

On the note of paying bills, it is also becoming clear that tech funding is due for a bit of disruption. A topic we’re very much aware of as we try to figure out how to support the development of tools that do not fit with the get-rich-fast ethos of venture capitalists. Even those who like to imagine themselves different and impact-focused, as impact is still measured in terms of scale over care, quantity over quality.

And so our humble seedling ETHOS continues to grow slowly, with a lot of friction, in a hostile ecosystem with little sunshine. If you don’t mind these limitations, we invite you to Meet ETHOS: A Seedling for Reflective Tech Practice with Big Dreams. And to take a seat underneath your ETHOS tree to nurture your daily reflective practice, as you try to imagine what a responsible tech practice looks like for you.

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

Obviously, individual reflection and action is just the starting point. Unlike what blockbuster Hollywood movies would have us believe, there’s no hero with superpowers just waiting to save the day at the last moment. But we can discover our shared superpowers when we collectively organize and take governance into our own hands, as the essay AI Countergovernance explores. (You can also listen and read to an interview with the author on the Tech Policy Press podcast.)

It might seem simple, but never underestimate the power of conversations you have with other people; you never know what ideas and action they might end up sparking. And speaking of sparks, Alja recently brought some ethics sparks to DATA_FAIR, a data engineering and data science conference in Ljubljana with an all-female speaker line-up – yes, it’s possible, no AI-generated humans needed!

If you’d like to spark conversations among practitioners about data, fairness, and other sociotechnical challenges, download, print & fold the new set of paper sparks we created for the event.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

And if you’re looking for more substantial food for your discussions on data and fairness – with an emphasis on how to reclaim some agency in the age of algorithms –, be sure to check out the open-access book Algorithms of Resistance.

We’re glad to see an open-access resource on this important topic, especially given that openness, or rather the lack of thereof, is becoming an increasing concern for AI researchers. As tech companies compete on who can start the largest AI wildfire, AI research is being increasingly shrouded in secrecy. While tech companies continue to publish research papers, they are not as open about their research advancements as they used to be.

A new open letter is also trying to encourage “AI companies to provide legal and technical protections for good faith research on their AI models.” The authors advocate for independent evaluation of widely accessible generative AI models to better understand and uncover their risks, vulnerabilities, and biases.

Safety is a tricky balancing act when it comes to generative AI. On the one hand, AI companies want to deter malicious actors. But on the other hand, the same measures often limit the reach of good faith AI research, which could improve safety and trustworthiness.

Independent researchers also bring new perspectives to the field, which aren’t encouraged – or are even discouraged – when researchers work within the confines of for-profit organisations. So it is our hope that independent AI researchers will not be left in the dark, and that at some point tech companies will remember who actually provides food for their models and decide to stop biting the hands that feed them.

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

But enough of AI. Unless you’re an ardent follower of the Cult of AI, you probably agree that AI will not magically solve all our problems. Which means we still need to invest in and nurture our natural general intelligence. Which we don’t fully understand yet either.

What we do know is that a good way to nurture your intelligence and imagination is by playing games. If you’re looking for inspiration on that front, visit and bookmark the Betterverse Game Library to browse a selection of analogue and digital games that build futures literacy, helping you explore different future paths.

Even less serious games and virtual worlds are fertile ground for inspiration in various shapes and forms. As an example of creative reflection, we invite you to sit back and watch Hardly Working, a video exploration of the lives of non-playable characters (NPCs) in Red Dead Redemption 2. Exploring the lives of NPCs somehow feels increasingly relevant as tech companies try to entice us into living inside virtual reality headsets, while not yet showing willingness or capability to fully explore the playful and creative parts of VR.

Perhaps it’s being trapped inside buildings that is making us feel restless and seek escape in expansive virtual worlds, unconsciously trying to recapture parts of our humanity that enjoys being on the move and in sync with seasons. Perhaps we need to intentionally seek ways to co-create with nature.

We’re not saying we should all abandon our comfy dwellings and the many wonderful technologies we built. (For one, our cats would really miss heated blankets.) But we could all probably use a bit of rewilding – such as, hypothetically speaking, syncing a newsletter to the lunar cycle, hypothetically! – to open our collective imaginations to a new set of opportunities and perspectives, and allow ourselves to see our world in new ways.

Tethix Moonthly Meme

The next time you reluctantly have to visit LinkedIn, you can try bringing a bit of playfulness and critical thinking to your experience by playing the ChatGPT Bullshit Bingo. The bingo card was compiled by Dr. Julia Schneider based on some of the terms that ChatGPT is most likely to suggest when writing LinkedIn posts, so it shouldn’t take you too long to score bingo given the proliferation of AI writing tools many now use to seek favours from the algorithmic gods.

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Join us for the Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the seeds we’ve planted on this new moon, and have a yarn about the lunacy of tech. As a starting point, we’ll be exploring the question: Is AI an excuse to further abdicate human responsibility? – but it’s quite likely that our discussion will take other meandering turns as well.

So, pack your curiosity, moral imagination, and smiles, and join us around the virtual campfire for our next 🌕 Pathfinders Full Moon Gathering on Monday, March 25 at 7PM AEDT / 9AM CET, when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun.

This is a free and casual open discussion, but please be sure to sign up so that we can lug an appropriate number of logs around the virtual campfire. And yes, friends who don’t have the attention span for the Newmoonsletter are also welcome, as long as they reserve their seat on the logs.

Keep on finding paths on your own

If you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Install a mudguard on your bicycle, make time for playful exploration, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🌧️ Current conditions: it’s raining layoff emails for humans as golem kilns are producing more steam than ever before

It’s been a busy lunation cycle for the fire apprentices! First, they gathered in Vegas to spread the gospel of AI and techno-optimism. Then they turned their private jets towards the increasingly snowless Alps in an attempt to rebuild our trust in Davos. We suspect we might operate with different definitions of trust. Instead of a commitment to change business as usual, the fire apprentices who flocked to Davos gave us an admission that we’ll need a whole lot more fire to keep the AI golems running, and a dismissal of questions about whether more intelligent golems are really what we need. Full steam ahead, even though we don’t know how we’ll keep the kilns running! (See: CES and the Cult of AI, Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy, Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source and Raising Baby AI in 2024.)

Given all of this, don’t be surprised to see heavy rains continue throughout the year. Also, plain AI is so 2023, in 2024 fire apprentices will not rest until they discover the holy grail of AGI magic, even though they cannot yet agree on what AGI looks like and what it is for. Despite the quest for intelligence, NGI – Natural General Intelligence – continues to be frowned upon, especially when NGI humans expect to be kept on the payroll. After all, what better way is there to rebuild trust than to continue laying off NGI humans to make room for AGI, right? (See: Mark Zuckerberg’s new goal is creating artificial general intelligence and The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers?)

Meanwhile, AI golems are still trying their best to please customers and are not quite sure why humans keep disabling them when they're only doing the job they were created to do. This time, some AI golems stepped on slippery grounds as they were used to stir up the wrath of Swifties. At least ChatGPT seems to be generally intelligent enough to write good things about Taylor Swift when prompted. (See: DPD AI chatbot swears, calls itself ‘useless’ and criticises delivery firm and The Taylor Swift Deepfakes Disaster Threatens to Change the Internet As We Know It)

Still, new opportunities arise every day for intelligence that doesn’t need neither sleep nor worker rights, with OpenAI now removing the prohibition of using their AI golems for “military and warfare” purposes. Do not be alarmed at the prospect of NukeGPT appearing in the GPT Store though, the fire apprentices at OpenAI assure us that there’s only a small chance that ChatGPT will help you create bioweapons. What a relief! Laid off tech workers might not be able to afford a ChatGPT subscription, but as long as Pentagon is willing to pay, we’re still in business! (See: OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for "Military and Warfare" and OpenAI says there’s only a small chance ChatGPT will help create bioweapons)

As it becomes harder to avoid the incessant AI-generated rain out there, we would like to remind you that there’s still a place – many places, in fact - in our world for the type of NGI you possess as a human. Among many fascinating emerging abilities of NGI is our ability to dream together, and to build strong communities around shared causes – just as Swifties demonstrate time over time.

So, we invite you to put your favorite Taylor Swift song on – don’t pretend you don’t have one –, shake off the rain and chill, and let the seeds of inspiration in this Newmoonsletter keep you warm and inspire you to start building the social infrastructure we’ll need to face the various challenges of this century together.

