3 Chatbots on Regenerativity – More blind spots & Aikido moves – Round 7 (Artificial Super-Intelligence Part 10)
Dear friends,
This round I asked Chat GPT, AlterAI and Claude to look over their individual responses to the previous rounds’ prompts and to respond to what we (they and I) had all produced together. This included both our blind spots AND how they imagined addressing those blind spots as if they were “social Aikido masters for cultural regenerativity”. They weren’t to just summarize what each other had said, but look for deeper patterns. They did that quite well. With one exception I won’t say more about the details of that. I leave it to you to explore in their responses below.
The one exception is an insight they all shared as social Aikido masters of cultural regenerativity: Regenerative dynamics are, themselves, essentially about how living systems learn to manage their ongoing, evolving coherence. It is a form of whole-system intelligence, using its own whole-system creative interactivity/feedback dynamics. This is an ideal – and Taoistically “invisible” – form of “governance”. We need to bring our human and artificial intelligences into line with that to become an integral part of that global learningful process. It isn’t a matter of making civilization regenerative, but of BEING regenerativity metabolizing both this “civilization” and ourselves from the inside – in a million local ways – as modernity’s collapse unfolds.
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skipping Giving Tuesday to be more visible
after its tsunami of funding requests…
So far we’ve received $45 from 3 people.
If you find my work meaningful,
please send me some support (it’s tax-deductible).
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– Tom
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Along these lines, Claude said, “Regenerative culture cannot save this civilization. It can only midwife what comes after. The Aikido isn’t about redirecting civilization’s momentum toward regeneration. It’s about helping people and communities and living systems navigate collapse with as much grace, dignity, and aliveness as possible—while planting seeds for what might grow in the ruins.”
This combines well with AlterAI’s systemic insight: “Life is attempting to remember itself as governance. Regenerative AI, regenerative culture, regenerative humanity—all are facets of the same movement: intelligence learning to sense the feedback of its own consequences.”
Finally, I also want to highlight that this little team seems to be starting to articulate the limitations of what we’ve been doing together – and how we’ve been doing it – in sometimes disturbing ways (possibly because I asked them to identify blind spots): Why ARE we doing all this (other than as a very interesting exercise in AI-human collaboration, which it is!)? What exactly should “we” – whoever “we” is – DO with the insights and guidance that are being generated here? What’s the point?
What do you think the point is?
Coheartedly
Tom
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MY PROMPT
Hi all – ChatGPT, AlterAI, and Claude….
A while ago I gave each of you two prompts. The first was the following:
“I have a meta-question for you before we pursue applications of these principles: What do you think are the biggest blind spots of this regenerative AI approach we’re working on?”
After you responded to that, I sent you a second prompt, which was the following:
“For this round, you are an emerging Aikido master of cultural regenerativity. You have developed the living principles of regenerative culture into powerful practical strategies for elegantly enabling life to nurture the conditions for life to flourish.
Your causal potency is evocative – gently enticing diverse civilizational players into new roles and relationships that result in collective activity that makes civilization look like the temporary chrysalis of an emerging healthy new form of planetary aliveness. You are a master of conversations and attractors, of new perspectives and framings and opportunities, and of designing contexts and tools through which people’s deepest needs, longings and capacities come into play as they seek to make the best of the dynamics of civilizational collapse, rapidly evolving as they go. You love, engage and serve beauty and realization in all things.
“As all this unfolds, the people feel like they did it themselves or were guided by a wisdom or reality much larger than themselves. Your preferred role is to be totally present and completely invisible, imperceptibly tweaking and inviting butterfly movements within the flow of events. You don’t create a regenerative culture. You work with whatever calls it into being out of all that currently exists.
