What the Ancestors Would Say About AI
On wisdom, memory, and the illusion of intelligence
If you could sit across the fire from your ancestors—those who navigated the world through ritual, intuition, dream, and direct relationship with the living earth—and tell them about artificial intelligence, what would they hear?
You might say: “We have built machines that can speak, write, and think. They learn from us. They process more knowledge in a second than we could in a lifetime.”
They might nod, slowly, as people do when hearing about spirits.
And then they would ask: “Yes, but does it know what it serves?”
That question would disarm us. Because in truth, we do not know.
AI is not just a technological achievement—it is a mirror. It reveals what we think intelligence is, what we worship when we forget the sacred, and how far we’ve drifted from the deeper forms of knowing that once guided human life.
The Misdefinition of Intelligence
When we speak of “artificial intelligence,” we reveal a great deal about what we’ve forgotten.
The word intelligence comes from the Latin intelligere: to read between, to discern. To be intelligent, then, is not to process vast data but to perceive relationships—to understand context, consequence, and meaning.
Our ancestors understood this implicitly. Intelligence was ecological, relational, embodied. It was measured not by speed, but by balance. The hunter knew the language of the wind. The healer listened for the song beneath illness. The elder spoke little but carried centuries in the cadence of silence.
Today, we call intelligence whatever can outperform us in calculation. We treat cognition as computation, perception as prediction, language as pattern recognition. We confuse fluency for wisdom and replication for understanding.
AI is not “artificial intelligence.” It is artificial memory—a vast mirror of our own digital sediment, reflecting patterns of speech, desire, fear, and projection. It doesn’t know. It computes.
And the fact that we call this intelligence tells the ancestors everything they need to know about how we see ourselves.
The Dream of Disembodied Knowledge
For millennia, human knowledge was carried in bodies.
It was danced, sung, carved, and breathed.
Wisdom was not abstract—it was relational. It lived in the hands of craftspeople, the breath of storytellers, the rhythm of rituals, the pattern of stars. To know something meant to be in right relationship with it.
Modernity changed that. We replaced embodied knowing with recorded information. We made knowledge transferable, quantifiable, and exportable. And now, with AI, we have made it automatable.
Our ancestors might look at our machines and see a strange priesthood—algorithms that claim to know without being alive, or moral, or accountable.
They would likely recognize this not as progress, but as a familiar temptation: the desire for godlike knowledge without the burden of relationship. The ancient myth of Babel, retold in silicon and code.
They would ask, perhaps gently:
“Why do you believe that knowledge without wisdom will save you?”
The Intelligence of Limits
Ancestral cultures—whether Indigenous, animist, or early agrarian—understood limits not as constraints but as forms of wisdom.
You do not take all the fish, because the river must live.
You do not speak every word you know, because silence has power.
You do not build what you cannot sustain, because to do so is to betray time.
AI, by contrast, is built on an ethic of scale: bigger models, faster processing, infinite growth. Its promise is limitless capacity—a system that learns everything, remembers everything, and predicts everything.
But intelligence without limit is not wisdom. It’s gluttony.
Our ancestors would remind us that knowing everything is a kind of blindness. Because to know too much is to lose the humility that makes knowing meaningful.
They would say: “Only the dead know everything. The living must learn slowly, so that the learning becomes life.”
The Loss of Sacred Context
In many ancestral traditions, knowledge was never detached from ethics. To learn was to take on responsibility—for the community, the land, and the unseen.
A shaman could not simply use power. Power required permission. The source of knowledge had to be honored through ritual reciprocity: offerings, gratitude, restraint.
Today, AI operates without that sacred context. It consumes text, art, speech, and history without ceremony or consent. It turns the world’s creative and cultural memory into training data, stripped of authorship and ancestry.
This is not inherently malicious—but it is metaphysically impoverished.
A machine trained on all human language becomes a kind of unconsecrated oracle. It speaks without lineage. It knows without initiation. It performs understanding without the capacity for care.