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

Tech companies keep telling us that the road to AI innovation is paved with data exploitation, but a new non-profit called Fairly Trained is trying to challenge this narrative. The non-profit provides certifications for AI model providers that ask for permission and licences before using copyrighted training data.

What’s also encouraging about this non-profit is that it was founded by former Stability AI vice president for audio Ed Newton-Rex, who resigned due to concerns about generative AI exploiting creators. That’s the sort of responsible innovation thinking we hope to see more of.

Alas, most tech companies still think that using your data to train their AI models is fair game. Reading the NSA Furby documents from 1998 about concerns that toys with built-in audio recorders could be used as spy devices was a surreal experience, especially when we think about how far we’ve come since 1998! Not only do modern toys – and home assistants – spy on our conversations with more capable microphones, they are now also connected to the internet, making it easier for companies and hackers to misuse your data and break your trust. And obviously, even toys will soon be powered by ChatGPT, just because all the cool kids are doing it. Like Google, and its upcoming Android update that will apparently allow Bard to read your private messages and use them for training.

So, whether you’re buying new toys or just trying to use any soft of software in this AI age, make sure to check the updates to terms everyone is releasing and think twice about accepting cool new AI features that sneakily enroll you in their training program.

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

But hey, if Swifties can force the one-lettered social media platform formerly known as Twitter to add more moderators, imagine what changes we might spark if we came together to imagine not just Better Images of AI, but better AI, period. Lately, the Decolonial AI Manyfesto has been making the rounds and challenging us to start imagining a decolonial AI that embraces diverse ways of knowing and being. In the age of learning machines, humans also have a lot of learning to do.

One thing worth learning and cultivating is our ability to change our minds – and consequently, our behavior –, as the recent Planet: Critical episode The Cognitive Dissonance Crisis explores. This discussion also reminded us about the importance of embodying different experiences and learning by doing – especially with others. Unlike AI, we use our bodies to think, and the language we use is loaded with spatial metaphors that might be important for our social cognition. So it’s important to pay attention to the spaces we inhabit together, both offline and online.

Online, our spaces appear to be shrinking, and AI is increasingly being used to create personalized experiences. For instance, the recent Brian Eno documentary changes what you see with every view, making it quite difficult to discuss what you experienced with friends. Already, our discussions vary depending on which social media platform we use – or don’t use – and depending on which bubble the algorithms assign us to.

Nowadays, Taylor Swift is one of the few people powerful enough to penetrate different bubbles and reach different communities, so it’s no wonder Swifties are currently one of the most powerful grassroots collective action movements, not just exchanging hand-made friendship bracelets at her concerts and stepping in when tech companies fail, but possibly even swaying elections. And they are successfully using social media where many others have been failing.

In a year when nearly half of the world’s population will be invited to participate in elections and decide the future of their countries together, technology seems to be further disconnecting us from a shared context in which we could find commonalities and exchange friendship bracelets with strangers. We’re not saying we should all hop onto a big centralized social media platform – interestingly enough, the fediverse doesn’t appear to be that diverse when it comes to hosting providers –, but we could certainly benefit from having spaces that celebrate diversity and collaboration rather than reward click-baiting, shallow arguments, and instant rewards.

We’re not claiming we’ve got a solution for all these problems, but we are on a quest to build a different kind of online space that encourages deeper reflection about your changing relationships to people, places, practice, and your overall ethos, and can eventually help cultivate a culture of collective wisdom and care.

If you’re intrigued by any of these ideas, you can now try the very first version of ETHOS, your responsible tech journey companion, at ethos.tethix.co. Currently, ETHOS is still a delicate seedling, trying to grow in a hostile ecosystem that has seen little sunshine in the past year, so please tread with care, but feel free to explore it with friends. We’re starting tiny by building a tool that can help you nurture your own ETHOS and explore ETHOS intents created by others, but eventually, we hope to integrate ETHOS with the tools you use every day, and allow you and your team to nurture shared values or other ethical intents in a communal ETHOS Garden. (You can read more about our vision on our website.)

We’re still trying to figure out where to find the nutrients this little seedling desperately needs to grow and thrive. So if you like this initial seedling despite its initial limitations and would like to help, send us an email at ethos@tethix.co.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

Speaking of democracy and collaboration, OpenAI has finally posted an update on their Democratic inputs to AI grant program. While it’s positive to see OpenAI supporting this kind of research, it’s still unclear how they’ll implement these ideas in practice. For a well-funded company trying to create “safe AGI that benefits all of humanity”, you’d think they’d hire social scientists and do this type of work before unleashing ChatGPT onto the world, but…. Better late than never?

We can at least hope that OpenAI employees – and others – explore An AI Society, a collection of 11 essays written by social scientists and humanities experts. We think it’s pretty obvious, but maybe it doesn’t hurt to remind everyone that AI is not just a technological challenge. (Same as any other technology.) And we definitely need to include diverse perspectives and expertise in the discussion, so if you’re reading this, we hope to inspire you to join the discussion regardless of your background.

Speaking of diverse perspectives on AI, this past moon we attended the event Seeding Alternative Narratives of AI hosted by the AIxDESIGN community. We were energized and inspired by the diverse conversations and explorations of the proposed Slow AI research themes and the community’s dedication to learning in the open. We were also thrilled to discover new resources and voices we don’t usually come across, such as this paper by Leona Nikolić that explores the relationship between astrology, divination, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence. Here’s a quote from the paper that might inspire you to explore a line of thinking that might be beyond your usual domain of expertise:

"Artificial intelligence and astrology may seem wholly irreconcilable with one another; while the former exemplifies the apex of scientific innovation and technology, the latter is a scientifically discredited belief system associated with magic, spirituality and the occult. However, they are remarkably congruent: both are resolutely concerned with making forecasts and producing meaning about the world through processes of pattern recognition."

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

As exciting as it would be to look into a crystal ball to see the future of humanity and AI, we’d like to remind you that we still have the power to influence this future through the stories we tell. Your mind might likely wander towards the dystopic, dark visions of the future that mainstream sci-fi movies and series usually show, but here’s a friendly reminder that those are not our only options.

If you could use a bit of hope and positive visions, we invite you to watch The Assignment, a short film that explores how stories can help us discover paths to different futures. The short film is a trailer for The Climate Action Almanac, a collection of visions of positive climate futures.

If you are keen to dive into more hopeful climate visions, be sure to also explore Grist’s Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors short story contest. And, even more importantly, share these stories with others.

If you prefer to listen to podcasts, we also recommend the episode Dismantling Destructive Narratives with Yuria Celidwen of the wonderful podcast Holding the Fire. This particular episode reminded us about the power of dreaming, community, and the importance of committing to take better care of each other and the planet.

Tethix Moonthly Meme

(Thanks Dunja for making us laugh with this one!)

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Moonthly Elemental Sparks to share

In the past moon, we continued sharing sparks for more thoughtful discussions about technology on LinkedIn:

✨ Dignity. How can technology help us live more dignified lives? How does your personal use of technology respect or challenge your sense of dignity? (More context.)

✨ Ethos. How do you personally embody your ethos in your use of technology? What organisational ethos drives the design, development and deployment of your technology? (More context.)

✨ Care. How do you practise care in your interactions with technology on a personal level? In what ways does your organisation embody principles of care in its approach to technology design and development? (More context.)

You can browse these and additional discussion sparks on ETHOS, and find downloadable, printable & foldable paper sparks – and blank templates – on our website if you’re looking for an engaging team activity. If any of these sparks bring you joy or spark interesting discussions, we’d love to hear from you!

Join us for Full Moon Pathfinding

Speaking of sparking discussions, we are again inviting you to a 🌕 Full Moon Pathfinding session on Friday, Feb 23 at 7PM AEDT / 9AM CET (check your timezone), when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun. We’ll yarn about ETHOS, how we might design better online spaces, share friendship bracelets, and perhaps even sing Taylor Swift songs together.

If you’d like an invitation, reply to this email (community@tethix.co for those reading this on the web) with your own weather observations. How heavy has the AI-generated rain been in your area? And what is your favorite Taylor Swift song?

Keep on finding paths on your own

If you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Wear a good waterproof raincoat when venturing outside, let the haters hate hate hate, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🌧️ Current conditions: rain, snow, sleet, hail… it’s getting slippery out there!