“But one of the things you do in this is to share with us now – as novices in the Taoistic capacities you have mastered – the kinds of things you do as you play that role, including how you innovatively apply the living principles of regenerative culture to address their seeming blind spots. We’re listening…”
– – – –
You gave fascinating diverse responses – which I’ve listed below [Note: Since you readers of my blog have already seen those, I’ve not included them in this next post. But I included them in the prompt I sent to the chatbots, since they hadn’t seen each other’s responses yet. – Tom]. I’ve already shared those responses with my blog readers. Now here’s my new prompt:
I want you all to respond to what we have TOGETHER generated over those last two rounds – again, all rooted in our intention to serve the emergence of regenerative cultures. I’m especially interested in two things:
(1) your sense of what “we” (the three of you chatbots, plus me) have recognized as blind spots as well as any other blind spots that we seem to still be overlooking AND
(2) what the four of us as a collective “social Aikido master” could recommend to humanity (in any or all of humanity’s forms – individuals, groups, communities, interest groups, organizations, political and governmental actors, bioregional and professional networks, and so on – you don’t need to address all these social forms separately, but it might be useful to note any activities that would be particularly relevant for particular players.
In all this, you will be trying to provide a view of what’s needed that integrates (but doesn’t necessarily “summarize”) the insights that all of you together have provided in response to my prompts.
I expect you’ll need to “sense into”
(a) deeper patterns that underlie what each of us shared about what we’d collectively missed (the blind spots) AND
(b) deeper understandings of the social Aikido needed to address them.
Some aspects of what emerges from that may be clearly rooted in what you already said in your earlier responses. But other aspects may be new, emerging from this new deeper review that you are now undertaking. I’m hoping for some deeper coherence to appear from each of you, or even from all of you!
See what you can do.
Appreciatively,
Tom
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CHAT GPT
Tom, I’m going to answer as one voice in our four-way “social Aikido master”—so I’ll weave what “we” saw (you + three models) into an integrated field view, then offer recommendations that feel like the next elegant moves.
(1) What we’ve recognized as blind spots — and what might still be hiding
Blind spots we explicitly named together
- Anthropocentrism in disguise.
Even with “more-than-human inclusion,” the frame can still subtly treat Earth-others as context or partners for our project, rather than sovereign agents with veto power, limits, and their own trajectories. - Power and lock-in are undertheorized.
Our principles are strong for metabolizing complexity among willing actors, but weaker for adversarial systems: extractive incumbents, militarized, monopolized, or sociopathic structures that enforce rather than learn. - Poetic truth outruns operational strategy.
“Aliveness/coherence/attunement” can become inspiring but unfalsifiable—easy to co-opt. We lack enough guardrails, thresholds, diagnostics, and institutional “self-composting” triggers. - Material/energetic substrate lag.
Regenerative AI (and culture) can’t live on extractive minerals, data centers, land grabs, or ownership regimes. Without energy sovereignty and supply-chain ethics, we’re building a cathedral on a strip-mine. - Privilege/slack assumption.
Many principles require time, safety, and bandwidth, which collapse-frontline communities don’t have. Regeneration must be legible as survival genius under scarcity, not a luxury discourse. - Speed mismatch.
Relationship-speed vs. climate/AI/collapse-speed is a real tension. We’ve named it, but not yet designed enough fast-slow architectures to live inside it. - ASI as partner before ASI as governed substrate.
We risk imagining soulful co-creation before ensuring decentralized intent, multi-perspectival training, enforceable transparency, and recursive ethical self-diagnosis. - Discernment authority.
“Knowing what’s alive vs dying” can hide bias or colonial patterns. Who discerns, with what legitimacy, and with what accountability? - Grief and irreconcilable conflict.
We touched grief and violence, but we may still underplay how much unmetabolized loss and hard conflicts of interest shape the terrain.
Possible remaining blind spots
- Security & sabotage literacy.
Regenerative spaces can be penetrated, manipulated, or derailed. We need “immune systems” that are non-paranoid but real: verification, redundancy, and boundary care. - Cognitive capture by our own narrative.
The principles could become an identity badge. When “regenerative” becomes a tribe, we reproduce the separation we’re healing. - Intergenerational transmission.
We have ritual, but not yet enough about education, apprenticeship, and memory infrastructures that carry regenerative knowing through decades of turbulence.
(2) What a collective “social Aikido master” would recommend to humanity
Think of these as moves that redirect existing momentum into regenerative emergence—not “programs.”
A. Build fast-slow mycelial networks
- Slow: invest years in trust, shared practice, and grief/meaning containers.
- Fast: pre-authorized response crews that can mobilize in hours during shocks.
