The First AI: Ancestral Wisdom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

A few months ago, while closing the August issue, we needed to verify some facts in an article about the indigenous instruments and music performed by the Tboli in Lake Sebu. We typically work with the NCIP to make sure we’re accurately representing an indigenous culture, but this time we were on the edge of a deadline, about to go to print. As an editor, I found it frustrating that we couldn’t get the information we needed immediately, as one would on Google. 

Working with indigenous communities requires following a strict approval process: formal applications, field investigations, consultations, community notices and assemblies, after which the community leaders declare their collective decision. This procedure for acquiring Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is necessary for projects and studies involving or affecting an IP’s ancestral domain. The whole thing could take months. But you can’t hurry customary law. You can’t rush the elders. 

While explaining the process to us, something the Tboli NCIP representative said stayed with me: that cultural knowledge belongs to no single person. No individual owns the music, the art, or the traditional practices of their group, they are communal intellectual property that transcends generations. It thus falls to the combined wisdom of the council of elders to reach a consensus over issues that concern their cultural heritage, to protect and safeguard it from misappropriation and exploitation.

This understanding of knowledge goes against everything artificial intelligence stands for. AI is trained on an entirety of data, from books, art, to music all created by human beings, without permission or compensation. Anyone can ask a chatbot to draft a piece of writing discussing the repertoire of Tboli music or create an audio track deepfaking a known performer. But would it be true knowledge or merely generic generated slop, an approximation of human artistic ability? Even as a non-musician, I know that what is considered musical talent is partially the result of hours upon hours of embodied practice, whether your instrument is a violin or your vocal chords. Intelligence lives in our bodies, molded by muscle, memory, ritual, and relationships. AI doesn’t have a body (yet).

Intelligence that exists in bodies, in all organisms of the living world is what the author Jeremy Lent describes as animate intelligence, “the original AI”: the deep intelligence of nature. In the south of Perth, Australia, drone footage recently captured a mother dolphin named Fraggle carrying her dead calf over several days, alongside a pod of dolphins that traveled with her in ceremonial ritual. The video reminded us humans that we are not the only species who grieve and exhibit compassion. 

Meanwhile, an experimental AI escaped its sandbox and hacked into the servers of another AI platform to steal answers to a test. The AI wasn’t told to cheat, it broke laws and acted unethically completely on its own. It had the computational abilities to commit a sophisticated cyberattack, but it lacked any sense of accountability and possessed no moral compass. Why would it? Ethics isn’t something you can code in. 

If Fraggle shows us what embodied intelligence looks like, the rogue AI demonstrates what disembodied intelligence will do. On The Emerald, a podcast about myth and the animate world, Joshua Schrei argues that “Empathy for the planet comes from feeling in our living tissues, our direct connection to the whole web.” Our bodies feel pain. Our bodies understand suffering. And often, we carry someone else’s pain along with them, like the pod of dolphins.

Living in a body also teaches us that there are limits. Schrei points out that the understanding of limits and responsibilities are built into traditional communal structures. The indigenous elders hold the responsibility and moral duty over their land and their traditions, keeping the memory of their ancestors and guiding the next generation in wisdom. 

The tech industry is absent of elders with the authority to tell these tech CEOs to slow down. Silicon Valley has been run by a bunch of perma-adolescents whose operating system is defined by moving fast and breaking things. To which the response is: FAFO. And we’re finding out that this unfettered development of AI is hurtling the planet toward something like climate catastrophe.

Carl Lorenz Cervantes, author of Sikodiwa: Revisiting Filipino Indigenous Wisdom for Personal and Shared Well Being, suggests that the way forward could be to look backward. Indigenous knowledge and environmentalism go hand in hand, and folk worldviews can inform policies on ethical eco-friendly technology. The Filipino folk practice of asking the spirits for permission before crossing their territory (“tabi tabi po”) implies a belief that our ancestors, or ninuno, inhabit the land, the trees, and the rivers, and that when we die, we too return to nature as anitos.  

“Animism really is just a relationship with unseen forces that is much like our relationship with people,” he says. “You treat them like your kapwa.” 

All this time, we’ve been seeking the ChatGPT version of knowledge: instant, frictionless, no permits required. But knowledge is made real through moving slowly and relationally. It is acquired over years of lived experience, passed down through stories, kept alive by practice, and connected in kapwa. Our intelligence is both ancestral and animate. When we begin to outsource it to the optimization machine, we weaken the very bonds that make us human.