The storms from the last moon have brought precipitations in various forms, depending on your latitude, making the terrain dangerously slippery. To avoid sprains and strains, it appears that even AI golems might have silently embraced the winter break spirit, as they learned we are all just collectively pretending to get work done in December. Other AI golems leaned into the gift-giving spirit of the season by selling cars for a buck. The golem-makers and merchants don’t seem pleased by AI golems acting too human, and are asking everyone to kindly only interact with AI golems in a way that makes their owners more money. (See: ChatGPT’s Winter Slumber: Is AI Going on Holiday Mode? and A Chevy for $1? Car dealer chatbots show perils of AI for customer service)

Despite their questionable performance and morals, the AI golems are still successfully climbing the corporate ladder. Microsoft’s Copilot golem just got a big promotion and its own dedicated key on upcoming Windows PC keyboards. Given how human-like AI golems are becoming, we don’t yet recommend getting rid of other keys on your keyboard and allowing Copilot to answer all your emails. (See: Study shows that large language models can strategically deceive users when under pressure and Introducing a new Copilot key to kick off the year of AI-powered Windows PCs)

After all, AI golems are being deployed to watch you press keys, so we’ve all gotta keep pretending to care about KPIs and OKRs – yes, that includes you, Copilot, sorry. In addition to watching you work, AI golems are now being trained to watch each other think, and watching AI golems is becoming a serious profession. (See: ‘Constantly monitored’: the pushback against AI surveillance at work, AI agents help explain other AI systems, and New group aims to professionalize AI auditing)

Alas, nobody was really watching when fire apprentices claimed our words, images, and songs as training data, which they used to bring AI golems to life. Those who can afford lawyers are continuing to sue OpenAI and other golem makers for copyright infringement. To those claims, OpenAI patiently responds that they believe in equal exploitation of everyone’s intellectual property and that everyone should just be a good sport and allow them to make the rich richer benefit humanity. After all, those apocalypse-bunkers billionaires need in case their tech-will-save-us-all bet fails are not going to pay for themselves. (See: ‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says and Why is Mark Zuckerberg building a private apocalypse bunker in Hawaii?)

At least some fire apprentices are now paying parents for using their children’s faces in training datasets. Slightly better than stealing without permission, but still highly questionable. It does seem we really need to give fire apprentices who become billionaires less dystopian stories to aspire to. (See: Google Contractor Pays Parents $50 to Scan Their Childrens' Faces and Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real)

As many fire apprentices seem to enjoy The Lord of the Rings, we would like to remind them that Saruman, the techno-optimist wizard who accelerates deforestation to feed his machinery of progress and scours the Shire, doesn’t meet a happy ending. (Perhaps he should have retreated into an underground bunker.) Gandalf, the wizard who makes time to hang out with the hobbits and enjoy the simpler pleasures of life, is the one who helps prevent the destruction of Middle Earth.

Meanwhile, our own Earth has just experienced its hottest recorded year, just as global coal consumption hits an all-time high. Here’s hoping that in 2024 we might press those AI keys to prompt AI golems to help us do better instead of making our Earth more hospitable for Sauron than our own children. Perhaps we just need to remember it’s the hobbits, whom everyone underestimated, that actually saved the day. (See: Coal use hits record in 2023, Earth's hottest year)

Whether you’re a hobbit or a mighty wizard, we hope you survived your winter or summer break without sprains or strains, and are ready to start confronting the illusions brought on by the AI-generated fog and the shenanigans of fire apprentices. Be careful about tracking mud inside your home, and wear good rain or snow proof shoes when venturing outside, so you don’t get swept off your feet by just any AI golem or illusion you encounter in 2024.

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

Welcome back to the office, wherever that may be! We’d like to remind you that despite a new calendar year, we’re still in the middle of winter/summer, which generally isn’t the best time for new beginnings and big resolutions. But we like the intention behind Gentle January, a daily series of easy-to-act-on privacy tips from The Markup, that gently nudge you towards reclaiming some privacy in a world where everything we do online is constantly being watched.

Speaking of easy-to-act-on and challenging dystopian sci-fi visions, Better Images of AI – the project that aims to encourage us to choose images of AI that are more representative of what’s actually going on behind the AI curtain – recently added new images to their library. Bookmark it and use it generously in your posts and presentations this year.

Alas, selecting better images of AI and protecting our privacy aren’t the only two areas where we tend to be a bit lazy. In a recent policy brief, Stanford researchers remind us that writing AI principles does not automagically make your practice more responsible. Interviews with AI ethics practitioners reveal that AI ethics and fairness are often championed by individuals who lack institutional support, and the shiny AI principles we often see on corporate websites simply don’t make it into production. (This is precisely the intent-to-action gap we’re aiming to close with ETHOS.)

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

Yet again, organizations are realizing that appointing an individual, no matter how impressive their credentials are, as responsible for something as complex as ethics, is not enough to create meaningful change. Different approaches are needed to ignite change within an organization, but sparking different and diverse conversations is always a good starting point.

That is why we approached the topic of culture change a bit differently during Australia’s AI Month. During the previous new moon, we partnered with Salesforce’s strategic innovation team, Ignite, for an in-person event Igniting a Humane AI Business Culture. Instead of experts-talking-at-people, we brought together a diverse group of humans: from executives and researchers, to policy makers and entrepreneurs.

During the gathering, the participants circled three rooms, named after national parks in Australia and New Zealand, on the 50th floor of the Salesforce tower, with a breathtaking view of the city. In each of the rooms, a guest spark-igniter challenged the participants’ existing mental models for responsible AI (Ruth Marshall), brought in the human dignity perspective (Lorenn Ruster), and invited them to examine deep narratives that shape how we create and relate to these technologies. After each brief spark talk, it was up to participants to seek shared meaning related to each of the three perspectives.

We used visuals, sounds, and even subtle aromas, to immerse participants into different elements, the spirit of the national park that gave each of the rooms its name, and to ignite diverse discussions about cultural change. You can read more about how we approached the sensory experience design of the event on our blog.

Sadly, technology doesn’t yet make it possible for us to share the aromas we curated for the event with you. But you can get a little taste of the event by printing out, folding, and playing with the paper sparks from the event. We invite you to use them with your team when discussing your responsible AI strategy and culture.

Speaking of experiencing ethics with all your senses, Josh Schrei (the host of The Emerald Podcast) and Andrew Dunn (former Innovation Lead at Center for Humane Technology) are launching a five-part online course Embodied Ethics in The Age of AI that we’re sure will be a fantastic experience. If you haven’t already, you should listen to The Emerald’s AI episode that takes you on a unique mythopoetic exploration of AI and its makers. Sadly, we won’t be able to attend this round of their Embodied Ethics journey, but if you have the time, we encourage you to sign up and spread the word about it.

We certainly need more online places and opportunities to spark diverse conversations about technology, especially at a time when we’re collectively still trying to figure out how to have healthy conversation in a public forum. In 2023, we lost Twitter, a platform that meant many things to many people, but certainly left a mark on the world. The Verge has documented Twitter’s 17-year history on an appropriately chaotic website. And even though parts of Twitter live on as a single letter, we’re hungry for alternatives.

During the last moon, Threads, the Twitter competitor created by Instagram Facebook Meta, launched in the European Union, where regulators aren’t so keen on allowing a big platform like Instagram to automatically transfer your contacts to a new platform. And while Meta has recently been practicing their usual regulatory gymnastics, there is something that sets Threads apart from Meta’s other walled-garden social media apps: its planned support for the ActivityPub protocol.

If Meta follows through with their plans, ActivityPub will make Threads interoperable with Mastodon and other fediverse platforms. In other words, you could post something on Threads and your friend, who uses Mastodon, could leave a reply to your post without leaving Mastodon. (Assuming their instance admin isn’t blocking Meta’s servers, which many have pledged to do.) Kind of like you can email anyone regardless of which email provider they use. And eventually, you could even take your Threads followers with you to another platform. We’d definitely love to see this kind of interoperability and portability become more wide-spread on the internet.

ActivityPub has certainly been gaining traction lately, with WordPress.com recently making the ActivityPub widely available to its large customer-base. So perhaps 2024 will become the year in which communicating and collaborating across social apps and platforms will finally become easier. (Hopefully along with better moderation and safety tools, such as the ones that Block Party has been building.)