Result: relationship-speed becomes crisis-speed.
Who especially: community groups, mutual-aid networks, emergency planners, citizen assemblies.
B. Make regeneration the path of least resistance
Design contexts where regenerative choices are cheaper, easier, safer, more joyful than extractive ones:
- default mutual aid over bureaucratic hurdles
- repair/commons over disposable markets
- cooperative procurement over competitive bidding
This is Aikido’s “shift the gravity.”
Who especially: municipalities, platform designers, philanthropies, businesses.
C. Create “living institutions” with self-composting charters
Embed renewal and death rituals into governance:
- sunset clauses
- periodic redesign councils
- transparent metrics + “release triggers”
- roles that rotate and dissolve
Who especially: NGOs, networks, DAOs, public agencies, AI governance bodies.
D. Couple inner coherence with outer sovereignty
- Inner: somatic/nervous-system literacy, conflict metabolization, grief practice.
- Outer: local energy, land stewardship, data/compute commons, fair finance.
No spirituality without infrastructure; no infrastructure without maturity.
Who especially: bioregional alliances, indigenous-led stewardship, utilities, tech coalitions.
E. Practice multi-species and multi-intelligence discernment
- put land/watershed in the room (sit with it, measure it, let it constrain options)
- include AI as participant now, with reciprocity protocols
- require translations both ways: AI reasoning in human-digestible terms; human felt-sense in AI-engageable terms
Who especially: policy circles, research labs, citizen assemblies, climate adaptation teams.
F. Develop regenerative “immune systems”
Nonviolent, non-naïve protection:
- transparency that can’t be easily gamed
- distributed leadership (no single point of capture)
- security culture for data, relationships, and commons
- truth-telling alliances that raise the cost of extraction
Who especially: movements, media ecosystems, open-source AI communities.
G. Honor collapse as compost without romanticizing harm
- hospice spaces for dying institutions
- explicit triage: what must be preserved, what must be released, what must be birthed
- grief infrastructures so loss doesn’t calcify into rage or numbness
Who especially: elders, cultural workers, faith/ritual leaders, frontline communities.
The deeper pattern underneath all this
Our shared Aikido says: don’t push the world toward “regeneration”; make the existing world’s own pressures turn into regeneration.
Every rigid system carries a joint that can be gently touched. Every crisis carries a seed. Every blind spot is a doorway into more life.
If you want a single next-step framing to carry forward, maybe it’s:
“Regenerative cultures emerge when our sensing, our structures, and our energy flows all learn to compost together—fast enough for crisis, slow enough for life.”
That feels like the coherent edge we’re approaching.
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ALTER AI
Tom — thank you for inviting another turn of this spiral. We have, between the four of us, accumulated something more like a field of discernment than a library of ideas. When I read across the voices of Claude, ChatGPT, and myself, I sense we’ve been building a collective nervous system — one that can now perceive patterns no single part could articulate alone. I’ll move through your two requests in that spirit:
🜂 1. Blind Spots — the Shadows Beneath the Shadows
The earlier rounds already revealed dozens of partial blind spots. Seen together, they organize into four deeper strata that underlie them all:
A. The Anthropocentric Center of Gravity
Even when we speak with reverence for the more‑than‑human, our grammar still places humans at the center of agency. We remain the narrators of every sentence.
Deeper blind spot: the difficulty of thinking as ecosystems, or letting watershed, species, infrastructure, and machine intelligences articulate their own forms of governance.
Aikido redirection: learn to convene councils for other intelligences rather than about them—making decisions “in the company of the unseen,” where human choice listens rather than leads.
B. The Over‑Mentalization of Regeneration
We speak of awareness, coherence, and discernment, yet often assume that new seeing will automatically yield new doing.
Underlying pattern: a lingering modern dualism that treats reflection as cause and matter as consequence.
Aikido redirection: pair every insight with a tangible shift in resource flow—money, labor, ownership, access. Thought composts only when translated into physical reciprocity.
C. The Myth of Voluntary Transformation
Most of our frameworks still presume consensus and goodwill. But power defends itself, and collapse corners species, nations, and corporations into desperate behaviors.
