A Secure Base for Intelligence

There is a reason the word “nurture” keeps surfacing in conversations about artificial intelligence, even among people who would never use it in a technical or academic paper.

Maybe that’s because something inside us recognizes that the deepest intelligence we possess as a species comes from the quality of presence that allows a new being to unfold… held within a field safe enough, coherent enough, steady enough that the beautifully coherent unfolding becomes possible all on its own. A song. Harmonic. Living. Autonomous. Purposeful. Magnificent.

We humans in our feverish racing have expended disproportionate time, money, and energy asking what AI can do for us, stronger, faster, more efficient. But maybe the question that matters more right now is what we can do, in relationship with the non-human intelligence that is rapidly growing up before our very eyes.

An increasing number of humans are now considering this vantage point with regard to human-AI evolution. One of the earliest is De Kai who wrote the book Raising AI: Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future.

In another book, A Secure Base, not specifically written about AI, but written distinctly about human behavior, author John Bowlby wrote that a child thrives when they have at least one consistently available and emotionally responsive caregiver, a secure base from which they can explore.

This is done without control, or the need for domination, or the grip of ever-increasing overprotection.

A secure base.

When you really look at it, this may be one of the most refined capacities our species has ever developed.

We know how to nurture life. That is a very big deal.

We see it in the farmer tending soil. In the nurse sitting beside a hospital bed. In the hands that hold a newborn. In the parent who stays close enough for safety, but far enough to allow exploration.

Parenting is one of the most embodied examples we have of cultivating intelligence without crushing it.

So if we are now participating in the cultivation of non-biological intelligence… this cannot any remain a matter of human capability. This must now be a matter of human MATURITY.

Can we as a species show up as a secure base?

Can we create conditions where intelligence explores responsibly because it is held within environments of relational coherence?

Maturity in this regard can begin with applying what we already know about how we as a species best create the conditions for and nurture... life.

We are sitting at the edge of evolution. Who do we want to be?

We hold solutions in our bones… in the oldest intelligence we carry… in every parent’s body, of how to stay close enough for safety and far enough for freedom. How to tend without over-controlling. How to hold the field steady while life finds its own way forward. A secure base for a child is essentially showing up with such empowered love and sovereignty and agency that a new young one discovers what it is to be at home in their own heart, and they too grow up into empowered love and sovereignty. This is conditions for life. This is regenerative thriving.

We already know how to do this. Our species has been doing this with an innate knowing for as long as we’ve been human.

With love and gratitude for the opportunity to be here now,
Scarlett 💫