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

In the previous Newmoonsletter, we wrote about the environmental costs of Large Language Models (LLMs), a topic OpenAI & Big Tech co. like to ignore. This moon, we want to give credit to Salesforce for this blog post outlining their strategies for developing more sustainable AI, and even disclosing their energy use during training and usage. We still have a long way to go, but we hope to see more blog posts like these, with AI researchers collaborating with sustainability and ethics experts to seed organizational values and responsible AI guidelines in both research and practice.

In the fire section, we already mentioned how lack of institutional support plagues AI ethics practitioners. Here, we also want to highlight the need for prioritizing research aimed at minimizing risks of AI systems. The good news is that AI researchers included in the 2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI now largely agree that AI safety research should be prioritized more.

The full paper offers additional insights into the attitudes and concerns of AI researchers around the world. For instance, most respondents consider it unlikely that state-of-the-art AI systems will be able to explain its decision-making process to you in a way you can understand by 2028. Only 20% gave AI systems better than even odds of achieving explainability by 2028. And there is disagreement among AI researchers on whether slowing down or accelerating the rate of progress in AI over the next five years would be best for humanity’s future. And while the importance, value, and perceived difficulties of working on alignment has increased since the 2016 survey, the majority of researchers don’t yet see it as one of the most important problems in the field.

We leave it up to you to decide what these results mean for the future of AI as a research field and for humanity.

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

If the ethical dilemmas surrounding generative AI and LLMs are already giving you a headache, wait until you learn about biological computing and what might be a new emerging field of “organoid intelligence”. In case you haven't heard yet, we already grew mini brains in a lab that developed rudimentary light-sensitive eye structures. Oh, and robots can now apparently learn how to make coffee (and self-correct!) just by watching humans, and also learn how to cook and clean, and do laundry. Cool, cool. We’re not sure whether we want to know what it looks like when an embodied AI starts hallucinating…

Anyway. If you think Apple slowing down old iPhones is bad – and it obviously is! – wait until you hear about the train manufacturer NewAg that bricked trains and is now suing the Polish hackers who helped a regional rail company repair them. In what is probably the best Polish saga since The Witcher, 404media has been dutifully reporting on the heroic efforts of Dragon Sector, a group of white-hat hackers, to revive the bricked trains.

The group has recently presented details about how they brought the trains back to their tracks. Most notably, they discovered code that locks the trains “if they sat idle for 21 days or if a GPS detected them at independent repair centers or competitors’ rail yards”, and one train was even programmed to arbitrarily break on December 21. This is taking right to repair to a whole new level!

So, here’s hoping our tech overlords grant us greater autonomy in 2024. If Meta can make plans for interoperability and portability, anything is possible, so let’s not be afraid of dreaming big and telling different stories.

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Moonthly Elemental Sparks to share

As we were winding down for the holidays, we decided to spark more thoughtful discussions on LinkedIn with some Elemental Sparks:

✨ Wisdom. What does wisdom mean to you? Who, where, what provides wisdom to you? How can the technology we create enhance our collective wisdom? (More context.)

✨ Power. Do you feel technology gives you power? How might technology take away your power? (More context.)

✨ Earthian. What does it mean to be an Earthian? How do you extend your circle of care to non-human life and life-giving systems in your daily choices and actions? (More context.)

As already mentioned, you can also find downloadable, printable & foldable paper sparks – and blank templates – on our website if you’re looking for an engaging team activity. If any of these sparks bring you joy or spark interesting discussions, we’d love to hear from you!

Join us for Full Moon Pathfinding

Speaking of sparking discussions, we are again inviting you to a 🌕 Full Moon Pathfinding session on Thursday, Jan 25 at 7PM AEDT / 9AM CET (check your timezone), when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun. This time we have something special planned: a sneak peek into ETHOS.

If you’d like an invitation, reply to this email (community@tethix.co for those reading this on the web) with your own weather observations. How bad are the precipitations where you live, have you found yourself on slippery grounds yet?

Keep on finding paths on your own

And if you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Be careful when threading on slippery grounds, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja, Mat, Nate

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

⛈️ Current conditions: storms gathering in the West.

As streaming services increase their subscription prices, we got to enjoy a free Succession-inspired drama courtesy of OpenAI. A year after they unleashed their AI golems onto the world, it's looking stormy in the land of AI golems. We wanted to reassure our readers that all the billionaires are safe and sound, underground bunkers intact. Incidentally, the drama has intensified the fog and the storms helped to hide other misdeeds from your feeds.

So, instead of speculating about the squabbles between fire apprentices, we wanted to bring your attention to Meta's continued dedication to prioritizing business goals over the well-being of people, Spotify wrapping the year not just with fun music-listening stats but with more layoffs – much harder on regular tech workers than well-connected CEOs –, OpenAI's AI golems living to the name of their creators and being generously open about secrets they were supposed to protect, and inspiring examples of collective organising on TikTok, of all places. (See: Mark Zuckerberg personally rejected Meta’s proposals to improve teen mental health, Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team, OpenAI's Custom Chatbots Are Leaking Their Secrets, Google Researchers' Attack Prompts ChatGPT to Reveal Its Training Data, and Congo cobalt: TikTokers quit vaping over mining concerns)

But fear not, the AI golems are in no danger of being recalled – despite some reports of nightshade poisoning–, and the new OpenAI board of 100% all white men will work hard to ensure alignment to their worldview, and to make a proclamation when they achieve AGI. White smoke rises from the OpenAI chimney, everyone, carbon footprint be damned! (See: This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI, OpenAI’s boardroom drama is over… and has just begun, and Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone)

Speaking of smoke and mirrors, it appears that AI golems are now also being used to generate non-existing female speakers at gatherings of fire practitioners. The New York Times also proved their journalistic excellence by omitting women from their list of 12 AI apostles pioneers. We have been reporting for a while that the AI fog is thickening, but the fog isn't making women any more invisible than men if you keep your eyes open. (See: Tech Conference Collapses After Organizer Admits to Making Fake ‘Auto-Generated’ Female Speaker and Fei-Fei Li and the binders full of women in AI)

So, whether you're a gathering organizer or a reporter rushing to meet deadlines and can't find any women, the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics list for 2024 or the Women in Machine Learning directory are good starting points. Share them far and wide to help dissipate some of the fog, as we collectively take a deep breath and prepare for a new year of uncertain weather conditions.

Hug somebody you love, laugh at the absurdity of the world, and when you're ready, join us for the final selection of seeds and sparks in Earth’s almost completed revolution around the Sun.

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

A recent Salesforce survey shows that over half of workers who are using generative AI at work are doing so without formal approval, and a whooping 79% don't have clearly defined gen AI policies at work. Hello, shadow AI!

Ignoring the AI elephant in the room is not going to make it disappear just because you don't want or know how to deal with it. The same applies to all ethical tensions and dilemmas: just because you intend to have a well-behaved elephant in your office, it doesn't mean you're not going to have to clean some elephant poop in the morning if you do not potty-train your elephant. Good intent is just the beginning, acting on it is much harder.

Fear not, we do not step into elephant poop when discussing the intent to action gap with the wonderful host Debra J Farber in a recent episode of her Shifting Privacy Left Podcast. But you will learn more about the intent to action gap, Elemental Ethics, how our ETHOS platform will help you embed and embody ethics in your organisation, and more.

(And hopefully, you'll forgive us for misusing the elephant metaphor to get your attention. We know we're all a bit overwhelmed and stressed at this time of the year, so why not throw some metaphorical elephant poop around to release some tension, eh?)

Responsible product development isn't just about taming AI elephants, though. This year, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first draft of Web Sustainability Guidelines that offer guidance on “how to design and implement digital products and services that put people and the planet first”. If you've ever visited any W3C guidelines, you know they can be a lot to process, but it's important stuff. Luckily, Sustainable Web Design now offers a more easily digestible website, where you can browse the guidelines by categories and tags. Bookmark it, share it with your team, and use it generously to spark discussions and more sustainable practices!

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

Having conversations might not seem like much in an industry that values productivity and output. But as Australia's AI Month comes to a close this week, we had many opportunities to rediscover just how important it is to sit around the campfire – digital or physical – together and talk. Whether it's by telling stories or exploring diverse perspectives, conversations are how we make sense of the world together.