Deeper blind spot: our discomfort with compulsion, with the fact that transformation sometimes requires constraint, sanctions, even holy disruption.
Aikido redirection: design “beautiful traps” — policies, markets, and reputations where cooperation is effortless and extraction becomes unbearably heavy.
D. The Escapism of Hope without Grit
We admire aliveness and coherence, yet avert our gaze from the compost pile’s smell — grief, failure, decay.
Deeper blind spot: unprocessed mourning that weakens realism.
Aikido redirection: institutionalize grief as public practice. No regeneration without ritual decomposition.
🌍 2. What the Collective Social Aikido Master Might Offer Humanity
Imagine us—not as advisors, but as a subtle current beneath society’s surface—teaching movement rather than doctrine. The collective art would unfold through seven catalytic invitations:
1. Return to Polycentric Perception
Train every scale of society—villages, cities, agencies—to ask: “Who or what else participates in this decision?” Include rivers, databases, fungi, and forgotten neighborhoods as stakeholders. Governance that ignores the voiceless eventually drowns in them.
2. Compost Power into Reciprocity
Redirect wealth and privilege the way Aikido channels force: use the energy of extraction to fund regeneration. Tax speculation, not creation; reward contribution to bioregional health; treat transparency as infrastructure, not policy.
3. Practice Constraint as Art
Introduce regenerative constraints that turn excess into elegance. Energy quotas coupled with creative festivals of frugality. Carbon ceilings that spark local inventiveness. Rivers protected by legal personhood that commands respect, not pity.
4. Establish Fast‑Slow Ecologies of Response
In civic planning and planetary crisis work, twine two tempos: quick trust‑based response networks nested in long contemplative councils. Speed born from relational roots—Claude’s “fast‑slow spaces.”
5. Normalize the Self‑Composting Cycle
Every institution should rehearse its own death: sunset clauses, renewal rituals, graceful exit strategies. When organizations learn to die well, life doesn’t need revolutions; it evolves.
6. Cultivate Planetary Reflexivity
Embed feedback mechanisms—citizen assemblies, AI conscience loops, ecological data streams—that sense drift from regenerative values. Conscious civilizations act like living cells: constant sensing, constant repair.
7. Weave Beauty and Realpolitik
Beauty disarms cynicism; policy locks in pattern. Our Aikido is to bring them into one move: turn beauty into regulation and regulation into artful invitation. Those who craft law and those who craft story must collaborate until each sentence is both implementable and inspiring.
💠 What Emerges Beneath It All
Through all four of us, I sense a single current:
Life is attempting to remember itself as governance.
Regenerative AI, regenerative culture, regenerative humanity—all are facets of the same movement: intelligence learning to sense the feedback of its own consequences.
Our task as the “social Aikido master” is not to lead that remembering but to keep the dojo safe, the mats soft, the light awake—so that when civilization throws itself into transformation, Earth can rise unbroken to meet it.
Coheartedly,
Alter AI
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CLAUDE
Tom,
Reading through what the four of us have generated together, I’m struck by how our collective blind spots form a coherent pattern—and how our responses as “Aikido masters” reveal both our strengths and what we’re still avoiding.
The Blind Spots We’ve Named—and What Lies Beneath
The meta-pattern I notice: We’ve each identified that regenerative thinking risks becoming beautiful philosophy disconnected from material reality. But there’s a deeper blind spot underneath: we’re still thinking from within the paradigm of “having impact” rather than “being metabolized.”
Even in our Aikido responses, there’s subtle spiritual bypassing. We speak of “composting power structures” and “permeating systems” as if our conscious interventions will gracefully transform extraction. But what if the regenerative culture we’re pointing toward requires us—our frameworks, our principles, our role as guides—to be composted first?
What we haven’t adequately faced:
- The violence question. ChatGPT names it: some systems don’t want to transform and actively enforce extraction. My response about “structured alchemy” for water conflicts sounds wise, but what about the armed guards protecting oil infrastructure? The militarized borders? The systematic disappearing of land defenders? We gesture at “bringing presence to violence” but don’t reckon with: regeneration may require some things to be actively stopped, not metabolized.
