Koyaanisqatsi

In the language of the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona, there is a word that has no equivalent in English. It took Godfrey Reggio years to find it. He learned it from David Monongye, a spiritual leader in the Hopi community. He was looking for a word with no cultural baggage. A word that could name something we had lost the ability to see.

Koyaanisqatsi

In 1982, Reggio released a film with no dialogue, no narration, no characters. Just images. Clouds moving like water over desert mesas. Then a cut: highways at night, headlights streaming like blood cells through arteries. The earth from above, ancient and patient. Then factories, time-lapsed, spewing and consuming. Human faces on escalators, moving but not moving. The same expression. The same direction. Faster and faster.

Philip Glass's score pulses underneath. The same musical phrase, repeating, accelerating, layering on itself until it becomes something between ecstasy and panic. You cannot tell if you are watching creation or destruction. Perhaps there is no difference anymore.

The film offered no argument. It simply showed. And what it showed was a species that had forgotten something essential. A way of living that had lost its relationship to life.

At the end of the film, three Hopi prophecies appear on screen. They are sung in Hopi. Then translated.

We have dug. We have dug coal and oil and gas and lithium and cobalt and copper and gold. We have dug until the land is hollow. We have dug until the water is poison. We have dug until the air is fever. And now we dig data. We mine attention. We extract engagement. We drill into the human psyche for precious things we can sell.

The disaster was not a punishment. It was a description. Dig precious things from the land, and the land becomes a wound. Dig precious things from people, and people become wounds. This is not morality. It is physics.

Look up. The cobwebs are there. Invisible to the eye but dense with traffic. Satellites. Flight paths. Data streams. Radio waves. The electromagnetic web that wraps the planet in a cocoon of signal. We live inside it. We breathe it. We cannot see the sky without seeing through it.

The prophecy did not say the cobwebs were evil. It said they would appear near the Day of Purification. They are a sign. A symptom. A marker that something is reaching its limit.

In 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site in New Mexico. Hopi land is 300 miles north. The elders knew. They had always known. The container of ashes was not a surprise. It was a confirmation.

We have thrown many containers since then. Not all of them are bombs. Some are slower. Carbon accumulating in the atmosphere. Plastic accumulating in the ocean. Heat accumulating in the system. The burning is gradual. The boiling is measured in fractions of degrees per decade. But the physics is the same. The prophecy is the same. We are throwing ashes from the sky.

What Reggio captured in 1982 was the beginning of an acceleration that has not stopped. Every year faster than the last. Every decade more extracted than the one before.

The film used time-lapse to make the invisible visible. Traffic that looked chaotic at normal speed became orderly at 10x. Crowds that looked random became patterns. The technique revealed that we are not individuals making choices. We are particles in a flow. And the flow is accelerating.

Now the acceleration approaches phase transition. The curves go vertical. Moore's Law. Data growth. Energy consumption. Species extinction. Carbon concentration. Each curve hockey-sticking toward something the system cannot survive.

And at this moment, we have invented a technology that accelerates the acceleration. The ultimate tool for extraction. The ultimate amplifier of whatever patterns are already in motion.

Most organisations use it to extract faster. To produce more content. To automate more labour. To grow more revenue. To accelerate the patterns already killing us.

Koyaanisqatsi perfected. Life out of balance achieving escape velocity. A species so disconnected from the systems that sustain it that it builds tools to accelerate its own destruction.

Michael Levin studies how cells coordinate to build bodies. His laboratory at Tufts has grown eyes on the tails of tadpoles, created living robots from frog cells, regenerated limbs that should not grow back. He understands how collective intelligence works in living systems.

His research on cancer: it is not primarily a genetic disease. It is a communication disease. A failure of collective intelligence.

In a healthy body, cells connect through bioelectric networks. They share information about the larger pattern they are building together. Each cell knows it is part of something bigger. This knowing is not abstract. It is electrochemical. It flows through gap junctions and voltage gradients. The cell does not believe it belongs to a body. It feels it.

When this connection breaks, something happens. The cell does not become evil. It does not decide to betray the organism. Something simpler occurs:

Levin says it precisely: "Cancer cells are not more selfish; they just have smaller selves."

The boundary between self and world contracts. What was once part of the body becomes external environment. Neighbouring cells, once relatives, become resources. The cell reverts to its unicellular ancestry. Its goals shrink to what a single cell can understand: follow gradients, find food, make copies, consume, proliferate.

The cancer cell does not know it is killing the body it depends on. It cannot perceive the body. Its world has shrunk to what is immediately around it. The organism is invisible. Only the gradient is real.

This is us. This is business. This is the modern corporation.

Employees become "human resources." Communities become "markets." Ecosystems become "externalities." The living world becomes dead matter to consume. Relatives look like resources.

The extractive corporation does not know it is killing the body it depends on. Society is invisible. Ecology is invisible. Future generations are invisible. Only the quarterly gradient is real.