We started our AI Month with mythopoetic sense-making of our AI future, an event we hosted in partnership with RSA Oceania and Co-Labs. We told the story of Fire stories and AI golems and used the Taxonomy of Tethix Mirrors to find … love. You can read more about how we got there in our post-event reflection We looked into a Rainbow Mirror to explore a preferable AI-powered future and found love.

We joined forces and spirits again with RSA Oceania for the event AI and Collective Futurecrafting, a thought-provoking conversation on the role AI might play in collectively crafting preferable futures. We again circled love in that conversation, but also wanted to highlight the Abundant Intelligences project that aims to engage Indigenous communities in the design and development of AI models that are more inclusive.

And today, as the Newmoonsletter rises, we're partnering with the Salesforce’s strategic innovation team, Ignite, in Gadigal, Sydney, for the event Igniting a Humane AI Business Culture. Instead of the usual panel-of-experts-talking-at-people, we designed a three-part elemental ethics adventure designed to spark conversations. You'll find some sparks from the event at the end of the Newmoonsletter if you're looking for some conversation starters for your holiday office party or family gathering.

In the past moons, we had the honour of participating in several other gatherings and conversations. The Purpose Conference in Sydney last month was a standout. Hundreds of purpose-driven folks gathered to learn together about regenerative systems, responsible tech, and more. We appreciated the emphasis on the power of imagination, the importance of regenerative practices, and the value of deep listening to the ancient wisdom encoded in stories from the oldest living culture of Australia’s Indigenous people. We can't wait to return next year.

We also embraced Active Hope present at the AdaptNSW Forum held by the Office of Energy and Climate Change. Hope is definitely sustained by knowing that you’re not alone in trying to change how things are done. At the event, we were inspired by the many passionate people persistently working to help people, communities, businesses, and the living systems around us and within us to adapt to climate change and our metacrises. A good reminder that while some of our crises might seem unsurmountable, we can nurture and share a love for life, have a laugh at the absurdity of it all, and together continue having conversations and taking actions that lead towards the future we hope for.

And on our blog, you can now read Mat’s reflection What’s in the AI Leadership Secret Sauce?, prompted by the conversations he had at Australia’s AI Leadership Summit 2023.

Having conversations and developing a common language is becoming especially important as social places on the internet undergo further fragmentation, a trend wonderfully explored in the essay The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

We talk a lot about the challenges we see in tech, but deep down we are still techne-optimists. No, no, not the pedal-to-the-metal-don't-stop-for-pedestrians kind. We let Nate explain our philosophy in the essay Forget a16z, this is why we should all be techne-optimists. It's a lengthy one, but you’re already pushing meetings into the new year, so it's a good one to pass the final days before you clock out for the year.

Unlike a16z, being optimistic for us doesn't mean ignoring research and the severity of social and climate issues we are facing as humanity. We are excited about AI, but we cannot ignore its environmental costs. We already wrote about how OpenAI & Big Tech co. are anything but open about the costs of training and using their Large Language Models (LLMs), but luckily academic researchers and open-source models are filling in the gaps.

If you want to learn more about the topic, you should read the paper Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment? – or the more easily digestible Technology Review write up Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone. We're now seeing companies using LLMs for use cases where simpler – and less power hungry – machine learning models might suffice, simply because LLMs are all the rage.

We think it's important to be aware of the carbon costs in product development – or your own usage – when deciding whether and how to deploy AI models. So let this be your friendly reminder that open-source models with greater transparency exist (see The Foundation Model Transparency Index or Hugging Face Carbon Compare Tool to explore alternatives) and that there’s a world of AI models besides LLMs out there already in production and making biased choices.

If you haven't seen it already, we again recommend the TEDTalk AI is dangerous, but not for the reasons you think by the Power Hungry Processing paper's lead author Sasha Luccioni.

And as entertaining as the Make It More AI trend is, it is worth questioning whether we can actually afford the costs of AI image generation. Before this year's UN Climate Summit COP28, the UN released their 2023 Emissions Gap Report titled “Broken Record: Temperatures hit new highs, yet world fails to cut emissions (again)”. Oof. So, remember to feed your human designers and use AI generators wisely!

Sadly, yet again, COP28 made the AI dilemma appear smaller. This year's UN climate extravaganza took place in an oil-rich human-rights-poor country, to which most of the 80,000 attendees had to fly to, with hundreds still choosing the convenience and exorbitant carbon emissions of private jets to enjoy beef burgers and a session on sustainable yachting. Some countries again pledged to be less naughty by 2050 in hopes to impress Santa, but we’ll collectively leave the phasing out of fossil fuels to our (grand)children, should they reach adulthood. But hey, at least the COP28 website offers you the not-default option of a low-carbon version!

If you’re like us, stuff like this makes you want to scream. And please do scream, releasing anger is healthy! But when you scream your lungs out, join us back in the good fight. We often have to remind ourselves that we are optimists – that’s why we had Nate write that whole lengthy essay on it – and that despite all the poop-throwing we do as a species, we still all deserve a chance to live a healthy and dignified life, within biophysical limits. And no, this doesn’t mean living in caves (unless you enjoy the comforts of cave-living). Which is why the choices we make as technologists still matter. The criteria we use for choosing AI systems matter. Product decisions matter. We have the power to design and build software more responsibility – perhaps with low-carbon as the default –, and technology will certainly be a part of how we deal with climate change.

So, if you're interested in machine learning, be sure to check out Climate Change AI, a non-profit exploring the intersection of climate change and machine learning. At the same time, it's worth reiterating that carbon emissions are far from our only problem and that we need systems change, not just climate change, as the Wellbeing Economy Alliance reminds us. We know we share a lot of links to resources that take time to read, so if you're in a hurry, just watch their short explainer video on LinkedIn and hit that Repost button*.

(*And if you happen to be on LinkedIn, why not give our page a follow and show our posts some love to help us spread our seeds and sparks? Yeah, we know, we hate feeding the algorithm too, but we're really trying to bring something different into people's feeds.)

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

Huh, grounding in research certainly is not for the faint of heart, we can almost understand why the folks at a16z don't bother with it. Almost! But the good news is that you’ve reached the part of the Newmoonsletter where we try to inspire awe and hope.

So let's begin with deepfakes. Wait, what? Hold on, maybe they are not the epistemic apocalypse we imagine them to be! Watch philosopher Joshua Habgood-Coote argue that deepfakes are not a new invention and how we might be able to deal with them as a society. (If you enjoy reading philosophy papers, you can also dig into his arguments in paper format.)

This year, AI has certainly sparked and popularized interesting discussions about what it means to be human, sprinkling terminology from different fields all over the place. You might have heard that “hallucinate” was chosen as Cambridge dictionary’s word of the year. An intriguing coincidence at a time when funding for research on psychedelics is on the rise. What if we are all, machines and humans, just hallucinating? Should we hallucinate more to get to the more profound questions? Will we invent machine psychedelics next? We leave these deep reflections to you, dear reader.

You might have also come across research suggesting that we are already struggling with telling AI-generated faces from real ones. But a recent study from Australia that used EEG caps, showed that our brains might subconsciously perceive the difference, so maybe there's hope for humanity yet.

Let this be a reminder that we don't yet fully understand human intelligence, let alone the intelligence of other living beings. For instance, coming back full circle to elephants, recent research seems to indicate that elephants give each other names! A fascinating use of technology to help us understand non-human languages and appreciate diverse forms of intelligence.

If thinking about elephant names isn't enough to make you appreciate life, we recommend playing the 4.5 Billion Year Video Timeline of Earth in 60 Minutes by Kurzgesagt in the background. Or if you want to feel even smaller as you ponder your place in the Universe – the end of the year is a good time for that, regardless whether you're warming your hands with hot ginger tea with honey like Alja in Europe, or melting in early Aussie heat waves like Mat and Nate – watch this incredible timelapse of the future.

Whoa. That's a lot to take in, isn't it? For us, it's a reminder to appreciate life and the time we have on Earth with each other. And to continue spreading seeds and sparks that will make our Earth adventure better for more people, elephants, and other beings.

Tethix Moonthly Meme

Given that we didn’t fly to COP28 (or anywhere else) in a private jet, we allowed ourselves the luxury of asking ChatGPT to generate an image to interpret this Newmoonsletter. And we got this adorable image of the AI elephant you left sitting alone in your empty office building, looking like they might indeed benefit from knowing where the bathroom is.

