“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”
Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13 can be read not only as a teaching about kindness and charity, but as a warning that increasing capacity without increasing consciousness leads to noise rather than meaning. Humanity now speaks with the tongues of men and angels through global communications networks, artificial intelligence, and digital technologies. Yet the question remains: to what end?
The Negotiating AI as a Community (NAIC) workshops and project are about the relationship between community, community action, capacity and consciousness. About how we might use AI and other technologies ‘as a community’, to actualise our intelligence as individuals and augment it as a community. I sometimes talk about Actualised Human Intelligence (AHI) and Augmented Community Intelligence (ACI). These are not technical terms but they are convenient ways of saying that we need to focus on becoming more conscious as individuals and communities.
Why We Need This.
At all levels, personal, local, national and global we have access to an unprecedented volume of information and unprecedented capacity for communicating information. But we are becoming more impoverished in terms of agency. A famous dictum has it that ‘Knowledge is power’, but knowledge is only power if we have also the power to act on that knowledge.
A starving person may know where food is. A tenant may know their landlord is acting unjustly. A citizen may know that a policy is harmful. Data, information, knowledge, even intelligence, is not power. Power lies in the ability to shape outcomes.
Understanding the distinction between knowledge and power becomes increasingly important in the age of AI.
Using AI, the great tech companies and states are not merely accumulating knowledge. They are accumulating:
- computational capacity,
- predictive capacity,
- surveillance capacity,
- behavioural influence,
- economic leverage.
In short they are accumulating power and therefore control. Over the past century several writers have warned about the accumulation and deployment of technocratic power. I will mention George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis and Pope Leo XIV:
- Orwell in 1984 feared domination through surveillance, coercion, and control.
- Huxley in Brave New World feared domination through pleasure, distraction, and engineered desire.
- Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, feared a technocratic elite that claimed to stand above human values and ultimately reshaped humanity according to its own preferences.
- Pope Leo in his encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence warns that AI could intensify domination, exclusion, and even death of humans in war and humanity within our civilisations if human dignity is subordinated to optimisation and control.
Long before our times Jesus observed that:
“For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” ~ Matthew 25:29
This has been called the ‘Matthew Effect’ or the ‘Matthew Principle’ sometimes summarised as ‘The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’ It can be applied not only in the sphere of financial capital, but also in the spheres of spiritual and community capital.
As individuals we have little financial capital but together we have potential community capital. Technology provides connection and but it is up to community to provide consciousness or else powerful institutions, whether corporate or governmental, will provide control without conscience.
The question for community organisations is therefore not whether AI will transform society. It already is. The question is whether communities will develop and use the capacity to shape that transformation or merely adapt to decisions made elsewhere.
NAIC is not about learning to use AI to become rich individually. It is about exploring how communities can use AI and other technologies to build, enhance and enrich community. It is about developing strategies and structures through dialogue and collaboration. It is about becoming not ghosts in the machine, but the soul of the machine.
Mapping Community Intelligence in Newham
We cannot become the soul of the machine without understanding our own soul, we cannot negotiate as a community without understanding ourselves as a community. Whether we think in terms of cooperation or competition, self-understanding remains essential.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” ~ Sun Tzu, The Art of War
I have, above and previously, shared my understanding of the opportunities and threats offered by technology in general and AI in particular and I have referenced the concerns and warnings of dystopian writers and of Pope Leo XIV. They are not alone. But we must look not only at the opportunities and threats of AI but also at the strengths and weaknesses of our community as it embraces or is forced to embrace AI.
On August 21st 2026 I expect to lead a full day workshop ‘mapping community intelligence’ in Newham. The workshop will look something like this:
Part 1: What Are We Already Doing?
Participants will share information about who they are, what they do, where they can be found, why they do what they do and how they do it.
Premises – What do we believe about people and communities?
Principles – What values guide our work?
Policies – What strategies or approaches do we follow?
Partnerships – Who do we work with?
Programmes – What projects and activities do we deliver?
Practices – How do we actually work?
The sharing will be used to create or to begin creating a permanent community knowledge base as a shared resource to be extended and managed on open source principles. Participants will be invited to share information prior to the workshop on the Newham Mosaic website.
Part 2: What Patterns Can We See?
Once people have shared their information maps, we will look for:
- common values
- common concerns
- duplicated effort
- gaps
- opportunities
- unexpected connections
This is where community intelligence begins to emerge.
Part 3: What Are the Key Threats and Opportunities?
These are not only the threats and opportunities offered by AI but also environmental, social and economic threats and opportunities
Questions such as:
- How is AI affecting our communities?
- How is AI affecting local government, local democracy health services, education, the local economy, the environment?
- How might it affect them in future?
- What risks are we already seeing?
This is when community intelligence begins to see things from a wider and collective perspective.
Part 4: What Could We Build Together?
This is the heart of NAIC, Newham Mosaic and the Newham Citizen Science Fairs and projects – building community together and turning knowledge (including self-knowledge) into agency Possible answers might include:
- regular dialogue forums
- shared evidence gathering
- citizen science
- community storytelling
- training
- digital tools
- collective responses to policy issues
But the question behind the question of what could we build together is how will we work together to built it. How do we become conscious enough, connected enough and organised enough to shape our own future in an age of accelerating technological power?
Perhaps Paul again points to an answer in his most quoted passage:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”