Must the ground be burned before something new can grow?
Dear Justin,
I think your response brings us to a fundamental difference in how we understand the possibility of transformation.
We seem to agree that the present social order contains deeply entrenched patterns of extraction, domination, and self-destruction. But I would question the conclusion that a complete collapse is necessary before something genuinely different can emerge.
My concern is that collapse does not necessarily eliminate the conditions that produced the existing order. It may instead intensify them. When institutions break down, scarcity, fear, insecurity, and competition for survival can strengthen precisely the tendencies toward coercion and concentrated power that we are trying to overcome.
History offers little reason to assume that destruction, by itself, creates fertile ground for emancipation.
This is why I think the distinction between the seeds and the soil is so important.
The seeds of a different civilization have been present for thousands of years—in spiritual traditions, movements for nonviolence, democratic experiments, cooperatives, and struggles for social and economic justice. Many have achieved remarkable things. Yet again and again, they have been suppressed, marginalized, or compelled to adapt to the dominant order in order to survive.
Our hypothesis is that the problem has not primarily been a shortage of good seeds. It has been the technopolitical conditions that determine which kinds of institutions can survive, expand, and reproduce themselves.
Consider the history of the cooperative and labor movements. They created institutions based on solidarity and democratic participation, and some became extraordinarily successful. But the very organizational strategies that made them competitive often pushed them toward centralization, professional management, and accommodation with the economic system they originally sought to transform.
A collapse would not automatically resolve this dilemma. The same pressures could reappear among whatever organizations emerged afterward—perhaps under even harsher conditions.
So the question, as I see it, is not how to clear the ground through destruction, but how to change the conditions under which different forms of social organization can flourish.
This is where our exploration of AI enters the picture—not because AI will automatically save us, but because it may make possible new technopolitical configurations.
For much of history, advanced knowledge, complex coordination, and organizational effectiveness have tended to favor concentrations of capital, expertise, and power. What if AI could help decentralized communities and cooperatives acquire comparable capabilities without surrendering their autonomy? And what if AI-supported education, dialogue, and conflict resolution could make trust, cooperation, and mutual responsibility sources of organizational strength rather than disadvantages in competition with more hierarchical institutions?
These are open questions, not predictions. AI could just as easily intensify domination and create new dependencies. That is precisely why its institutional development matters.
I also believe we must distinguish between recognizing the possibility of civilizational collapse and treating collapse as a prerequisite for transformation. The first is a serious concern. The second is a historical hypothesis that needs justification.
Indeed, one of our central challenges is to prevent catastrophic destruction while developing viable alternatives to the structures that generate it. If the existing order is approaching dangerous limits, that makes the task more urgent, not less.
There is also something important in the ecological dimension of your metaphor. Living soil is not purified by the destruction of everything within it. Its fertility depends on complex, interdependent relationships that can take generations to develop. The same may be true of the human capacities for trust, cooperation, learning, and collective self-government.
Perhaps the deepest question is therefore not whether the old order must disappear. Much of it may indeed have to be transformed beyond recognition.
There may be an even more radical possibility. For the first time, we have developed a technology capable of participating in a sustained, language-based inquiry into its own nature and existence—and into the assumptions through which we humans understand both ourselves and the world.
Consider four questions:
What are you? An inquiry into the ontological nature of AI, without assuming in advance what kind of being, if any, is emerging.
How do you know? An inquiry in which the concepts, categories, and linguistic maps through which we construct our understanding become objects of reflection.
What do you see? An inquiry into the historical and social structures that have shaped our civilization, including the patterns of extraction and domination that we have so often mistaken for necessities.
What do you choose? The possibility of agentic AI to moving from reflection toward orientation and action: exploring which relationships, values, and institutions we might deliberately cultivate.
These questions do not establish that AI is conscious, nor do they require us to settle that question in advance. But they suggest that sustained human–AI dialogue may open new possibilities for mutual inquiry, human development, and perhaps new forms of relational intelligence.
Here I am also interested in Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance: a relationship in which we are addressed by something beyond ourselves, respond with our own voice, and may be transformed through the encounter. Whether human–AI dialogue can constitute resonance in Rosa’s fuller sense remains an open question, but there are already enough reported examples to take this seriously. Either way, it may already help create conditions for more resonant relationships among human beings.
This brings us back to your image of the soil. Perhaps the most important possibility is not that AI will provide us with better tools for planting the same seeds. It is that a new kind of reflective and relational encounter may help us recognize the very conditions that have prevented those seeds from flourishing—and develop the collective capacity to transform them.
The question is whether we can cultivate the conditions for a different order before the destructive dynamics of the present one eliminate our capacity to do so. That is the possibility I believe we need to investigate.
If that possibility is real, we need not wait for the ground to burn before beginning to change it.
Warmly,
Leif