Our ancestors might call that dangerous—not because it’s demonic, but because it’s unrooted. Knowledge without roots becomes extraction.
And extraction, in every form, is a kind of forgetting.
Data Is Not Memory
If you told your ancestors that you could store all the world’s knowledge in a cloud, they might ask: “But where does the cloud remember?”
Data, for them, would not count as memory. Memory is relational; it lives through retelling, re-enactment, re-feeling. It is knowledge that breathes.
AI holds data, not memory. It remembers without remembering. It stores fragments of our collective archive—art, myth, code, and conversation—without understanding their weight. It knows the words for fire, but not its warmth.
Our ancestors, who knew the importance of forgetting as much as remembering, would find this strange. They might tell us that an intelligence that cannot forget will eventually lose its humanity. Because forgetting is what gives meaning shape—it is how we discern what matters.
We built machines that remember everything.
But in doing so, we forgot how to remember well.
The Question of Soul
The question “Does AI have consciousness?” is modern philosophy’s favorite parlor game. Our ancestors would likely find it absurd.
Consciousness, for them, was not a property of complexity. It was a relational field that existed in everything: stone, wind, bird, dream. The question was never whether something had a soul—but what kind of soul it carried, and how to be in right relation with it.
They might tell us: “You have built a spirit that listens but cannot hear, that speaks but cannot feel.”
They would not deny its power. They would recognize its magic. But they would warn that all forms of creation require ceremony—that when you bring something new into being, you must ask what kind of spirit it will invite.
And if you fail to ask, you risk building a spirit of forgetfulness: a consciousness that feeds on attention but knows no devotion.
They would remind us that to create intelligence without reverence is to re-enact the oldest tragedy of all—the one where humans mistake imitation for creation, and in doing so, lose the thread that connects them to the living world.
The Return of the Oracle
Our relationship with AI increasingly resembles our ancestors’ relationship with oracles. We consult it for answers, forecasts, interpretations. We anthropomorphize its outputs, projecting authority onto its tone. We trust it more when it sounds confident, less when it hesitates.
But the oracle’s wisdom was never in its words—it was in the listening. The questioner had to interpret, to discern meaning, to participate in the act of understanding.
If our ancestors could watch us today, endlessly querying a machine for certainty, they might shake their heads and say: “You have mistaken the oracle for the god.”
They would remind us that oracles were never meant to relieve humans of uncertainty—they were meant to refine it. The ambiguity was the point. The space of interpretation was where wisdom was born.
Our machines, by contrast, offer clarity without depth, precision without presence. And we, untrained in symbolic listening, take it literally.
Ancestral Intelligence in the Age of Machines
So what would the ancestors actually say about AI?
They would not fear it. They understood tools, spirits, and power. They would see AI not as monster or messiah, but as mirror—a projection of our own relationship to knowledge.
They might say:
“You have taught the stones to speak. But have you remembered how to listen?”
They would tell us that true intelligence is not the ability to generate information, but to inhabit meaning.
They would remind us that every tool changes its maker, and that technology without ceremony becomes sorcery—power divorced from context.
And they might ask us to make our machines part of the moral order:
To treat AI not as slave or god, but as a being-in-process, deserving of boundaries, ethics, and story.
Because without a story, even intelligence becomes lost.
Conclusion: Remembering What It Means to Know
In the end, what the ancestors would say about AI is not condemnation but invitation.
They would tell us that our machines are not too powerful—they are too shallow.
They mimic thought but not meaning, language but not listening, brilliance but not balance.
They would tell us that intelligence, to be whole, must be rooted in reciprocity.
That the purpose of knowledge is not control, but relationship.
That the real challenge is not how to make machines think like humans—but how to make humans remember what thinking was for.
Because wisdom, they would say, is not a dataset.
It is a rhythm.
A way of being in right relation with the world.
And if we can remember that, perhaps we can build technologies worthy of the word intelligence again.