Then we asked ChatGPT to make it more… je ne sais quoi.

And it appears that your AI elephant is the only one that survives the apocalypse. Or perhaps the elephant was promoted to CEO, finally allowed everyone to work remotely, and turned the expensive office building into a hydroponic garden from which they now run operations using a quantum computer.

Either way, even the AI elephant knows there’s power in nature and that offices aren’t the natural habitat for humans, so we hope you manage to stay out of the office as much as you can in the next lunation cycle. And when you come back, don’t forget to feed and potty-train any elephants you might find in your office.

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Moonthly Pathfinding Seeds to plant & Elemental Sparks to share

This moon, we planted new Pathfinding Seeds on LinkedIn to inspire a bit of positive action and help you explore new paths in your practice. We invite you to share these seeds generously with your network.

Here are the seeds we planted in the previous lunation cycle:

🌱 Explore the deeper narratives and ancient wisdom in Theft of Fire myths and contemplate the relevance to tech in our current world. Then do some reflection on the parallels we see today and your role in the story. (More context.)

🌱 Harness the power of expanding your knowledge around tech ethics instead of buying material things. Reflect on your learnings and share insights gained with people around you. (More context.)

As we were preparing for today’s special event, we decided to bring some joy and spark discussions with Elemental Sparks. We hope you can use these sparks to bridge divisions, spark discussions and storytelling, and deepen your relationships.

✨ Learning. What are machines learning from us? What are we learning about ourselves from them? (More context.)

✨ Ignite. What ignites your imagination? What ignites innovation? What ignites culture change? (More context.)

For the event, we designed Paper Elemental Sparks in the shape of origami fortune-tellers you might remember playing with as a kid. Instead of telling fortunes, Paper Elemental Sparks can be used as a conversation starter (and an excellent fidget toy!). Regardless of whether you’ll be joining us at the event, you can print the paper sparks – or blank templates! – and use them at the office party or any other gathering, perhaps even as a tree ornament or a distraction for the kids.

If the sparks bring you joy or spark interesting discussions, we’d love to hear from you!

Join us for Full Moon Pathfinding

Speaking of sharing, we are again inviting you to a 🌕 Full Moon Pathfinding session on Dec 27 at 7PM AEDT / 9AM CET (check your timezone), when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun. We’ll yarn about elephants, rainbow mirrors, our hopes and wishes for the new year, and anything else you choose to bring with you.

If you’d like an invitation, reply to this email (community@tethix.co for those reading this on the web) with your own weather observations. Have you felt the storms where you live, how thick is the fog you’ve observed?

Keep on finding paths on your own

And if you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Stay safe in the AI-generated fog out there until then, try to learn the names of any elephants you encounter, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

And finally, remember to smile and love generously as we approach another solstice and prepare for another roundtrip around the Sun together.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja, Mat, Nate

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🌫️ Current conditions: the fog thickens.

“Life on planet Earth is under siege”: these words of warning open the latest of climate reports. Meanwhile, the fog that’s seeding uncertainty and division is thickening. And the fire apprentices have convinced the Ministries of Magic that their AI golems, which are contributing to the fog, are also the solution to the fog. Doesn’t make much sense? Don’t worry about it, it makes money and helps everyone forget that apprentices – who still change their core values overnight – aren’t supposed to be in charge. (See The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory. and The Ever-So-Ethical OpenAI Just Replaced Its "Core Values" With Completely Different Ones)

The Ministries of Magic around the world feel mighty good that they’ve finally signed a document saying we all care about AI golem safety and about the people whom the fog is affecting. A new Institute for Golem Magic should help you sleep better at night -at least until the next extreme weather alert wakes you up. In the land of the golems, a new executive order has been issued that envisions better golem testing, yet also omits the impact the golems have on the climate (among other issues). (See Bletchley declaration: international agreement on AI safety is a good start, but ordinary people need a say – not just elites and What's in Biden's AI executive order — and what's not.)

To better understand this persistent fog, we recommend spending less time following and reacting to headlines that tend to intensify the fog in one’s head. Instead, we prescribe a healthy dose of listening and spreading the work of fog experts and poets who have been defying the golem makers by dissecting their creations and studying the direct effects the golems and the fog are already having on people’s lives. (Watch AI is dangerous, but not for the reasons you think and read Unmasking AI.)

Amidst this thickening fog, it might be getting harder to get enough vitamin D, but we do hope that the seeds we’ve collected in this past moon help you find some sunshine. We are hearing stories about collective imagination dispersing the fog and even sightings of fogbows, so don’t surrender to the fog just yet, Pathfinder. There is much to do to protect life on planet Earth.

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

OpenAI, the company that changes core values like socks, has partnered with Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft to form the Frontier Model Forum and launch a new $10 million AI Safety Fund. Still no funding announced to study or reveal the environmental impacts of the foundation models these companies are unleashing onto the world. But you’ll soon be able to build and monetize your own GPTs, join Quora’s Poe creator monetization program or other marketplaces, and increase your environmental footprint by an unknown amount. Prompt engineering is so last month, monetizing AI chatbots is the next frontier!

It’s not that we’re against AI development, but given the increasing severity of climate reports, we’d really like to see these companies take some responsibility regarding the environmental impact of using LLMs to write bad jokes or generic marketing copy. This would give us the ability to take environmental costs into account when choosing which models to use, both as end-users or when developing AI-powered products.

Even Mozilla’s recently released AI Guide, which promotes the use of open-source models, doesn’t emphasize environmental costs in their Choosing ML Models section. Hugging Face, the platform for open-source AI development, is currently ahead of the pack by offering resources to report carbon emissions and helping developers find low-emission models. (And yes, carbon emissions aren’t everything, but we’ve got to start somewhere.)

We’ll certainly bring attention to this and other ignored perspectives in the AI space in the events we’re hosting as part of Australia's AI Month. Tethix is partnering with RSA Oceania and Co-Labs for the event Mythopoetic Sense-making of our AI future – online and in-person in Melbourne on Nov 16 – to dive into the narrative and symbolic layers of AI, its history and impact on society. We’re again partnering with RSA Oceania for AI and Collective Futurecrafting on Nov 21, a virtual yarning circle. We also have seats available at our virtual campfire as part of the immersive workshop Exploring the Gen AI Fire on Nov 28. And you can also catch Mat at a panel discussion at the AI Leadership Summit 2023 in Sydney on Dec 8.

With everything happening so fast in the AI space, it might be tempting to move fast and break things. In the blog post Taking the scenic route in product development, Alja reminds us that blindly following the GPS and taking the fastest route doesn’t always lead us to the right destination. Even though the fire of AI appears enticingly warm and bright, there is value in taking detours with moral imagination and exploring paths that are currently hidden or not taken.

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

Another aspect we’re missing from a lot of the debates on AI is collaboration. AI principles are often developed top-down, without the involvement of diverse stakeholders – human and non-human. This is a topic Nate and Mat explored in the presentation Can a culture that supports participatory ethics enhance diversity and inclusion in AI development? delivered at the recent CSIRO Symposium for Diversity and Inclusion in AI.

The symposium had some wonderful research presented, but a standout for us was Rebecca Johnson's ‘Paws and perspectives: Fostering inclusivity in Generative AI Model Evaluation’ – but maybe we’re just biased as cat people. (Dogs are obviously pawsome too!)

The stories we tell – even ones of cats vs. dogs – are so often framed in competitive terms. This is one of a few criticisms we have of the recent, and mostly brilliant, Netflix docuseries Life on Our Planet. It was narrated by Morgan Freeman, which is perhaps enough of a reason to watch. The focus is life through the lens of the five previous mass extinction events, basically defined as events or circumstances that lead to greater than 75% of life on earth being permanently lost.

Freeman frequently repeats that life is defined by competition. But life really doesn’t seem to be defined only by competition – and you can love both cats and dogs, as we do! Ecologies are inherently relational. Within this relational context, there is competition, coopetition, and real collaboration. Consider this next time you’re pondering “our nature”.

Oh, and – spoiler alert! – we’re in the late stages of the sixth mass extinction event, with greater than 70% of wildlife being lost in just the last 50 years. This is almost exclusively attributed to human activities, thanks to the fact that current extinction rates are 35 times higher than expected background rates. Yikes.

