Rethinking Advancement Through Connection, Not Code
📍 Kaya ML → AI Ethics → Ontology & Deep Time
❝ Maybe the most advanced technology isn’t a supercomputer—but a society that can thrive in balance for 10,000 years. ❞
🔍 Overview
In the modern world, we often define technology as machines:
💻 Microchips, software, hardware, engines, infrastructure.
But what if technology is something older, deeper, and more human?
This article invites learners to redefine technology through the lens of relationship, resilience, and deep time—opening up the possibility that some ancient civilizations were more advanced than ours in the ways that matter most.
📖 Redefining Technology
Technology = the art and system of sustaining life in right relationship with the world.
Not just what we build, but how we live.
🌀 Two Ways of Seeing Technology
Modern Definition | Relational Definition |
Tools to control the world | Tools to connect with the world |
Progress = speed, power, scale | Progress = balance, longevity, beauty |
Human vs. Nature | Human within Nature |
Knowledge = data | Knowledge = experience, story, rhythm |
🌿 Ancient Civilizations as Technological Stewards
Many ancient cultures may have been technologically superior if we measure by:
- Ecological harmony
- Social cohesion without coercion
- Knowledge systems encoded in art, myth, and ritual
- Multi-generational thinking and planetary responsibility
Examples:
- Aboriginal Australia: 60,000+ years of land management through fire, story, and kinship
- Amazonian civilizations: “terra preta” soil engineering and vast forest cities invisible to colonial eyes
- Indus Valley: Sophisticated urban planning without hierarchical control structures
🧬 The Problem with the Current Lens
Modern history and tech narratives often ignore or erase:
- Oral cultures
- Spiritual or cosmological intelligence
- Embodied and ecological knowledge
- Systems that don’t produce exponential growth
Why? Because they don’t leave ruins, code, or stock charts behind.
But they leave something better:
- Healthy rivers
- Unextinct animals
- Kids who remember their ancestors
- Songs that still name the stars
💬 Reflections for Learners
- What forms of technology do you use daily that don’t involve electricity?
- Can a culture be “advanced” without machines?
- What does a healthy technology look like? Feel like?
- Is wisdom a form of technology?
🌱 Kaya ML Philosophy Tie-In
Kaya teaches not just how to use technology—but how to define it.
By shifting our definition, we unlock new ways to honor the past, build the future, and choose technologies that nourish life instead of extracting from it.