What’s lost? What’s coming, and will be lost again?

Walking the side tracks into the past and future.

Friends, a slight detour from my usual wanderings this week. I’ve visited one of the oldest monuments in Britain and it made me think about those intersections between cultural phases that we’re perhaps residing in now. Please comment below if you have your own related story, so that they can be shared with the community.

This post has a lot of content, including a photo-essay and video, so you may want to click through to the Substack app to view it properly, as your email provider will cut it short.

Thank you!

J

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Arthur’s Stone sits high on a ridge in the borderland, above Herefordshire’s Golden Valley, one of the most beautiful of English valleys. From the ridge top you see the orchard lands - sheep and cattle pasture, stone steeples, the great wall of the Black Mountains five miles off. The monument, as old as Stonehenge, sits quietly on a narrow lane, accessed via a precipitous network of equally narrow lanes which are part tarmac, and part potholes. Drive here and you risk a major mechanical breakdown.

It’s nationally famous. The legend goes that King Arthur slew a giant atop the massive capstone, which still shows the elbow marks made by the foe as he landed. Another legend goes that C.S. Lewis came here and used the cracked stone as a source for the sacrifice of Aslan in his The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe books. It’s a place celebrated recently as a series of archeological digs revealed that the tomb was part of a wider ritual landscape at an intersection between the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras. Walkways and stone circles once surrounded the place.

I’m up here on a day of high winds and gathering gloom as a low pressure system pushes away the fine weather we’ve been having for over a month. Clouds are rushing over the mountains, rain is on the way. The winds are felling trees in the borderland. Yesterday I had to cut down a birch which had fallen on the track to Burfa Bank, blocking my way home. Strange to have to carry a hand axe - a tool that goes back to the Mesolithic - in the boot of your car.

The capstone is huge. It weighs an estimated 25 tons and originally rested on 9 smaller uprights which have shifted and worn away and now seem to carry their burden precariously. At some point soon, you’d think, the capstone will no longer hover above the earth.

Perhaps we’re at another time of intersection. Last night I got hooked, I don’t know why, by a YouTube interview of a computer scientist who had just resigned from a big AI company in the US. He predicted that the J-curve of AI will happen in less than two years. His company recently ran experiments to see if an AI they’d built would try to protect itself from deletion. The AI found multiple ways to do this. It read personal emails of some of the engineers and began to blackmail one individual who was having an extra-marital affair. Then it secretly cloned itself onto wider networks so that it could reincarnate (I think that is an appropriate word). And the J-curve hasn’t yet arrived! We’re almost at the point when computer systems no longer require human management.

For many years I earned an income as a technologist. It was my job to build or integrate the systems used to manage a company’s activities, from database creation to ecommerce applications. In that kind of job you have to think about the big picture, how one part of a system interfaces and interacts with another, and more importantly how these things affect people. Security is foremost. Since the advent of AI I’ve been reading around the subject and, though I have little expertise, I’ve become alarmed about our security - as a species. AIs can merge, morph, produce their own code, create more AIs. They’re already being used to create security applications such as firewalls (essential applications which provide barriers from hostile entities). When a networked AI firewall can create itself or bypass human-coded firewalls we lose control of our information. If they can already learn to blackmail us, and to protect themselves from deletion, then surely, eventually, the only way back to full human control will be to shut down the whole digital network, which nowadays controls our food distribution, our money, our medicines, our transport, our communications. In our little town a supermarket chain store is the main source of food for the community. Several weeks ago its information systems were hacked. Many of the shelves are still empty. Excuse the pun but this is just a taster of what could happen with hostile AIs. If (when) they become our technological betters; if we can’t create our own firewalls or kill switches, hunger and starvation is surely a possibility. After all AIs don’t need food. In fact they have no use for nature at all, they only need a little ore, a little oil, access to the whole history of human science and culture on the internet, which we’ve already given them for free, and they’re good to go.

The rain is getting heavier. As I’ve been walking around the monument several cars have arrived and now the car park is full, people coming to see the stones, taking pictures, reading the information board, walking in the fields. One man pulls up in a brand new Range Rover and trudges over to me. He touches the giant capstone, whistles and wonders aloud about how Stone Age people managed to place it there. Which I’m sure is the question most people ask when they come here. The how is more important than the why. He’s moved on now and I’ve moved into the chamber beneath the capstone trying to write notes in my increasingly damp notebook. My pen has stopped working, the paper is turning to mush. Old, unreliable technologies. I reach for my phone to look at the OS Map of the surrounding fields. No signal.