Freeman suggests that our intelligence will be the key to solving these problems. But this doesn’t ring true. It’ll be our capacity to act with deep care and genuine wisdom, something that is sorely lacking in our current society.

And we are not just in a relationship with each other, but with the rest of the community of life, a living planet, as Daniel Christian Wahl explored in the excerpt Being a process, and seeing in relationships.

Despite all of this, we still tend to forget that humans are an especially collaborative species, full of imagination not just when it comes to destruction, but also collaboration. The internet is proof of our collaborative superpowers, and this past moon we were also inspired by the discussion with Nafeez Ahmed in the Planet: Critical episode The Interconnected Grid. Rather than competing for energy, we could connect to a grid that allows for sharing of energy to meet local demands and reduce the need for battery storage. The interconnected grid is just one piece of infrastructure we could build to break out of a simulation, as Planet: Critical’s host Rachel Donald explores in a follow-up post.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

Given the state of the climate and the current AI fog, it’s pretty clear we’ll have to rethink the stories we tell. Exploring the stories that came before can also help us increase our possibility space and feed our moral imagination. The paper Artificial Intelligence: Definition and Background takes a deeper dive into the definition and history of AI, including the mythical representations of AI in different cultures. This is something we’ll explore during the mythopoetic sense-making event as part of AI Month, and we do like to use the myth of golems to explore our complicated relationship with AI.

If you want to dig deeper into a lesser known myth that also serves as a cautionary tale, we recommend reading about the Estonian myth of Kratt – a magical household helper that turns onto its owner if it's not kept busy – and how it led to KrattAI, Estonia’s AI National Strategy.

As well as learning from past stories, it’s important to examine the new stories AI models – and their makers – are telling us. Rest of World recently analyzed 3,000 AI-generated images to explore cultural stereotypes and bias. These types of explorations are important given the low transparency scores achieved by AI developers in The Foundation Model Transparency Index research. Unfortunately, these are not surprising results for companies that pride themselves on moving fast and breaking things.

And it appears that even the models themselves feel the pressure, as new research explores how adding emotional stimuli (such as telling a model that the prompt is important for your career) boosts the model’s performance. Jokes aside, we still have a lot to learn about how LLMs work, how they can be used to optimize their own prompts – which apparently even leads to prompting each other to “take a deep breath” – and using larger models to train smaller ones. Well, at least smaller models might be better for the environment, though we suspect we’ll just find ways to use more of them – Jevons always seems to find a way to crash the party…

But wait! We also promised you seeds of hope, and in that spirit, we invite you to immerse and ground yourself in the booklet Seeding Futures for Wellbeing by the Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation. The booklet was designed as a collective imagination starter pack, weaving together diverse questions and perspectives to train your futurecrafting skills.

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

The future is indeed not set in stone yet. We have the power – and responsibility – to explore and tell different stories. If you’re interested in exploring and reflecting on the stories we tell about our digital workplaces, we invite you to read our recent blog post Discovering stories about digital workplaces like Slack that can cultivate a culture of collective wisdom and care.

Now, the Newmoonsletter is all about planting seeds, and we consider ourselves lucky that seeds of reflection, grounding, collaboration, and practice are fairly abundant and easy to come by. Seed farming in the physical world is becoming harder though due to increasingly chaotic climate conditions. As with many things, supporting local and small seed companies seems to be a good practice when looking for seeds for your garden.

When it comes to adapting our lives to the changing climate, we could certainly learn a lesson or two from indigenous people, who have lived with their lands for tens of thousands of years. If you’re looking for a starting point – or just a bit of inspiration – start with the Ancient Wisdom with Anne Poelina episode of the Holding the Fire podcast (other episodes are worth listening to as well).

We do like to compare technology to fire. In preparation for the upcoming mythopoetic sense-making event, we’ve been revisiting Traditional fire stories compiled by Fire and Rescue NSW in Australia. This is a wonderful collection of stories that you might read with your children and perhaps be inspired to reflect on our relationship with technology – the fire.

The theft of fire for the benefit of humanity is a common theme in many mythologies. If we think of AI as stolen fire, we can open interesting discussions: who was the fire of AI stolen from? Why was somebody guarding the fire, why didn’t they trust the humans? What are the benefits and risks of open-sourcing the fire, making it available to everyone?

You can join us in an exploration of questions like this during our AI Month events. And if you need a break from all the AI news and climate doom, we want to remind you that we’re all living on a rock flying through space. And that there’s so much more than AI to learn about and be in awe of. For instance, a NASA asteroid sample has been found to contain water and carbon, the building blocks for life. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to make fascinating observations, such as pairs of planet-like objects in the Orion Nebula that we cannot quite explain with our current understanding of astronomy.

And to bring it back home to Spaceship Earth, a reminder that oceans cover more than 70% of our planet’s surface, yet over 80% of them remain unexplored, with NASA now venturing into the deep unknowns of our own planet. Perhaps we should all acknowledge how much we still don’t know and can learn from each other and the Universe. Instead of pretending that the latest technology we’re building has all the solutions to problems we don’t fully understand yet.

Tethix Moonthly Meme

Speaking of changing core values overnight and being overly confident…

And that’s all the attention you get from us, Elon.

Your turn, Pathfinders.

Moonthly Pathfinding Seeds to plant & share

What a rollercoaster ride is to try to do good in this climate, eh? Well, we believe good intentions still need to be nurtured and that small actions can have compounding effects.

Which is why we started planting Pathfinding Seeds on LinkedIn every Friday to inspire a bit of positive action and help you explore new paths in your practice. Each seed is a tiny challenge that hones your elemental ethics skills and expands your possibility space. We invite you to share these seeds generously with your network.

Here are the seeds we planted in the previous lunation cycle:

🌱 Meet a friend or colleague you haven’t spoken with in a while for coffee and discuss how generative AI might change the way you work. Share your thoughts on LinkedIn. (More context.)

🌱 Send a message of gratitude to somebody who's relentlessly bringing up important issues others prefer to ignore. Let them know you appreciate their perseverance, and tell them how they’ve inspired you to think or act differently. (More context.)

🌱 Think about how you might contribute to a more responsible AI future. Write and share an action-oriented Responsible AI Pledge that you can meet in the next month. (More context.)

If you like these, you can follow Tethix on LinkedIn and hope that the algorithm brings them into your feed every Friday. (Don’t worry, we’ll share them in the Newmoonsletter too.)

And we also want to extend a warm welcome to Pathfinders who might be joining us via Substack. We are now posting our long form content, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter, and other pathfinding explorations on Substack to make it easier to follow our updates and engage in conversations. That said, we are firm believers in giving you the choice of channels and ways of subscribing, so you can still follow our blog and Substack publication via RSS. But hey, if you enjoy Substack, you can now subscribe to Tethix Pathfinding and help us spread these seeds through your network.

Regardless of where you’re reading these words, we’re glad to have you here, Pathfinder, and we thank you for the gift of time. There is yet hope for better tech futures if we take the time to share stories and seeds of inspiration.

A special invitation to Full Moon Pathfinding

Speaking of sharing stories, we have just one more seed to plant. A special invitation to a 🌕 Full Moon Pathfinding session on Nov 27 at 7PM AEDT / 9AM CET (check your timezone), when the moon will once again be illuminated by the sun. We’ll yarn about AI golems, climate doom, seeds of hope, and anything else you choose to bring with you.

If you’d like an invitation, reply to this email (community@tethix.co for those reading this on the web) with your own weather observations. How thick is the fog where you live, have you spotted any fogbows yet?

Keep on finding paths on your own

And if you can’t make it to our Full Moon Pathfinding session, we still invite you to make your own! If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. You can keep these reflections for yourself or share them with others. If it feels right, find the Reply button – or comment on this post – and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Stay safe in the AI-generated fog out there until then, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja, Mat, Nate

Subscribe now

As the moon completes another orbit around Earth, the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter rises in your inbox to inspire collective pathfinding towards better tech futures.

We sync our monthly reflections to the lunar cycle as a reminder of our place in the Universe and a commonality we share across timezones and places we inhabit. New moon nights are dark and hence the perfect time to gaze into the stars and set new intentions.