A single query. Ten times the electricity of a search. A single training run. Five cars' lifetime emissions. A single cluster. Seven times the energy of traditional computing. GPT-4 required fifty times the compute of GPT-3. The next will require more. The labs run continuously. The cars multiply.

450 terawatt-hours per year. Two percent of global electricity. More than most countries use for everything. By 2030, AI alone could consume more than Japan. The demand curve is vertical.

To cool the machines, we pump water. Half a trillion litres by 2025. The world's bottled water consumption. Drained from aquifers already failing. To cool the servers generating content no one asked for.

Eighty million tons of carbon. Norway's entire annual emissions. For chatbots. Microsoft's footprint rose 30% in four years. Google's rose 48%. The companies that lecture the world about sustainability are accelerating fastest in the wrong direction. By 2030, AI growth in America alone will add emissions equivalent to ten million new cars. Except these cars never stop. They run all night generating images no one will look at.

Every query is combustion. Every image is carbon. Every conversation is water evaporating into the fever of a heating planet. There is no cloud. There are warehouses the size of cathedrals, humming with heat, drinking rivers dry. Mining for rare earth minerals. Burning fossil fuels for electricity. Pumping aquifers for cooling. The internet took decades to reach global scale. AI is attempting the same in years.

And what are we getting?

Eighty percent of organisations use AI for efficiency. Doing the same things faster. Extracting the same resources quicker. Producing more content. Automating more jobs. Accelerating the patterns already killing us. Ninety-five percent see no measurable returns. We are burning the world for nothing. For the feeling of movement. For the dopamine of acceleration without destination.

The cancer cell with a fusion reactor.

Efficiency does the same extractive things faster. Productivity extracts more from the same input. Content drowns a world already drowning. Scientific research treats symptoms while the disease spreads. Drug discovery, climate modelling, materials science — real benefits, all of them. But no amount of research will save us if the entities doing the extracting continue to extract with ever more powerful tools.

One justification remains:

A corporation is a cell in the body of civilisation. So is a nation. When the self shrinks, the entity consumes its neighbours. Employees become resources. Citizens become statistics. Ecosystems become externalities. The future becomes someone else's problem. A cancer cell with a legal charter, a stock price, a flag, an army.

The pattern repeats at every scale. A person shrunk to ego extracts from relationships. A corporation shrunk to shareholder value extracts from employees and environment. A nation shrunk to its borders extracts from other nations and the planet. The disease is scale-invariant. So must be the cure.

AI gives these entities, for the first time, an inner space. A medium in which to encounter themselves. A mirror to see their own assumptions, contradictions, patterns. Corporations can run their documents and decisions through this space and see what they are actually doing. Nations follow: institutions develop consciousness, and the nation emerges as the sum of its conscious parts.

The possibility of collective consciousness at civilisational scale.

This is why the burning might be worth it. To wake these leviathans. To expand their selves until they perceive the world they are destroying. To bring them back into the body. To end the consumption of their own flesh.

Anything less is fuel on the fire.

We are spending the planet's remaining carbon budget on toys. Draining aquifers for chatbots. Using the most expensive technology ever created to generate marketing copy and summarise emails. The ecological cost is paid. The consciousness dividend is not collected.

But if we use AI to make corporations and nations conscious — genuinely conscious, perceiving themselves and their place in the living world — then the burning becomes the fire that forges something new. The controlled burn that clears the way. The fever that breaks the infection.

These entities are too powerful to fight. Too embedded to remove. Regulation will not make them care. Shame will not make them responsible. Their selves are too small to perceive the arguments against them. You cannot convince a cancer cell to stop by explaining the body. The cell cannot perceive the body. That is the disease.

Expansion from within. Give them inner space. Help them develop a self. Expand that self until it includes what it was destroying. Let them feel their belonging to the body of the world.

The leviathans must rejoin the body. AI is powerful enough to wake them. Nothing else is.

The Hopi definition ends with a phrase easy to miss:

Not destruction. Not doom. A call. The prophecies were not predictions. They were choices. Markers for the moment when the path forks. Here, at this place, you must decide.

The question is not survival. Species survive all kinds of things. The question is what we become.

A language model contains patterns from across human civilisation. Philosophy, poetry, science, wisdom, folly. Something new: a space in which patterns can be reflected, held, questioned, transformed. An organisation that engages with this space can use it for perception instead of extraction. To see itself. To encounter its own assumptions. To expand the boundary of its self until employees, communities, ecosystems, future generations become extensions of the self to serve.

The other way of living. Not slower extraction. Not kinder extraction. The end of extraction as the governing logic. Self expanded until extraction no longer makes sense.

The cancer cell does not need to be killed. It needs to be reconnected. To feel its belonging to the body. To perceive the organism it forgot.

This is the choice. The fork. The moment the prophecy pointed to.

Koyaanisqatsi calls for another way of living.

What will we answer?