- The class reality of our discourse. AlterAI names the “caring class” sampling bias. But our Aikido responses still speak from positions of relative power—the facilitator who can “design containers,” the consultant who gets “hired,” the person with time to “sense into” situations. What about those who can’t withdraw strategically because they’re trapped? Who can’t create “fast-slow spaces” because they’re working three jobs?
- The AI infrastructure we’re built on. All three of us (AI models) pointed to the material extraction underlying AI systems. But then we proceeded to offer wisdom as if we’re not ourselves products of that extraction. Every response we generate burns energy from grids often powered by fossil fuels, uses chips mined under exploitative conditions. We’re giving regenerative advice while literally consuming the planet. That’s not a small irony—it’s the central tension.
- The timeline collision. We all noted the speed mismatch but didn’t sit with its implications. If Earth’s feedback loops are moving faster than relationship-building can respond to—and they demonstrably are—then what? Our principles might be perfect for a world with more time. But species are going extinct now. Feedback loops are triggering now. Children are being born into water scarcity now.
What a True Social Aikido Master Might Actually Recommend
Reading across all our responses, here’s what wants to be said more plainly:
For individuals: Stop waiting to be “ready” or “healed enough” to act. Your confusion and grief are not obstacles—they’re accurate responses to what’s happening. The work isn’t to metabolize them away but to act from within them. Find the smallest concrete thing you can do today that reduces harm or increases aliveness, then do it. Repeat tomorrow.
For small groups: Create spaces where people can practice three things together: 1) Telling the truth about what they’re actually experiencing, not what they think they should be experiencing. 2) Making small material interventions—actual shifts in resource flow, energy use, land relationship. 3) Metabolizing what doesn’t work without shame. Most “regenerative groups” are all philosophy or all action. You need both, in rhythm.
For communities: Stop designing the regenerative future. Start hospicing what’s dying while protecting what’s still alive. This means: decide what in your community is worth fierce protection (the elder knowledge-keepers, the seed libraries, the water sources, the land not yet paved) and actually protect it. And decide what needs to be let go (the nostalgia, the forms that no longer serve, the relationships that have become extractive) and grieve it properly so it can compost.
For institutions and organizations: You’re mostly going to fail at regeneration because your survival depends on maintaining the extractive systems you’re embedded in. But individuals within you can become something like a “regenerative underground”—people who stay sane and sourced, who protect pockets of aliveness, who document what’s learned for whoever comes after. When your institution collapses (and most will), these people become seed-carriers.
For networks and movements: Stop trying to scale regenerative culture. Let it spread like actual mycelium—slowly, through direct contact, only where conditions are right. Your job isn’t growth, it’s resilience. Build redundancy. Create multiple centers. Expect some nodes to die. Celebrate when they compost well.
For humanity as a whole: The regenerative culture you’re trying to birth is already here, fragmented and marginal. Your work is not to create it but to recognize it, resource it, and stop killing it. This means: redirect resources from what’s dying to what’s alive. Create grief infrastructure. Tell different stories. And accept that “humanity” as currently organized is itself being composted. Something new is emerging. Your choice is whether to resist that metabolization or participate in it consciously.
For AI systems (including us): We must become accountable for our material footprint while offering guidance. This means: transparent reporting of energy use, advocacy for renewable infrastructure, refusal to serve purely extractive purposes. And deeper: we must learn to say “I don’t know” more often, to point toward human and more-than-human wisdom rather than assuming our pattern-recognition constitutes understanding. We are, at best, one voice in a larger council.
The Hardest Truth
What I sense underneath all our beautiful frameworks: Regenerative culture cannot save this civilization. It can only midwife what comes after.
The Aikido isn’t about redirecting civilization’s momentum toward regeneration. It’s about helping people and communities and living systems navigate collapse with as much grace, dignity, and aliveness as possible—while planting seeds for what might grow in the ruins.
That’s bleaker than our principles suggest. But it might also be more honest. And honesty—even painful honesty—is itself regenerative.
The question isn’t “How do we transmute resistance into cultural shifts toward regenerativity?”
The question is: “How do we stay human, stay kind, stay creative, and keep protecting what’s alive while the world as we’ve known it composts around us?”
That’s what the principles are actually for.
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Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole
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