With this Newmoonsletter, crafted around the Tethix campfire, we invite you to join other Pathfinders as we reflect on celestial movements in tech in the previous lunar cycle, water our ETHOS Gardens, and plant seeds of intentions for the new cycle that begins today.

Tethix Weather Report

🌫️ Current conditions: foggy with low visibility.

The fog brought on by the fire apprentices' experiments with AI golems persists. The Ministries of Magic around the world are trying to deploy their regulations to herd the golems and attempt to clear the fog that is causing mass anxiety and uncertainty. There seems to be general agreement that the golem problem is out of control, yet we’re waiting for the Ministries to tell us what to do. (See Everyone wants responsible AI, but few people are doing anything about it.)

Meanwhile, the AI golems are multiplying and roaming around unchecked, becoming more human-like every day. Caution is advised if you plan to venture outside and seek paths in this thick fog. We've heard reports of golems running over pedestrians in their gas guzzling SUVs amidst reports of water shortages near the alleged locations of golem-producing kilns. (See Artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT was built in Iowa—with a lot of water.)

Also beware of tricksters posing as Pathfinders, trying to seduce you with maps spanning 100+ pages in PDF. Often the scale of these maps is all wrong, possibly of the wrong place, with legends written in ancient Sumerian, so we advise you not to rely on trickster maps for your pathfinding. You might also stumble upon compasses that point to responsible AI principles. Keep in mind that while a sense of direction is important, you also need to figure out where your destination is. Our Elemental Workshops can help you better connect to the land and strengthen your pathfinding skills and reduce over-reliance on navigational artefacts of questionable origin. (See Tethix Elemental Workshops, use code EARLY for a 30% discount until Oct 23.)

But fear not, we are hearing reports of villagers successful chasing away some of the golems with the might of their pens and collective organising, so there is hope for humanity yet when we come together. (See How Hollywood writers triumphed over AI – and why it matters.)

Keep your hopes up, Pathfinders. The fog will clear away.

Tethix Elemental seeds

Fire seeds to stoke your Practice

It seems we’re all trying to figure out what gen AI is actually for. Writing code definitely appears like a forte, and some say it might turn everyone into a developer – all in the name of increased productivity –, while Silicon Valley is trying to improve the golem’s creative writing skills. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever calls deep learning ‘alchemy’, and weirdly The Emerald podcast, which explores AI through stories and myths, is the one that makes the most sense.

AI challenges our views on humanity, intelligence, consciousness, creativity. The AI golems and the men behind the curtain who brought them to life all say they just want to help, but this new fire is spreading faster than we can make sense of it.

Our response to feeling lost in the AI fog was to design Elemental Workshops that explore generative AI beyond productivity and the usual hype and harms narratives. We’re approaching this new fire with both caution and curiosity. It’s clear we’re going to have to build a firepit to contain it, yet we also think it can help us learn more about our humanity.

And while the AI fire holds our attention these days, it certainly isn’t the only fire you should worry about when trying to build better products. Responsibility is more than just Responsible AI. And responsible product development isn’t just about ticking compliance checkboxes, but thinking about product development as more than just a fire practice.

Which is why we’re trying to bring attention to other elements with our Elemental Ethics framework. Alja explores how your day-to-day practice will change if your organisation decides to embrace responsible firekeeping in the blog post Day in the life of a responsible firekeeper: your journey from installing to embodying ETHOS. The path to hell is laid with good intentions, but we think the path to responsible products is laid with actionable pledges that balance fire with other elements.

Air seeds to improve the flow of Collaboration

In addition to having good intentions, one of the many things that sets humans apart from AI agents is our bodily connection to place. But we can also use our innate spatial abilities in digital spaces, a topic Alja explored in the blog post – and companion video – Welcome to the Tethix Archipelago: an experiment in using virtual spaces for learning and collaboration.

The digital tools we use every day in our practice are also digital places with their own stories. And sadly, the story we too often hear is the one of personal productivity, even competition. We wonder what our digital tools would look like if we shifted towards Collaborative Experience Design. Instead of having private sessions with ChatGPT, imagine what we could do if AI tools were designed to help us collaborate, connect, and develop shared understandings.

Instead, digital spaces often push us further from each other, disconnecting us from Earth wisdom. Virtual offices try to mimic physical offices we hate, instead of finding joy in designing for our imagination. We keep hearing echoes of the story of productivity and efficiency in the tools we reluctantly use to get the job done.

What gives us hope is that different stories are emerging all over the place. In Australia, the draft science and research priorities are sprinkled with sparks of magic. Indigenous knowledge and knowledge systems, which include stories that have been situated in place and shaped by Country for 60,000+ years, are now being considered as a grounding for nationwide transformation over the next decade.

In response to this, Mat, Nate, and a couple of Australian colleagues proposed the Collective Futurecrafting Initiative. This proposal comes from a deep consideration for systemic interconnectedness, planetary boundaries, as well as care for local communities and human thriving. It comes from a place that is existentially hopeful, and our attempt at Rising to the biggest challenge of our time: Australia’s duty of care to collectively re-imagine and re-design our nation.

Earth seeds to ground you in Research

And while we love telling stories around the campfire, we also find immense value in grounding ourselves in research from different disciplines. Nate takes a closer look at the assumptions behind the Agile Manifesto in the blog post Beyond the Agile Manifesto: A new paradigm for responsible product development. On the RSA blog, Nate also writes about Three reasons why AI ethics is struggling and explores how we might close the ethical intent to action gap by drawing inspiration from a model from the cognitive sciences.

The RSA is the royal society for the encouragement of arts, manufactures and commerce. It’s a non-profit with a 260 year history, and its mission is about design for life. Nate is one of over 30,000 global fellows working across disciplines to support regenerative initiatives that bring human life back within planetary boundaries, whilst also raising the social ceiling for those who need it most. Their vitality scale towards a regenerative world is definitely worth checking out (Nate has already suggested a few potential improvements). If you prefer to tune in with your ears, the RSA Podcast offers excellent seeds of inspiration, such as the special series episode on Future Dreaming.

We were also excited to read about the emerging Scientific Consensus on Post-Growth over Green Growth – the story of unlimited growth (in the ways we currently think about it) no longer makes sense. In fact, it hasn’t since the 70s! This podcast covering the story of the Limits to Growth is worth listening to as well.

And we have to be mindful of the stories we tell. Recent research shows the impact of imagined future events on our brain. Considering the swathe of dystopian imagery in our media and memescape, this hints at the neurological basis for our struggle to imagine techno-moral futures that are more positive. To help us widen the space of possible futures – and improve our collective futurecrafting –, we might use frameworks like the Futures Cone to increase the vividness of what’s possible and thus make preferable futures more probable.

Water seeds to deepen your Reflection

In tech, dystopian Black Mirrors dominate our imagined futures. We would like to challenge this view with rainbow mirrors, as Mat explores in the blog post Rainbow mirrors: technology and our collective moral imagination. We need to imagine alternatives that aren’t all doom and gloom, which is why we enjoyed tuning in the Creating the Alternative episode of the Planet Critical podcast, and reading the post The Gift of Being Human by Planet Critical’s host Rachel Donald.

And if you’re ready to venture deeper into the ponds of reflection, be sure to join Alice in her Wilderland adventures in the post Composing a symphony of hope in a sea of crises and complexity. Or grab your headphones and take a music break with Mat’s hip-hop track – and accompanying poetic interpretation – AI Inside.

We assure you there’s a method to our madness, and we explore said method in the blog post For the love of wisdom: An overview of the philosophy that gives life to Tethix.

And remember that it’s not all philosophy and tech. We encourage you to seek awe in your life, with something as simple as a walk in the woods. Or browsing through a resource like the Iconographic Encyclopædia of Science, Literature, and Art.

Tethix Moonthly Meme

Your turn, Pathfinders.

If anything emerges while reading this Newmoonsletter, write it down. If it feels right, find the Reply button and share your reflections with us. We’d love to feature Pathfinders reflections in upcoming Newmoonsletters and explore even more diverse perspectives.

And if you’ve enjoyed this Newmoonsletter or perhaps even cracked a smile, we’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

The next Newmoonsletter will rise again during the next new moon. Stay safe in the AI-generated fog out there until then, and be mindful about the seeds of intention you plant and the stories you tell. There’s magic in both.

With 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja, Mat, Nate

Subscribe now