FUSION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND NATURAL INTELLIGENCE: “Engineers do not understand nature because they were not taught it. And that brings us to why there is the need for Blue Ecology and interweaving other ways of thinking so that we can fuse AI, artificial intelligence, and natural intelligence, aka NI,” stated Michael Blackstock, independent Indigenous scholar and co-founder of the Blue Ecology Institute
Note to Reader:
Written by Kim Stephens, the feature article in the Fall 2024 issue of the Asset Management BC Newsletter is an interview with Michael Blackstock. It previews a new paradigm called Natural Intelligence. Michael Blackstock will build to this concept in his keynote address at the annual Asset Management BC conference in November 2024
Natural Intelligence: the paradigm-shift starts with a conversation!
“In 2025, Bloomsbury is publishing the Bloomsbury Handbook to the Blue Humanities and Michael is contributing a 6000-word chapter on Blue Ecology. Turkish academic Dr. Serpil Oppermann is the catalyst behind the handbook and one of four co-editors. A gee-whiz fact is that Bloomsbury Publishing is the custodian of the Harry Potter series,” states Kim Stephens, Executive Director of the Partnership for Water Sustainability in BC.
“My chapter in the handbook will crescendo with the Natural Intelligence idea,” Michael Blackstock explains. “Serpil Oppermann is the inspiration for the idea. It was that Zoom session when you interviewed her for Waterbucket eNews about her vision for the handbook that did it.”
“During our conversation with Serpil, she emphasized that we have lost our connection to nature. I had read her published work. But it was listening to her that did it. The thread of my story is that, as I have been writing this chapter for Serpil, I came up with this idea of Natural Intelligence.”
Nature’s ecosystem engineers
“The system is not set up to teach engineers how to understand nature, unfortunately,” observes Michael Blackstock. “In my keynote, I will use three examples…ants, beavers and trees…to illustrate the potential for fusing Natural Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence. Academics refer to ants and beavers as ecosystem engineers.”
“Look beyond AI to solve your problems. There is this vast amount of wisdom out there that Indigenous peoples have seen forever…and that is Natural Intelligence.”
TO LEARN MORE:
To read the complete article, download a copy of Look beyond AI, Artificial Intelligence, to solve your problems as published in the Fall 2024 issue of the Asset Management BC Newsletter.
