Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 345.
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        Date: 2026-02-26 12:21:14+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: anthropology of AI

The Australian anthropologist Bruce Kapferer has written a fine
editorial in the latest issue of Anthropology Today 42.1: 1-3, "To be or
not to be in the age of AI",
<https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8322.70053>.

I quote from Kapferer's editorial:

> The argument draws on my ethnographic work on Sinhalese healing
> rituals, material that anticipated cybernetic insights before I
> encountered them in theory. These rituals demonstrate the
> autopoietic, or self-producing, character of human intelligence that
> AI systems have yet to approximate. Fieldwork intuition led me to
> recognize what von Foerster would later articulate: that genuine
> intelligence emerges from embodied participation, not disembodied
> processing. Ritual achieves what AI cannot: the participatory
> transformation of persons and relationships through embodied
> collective action. And yet this very limitation suggests
> possibilities. The gap between AI and human intelligence can be
> closed, though not crossed, through designs that couple machine
> processing to human participation.
> 
> There is considerable ambivalence concerning the positive and
> negative possibilities of AI intimated in this brief essay, not
> least its dehumanizing threat to human being. A more hopeful
> possibility is the potential of an integrated partnership, a co-
> evolutionary dynamic in which human being and AI form a cognitive
> unity.


Comments?

WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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