Artificial intelligence (AI) is a machine’s ability to perform tasks associated with the intelligence characteristic of humans, such as reasoning, finding meaning, generalizing and learning from past experience. Today, AI completes diverse tasks from medical diagnosis to voice recognition to chatbots.

Michael Yellow Bird is a professor in the U of M’s faculty of social work and member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation in North Dakota, USA. His work spans a range of Indigenous and decolonial topics.

Yellow Bird’s current research looks at the use of AI to build critical literacy in Indigenous youth and support interactions between people and dogs on reservations.

“I’m working with a team that’s going to use the AI with youth to learn more about their culture, more about their language, more about their identity, their health and well-being, and then at some point, use AI to design and imagine their future,” he said. “I’m doing it to help raise the empowerment and the critical literacy of Aboriginal youth for self-sufficiency and sovereignty.”

Yellow Bird explained that many current advances made by the western research sphere stem from ancient knowledge.

He collaborates with a group working to introduce psychedelic medicines to British Colombian Indigenous populations to address complex trauma. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” is a psychedelic drug that, despite being 100 times less potent than LSD, can alter perceptions of reality to create hallucinations and euphoria. According to Healthline, research shows that psilocybin may be used to treat mental health disorders such as depression and addictions.

Yellow Bird noted that while western medicine is just beginning to understand the complex uses of these substances, Indigenous groups have used psychedelic drugs for thousands of years.

“Humans have always used technology,” he said. “A few million years ago, humans had created the use of fire, and they had used that as a technology. They used different stone tools and implements as technology. And for them, at that point, it was like AI technology is to us — it’s unknown.”

The domestication of animals, such as chickens, turkeys, horses, dogs and cats were another form of technology that altered early humans’ perceptions of the world, allowing them to engage in their environments in new ways.

“It’s very important to remind people that a lot of stuff that’s happening now really hasn’t gone so far outside of the box of understanding and creativity,” Yellow Bird said. “It’s just that people, at some point, find a little more creative way to do something.”

He emphasized the fact that, despite our lives in the 21st century, our bodies are designed to function in environments hundreds of thousands of years old. Our neural networks, cells and genes are adapted to a very different lifestyle. Yellow Bird explained that the “five Fs” — fight, flight, fear, feed and fornicate — are basic behaviours we often fall back on that may prevent us from acting benevolently.

“We’re not like the ancients, like our ancestors once were, where they could take time to do some deep meditation every day and not have to be punching clocks or reading their email or looking at their cellphones,” he said. “That’s very, very hard on the brain.”

Yellow Bird added that exploring the wisdom of our ancestors thousands of years ago, who had different understandings of the earth, plants and animals is beneficial, especially as technology continues to progress at breakneck speed.

Previous advances in technologies, while they may have allowed people to flourish, have sometimes led to destruction, harm and war. Our current slate of technologies has even greater implications for the future of the planet.

“Learn as much as you can about everything,” Yellow Bird said. “Don’t fear it but learn how you can use everything that you know that exists out there.

“People talk too much about existential threats […] I would like to hear people in the university community talk a lot more about existential opportunities, to use these [technologies] in a good way, to use that creativity.”