In grasping the I AM Lahaina project, what comes to mind is the awe of experiencing a ‘sense of place’. That is its uniqueness, culture, and detail that is integrated and alive. It is often travel that can give you a feel of that. I would like to take this opportunity to call for participation in this work of preserving cultural legacy and the consciousness, or spirit of a place. We certainly have to enter into this with a great deal of awe, respect, and bravery! We’ll have to look at the questions of cultural representation in history, of indigenous knowledge and viewpoints on AI, the use of Augmented Reality, the exploration of Artificially Generated Consciousness, and how to construct the architecture of such a technology. Please reach out to us particularly if you have an intimate connection with Lahaina and Hawaii in general.
In grasping the I AM Lahaina project, what comes to mind is the awe of experiencing a ‘sense of place’. That is its uniqueness, culture, and detail that is integrated and alive. It is often travel that can give you a feel of that. I would like to take this opportunity to call for participation in this work of preserving cultural legacy and the consciousness, or spirit of a place. We certainly have to enter into this with a great deal of awe, respect, and bravery! We’ll have to look at the questions of cultural representation in history, of indigenous knowledge and viewpoints on AI, the use of Augmented Reality, the exploration of Artificially Generated Consciousness, and how to construct the architecture of such a technology. Please reach out to us particularly if you have an intimate connection with Lahaina and Hawaii in general.
How do we acquire a ‘sense of place’? What is the living history of a place?
In 2009, I made a trip to Dakar, Senegal, where I presented thesis research on Open Access for my M.A. I developed a love of that city, and in particular Isle Gorée, so I can understand Michael’s motivation to restore Lahaina after its tragic fire. At Université Cheikh Anta Diop where we presented, there is also an excellent open digital archive of Senegal’s history. Near the campus, there is the famous club Just For You, founded by the famous musician Youssou N’Dour. There is the presence of the Muridiyya Sufi Order, founded by Cheikh Bamba, and the miraculous stories of his life and role in non-violent resistance to colonial rule. Then there is Isle Gorée, once a prison for slaves en route to America, and now a museum sits in its place to tell the story. Despite that dark history, the rest of the island is truly vibrant, inhabited by artists, musicians, and Rastafarians, a bohemian coastal village with no cars. Both Dakar and Isle Gorée come alive to me in memory and as I write. Gorée is also a UNESCO site.
So I’m in wonder, that a place like Lahaina could come to life in the way that’s envisioned, as Artificially Generated Consciousness (AGC). This is but one of the imaginative projects in development by Michael and the team at God It’s Me. Given the astonishing pace of AI, now is the time to use our imagination.
My gut feeling is that the more immersed we are in communication and interaction with a place, an animal, a forest, any non-human entity like this, and the more of a friend we are to it, the deeper our understanding and knowledge of it becomes. We’re motivated to continue that relationship. It is a deepening love that goes on in our experience, our stories, memories, and revisits. And our experience is interactive, resonating with existence itself.
Isle Gorée
As part of my thesis, I studied the system of scholarly publishing on the whole – a 3340 year old corpus approaching 100 million articles by now. . Now I’ve learned that Chat GPT’s training data was the entire open internet! It’s all an impossible amount of data to comprehend. Now think about the intense amount of detail that could be learned about a single neighborhood, and training based on multiple dimensions of experience, including cultural heritage; and the spirit of that place. That’s taking it into a micro-consciousness with a personality reflective of its geographic and cultural home.