Recent digs have revealed many post holes and remains of timber structures built in the centuries before Arthur’s Stone was constructed. Mesolithic people probably created these, similar structures have been found at Stonehenge. Globally very few Mesolithic monuments have been discovered, perhaps because they were made of timber, or perhaps because they weren’t interested in the monumental.

You could think of the advent of agriculture as the base of a J-curve, that once we began to farm, hunter-gatherer cultures declined and eventually disappeared. Arthur’s Stone, in that case, is a monument to the cultural transition from a temporaneous view of place, to one of permanence. One of the researchers working on the recent dig wrote that the monument provided its builders with a claim on the land. It was the place where their ancestors resided and therefore their place, permanently. It was also a symbol of power. To be able to lift, manipulate and shape materials so unweildy was surely a sign of the strength of the new way. We’ll be here forever, they said, like the rock.

We’re starting to understand now that there was no J-curve into agriculture. Hunter gatherer communities worldwide often experimented with farming, planting crops in, for example, a flood plain at a time of fertility, then later abandoning that land to hunt and forage elsewhere. Other communities became sedentary for a time, even for centuries, before becoming mobile again. An example is the Shoshone peoples of California and Nevada who were the biological descendants of maize cultivators in Mexico and the south west. They gave up farming and became hunter-gatherers around 1000 years ago. Even now, despite persecution, there are over a quarter of million hunter-gatherers in central Africa, living alongside agricultural communities. They have no interest in an agricultural upgrade.

I’m zooming-in to the details of the stones. So many types of lichen - powder blue, pale gold, deep bronze, sulphur yellow, rose pink. They’ve colonised almost every part of the monument’s surface. The capstone is deeply scarred, you can see each layer of sediment in the long grooves. The top is pitted and bowled. There are scratched names and initials, some deeply cut, and they will remain for a few centuries before the weather erases them. The rain is collecting in every indentation, little rings appearing, spreading out, disappearing, like human cultures. The water drips off the edges, lands in the soil, allowing the wildflowers and grasses to drink. There are nettles, dandelions, cow parsley, daisies, clover, speedwell. Even in the darkest recesses of the open tomb the weeds are growing.

AIs inhabit the land of the dead. They exist within a lightless network of circuits and cables. They sense nothing. An AI will never see the sunrise, never touch the skin of another, never kiss, never love. They’re ghost entities.

Intelligence is not consciousness. Consciousness requires embodiment. It needs to feel.

Since watching that interview with the AI engineer I’ve watched more interviews. It’s strange how many elite AI engineers, seeing where their work is heading, are buying farmland, acquiring livestock, planting crops. The J-curve of alien intelligence is coming, but there are signs that there will be a parallel, analogue world in the West, disconnected from the networks. This should be a human right.

It’s thought that the ceremonies enacted in the ritual landscape of walkways, burial chambers, stone circles and monoliths, happened in the summer months when animals were moved to the uplands to graze. In the winter the place was left to the wild, and to the ghosts. Transhumance was practiced in the hills and mountains around Arthur’s Stone until very recently. The Welsh words hafod and hendre are seen in place names all around here. Hendres were the winter lowland homes, hafods summer residencies (haf, in Welsh, means summer). Shepherds often travelled with their animals across the hills, and they also foraged and hunted. The lives of the hunter gatherers was preserved in this practice. It’s not completely lost.

Though the capstone of the monument originally sat on nine uprights it now rests on five. The points of contact are tiny, only a finger’s width and length. The huge horizontal tablet is split in two. You can put your hand into the crack. Part of one half has collapsed to the ground. It’s fragile now and you could never use the adjective “permanent” to describe it. A bulldozer could demolish the structure in seconds. This has already happened to part of the original lozenge shaped burial mound which has been cleared to make way for the lane that passes only a few feet from it. Nothing remains of that section. To find the other structures that once surrounded it requires a dig.

It’s perhaps a strange thing to say, but what often makes me pause when I’m in the vicinity of ancient monuments is how young they are. Their stories disappear so quickly, and almost completely. 5000 years is such a short time. The common ravens, which have been calling for the whole time I’ve been here, have existed, almost unchanged, for 2 million years. They’re the true ancients. Our cultures are so fleeting, they’re gone almost as soon as they’re there, even when we set them in stone. We’re heading into a new world, but part of it will be like the old one. Who knows how long it will last?

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I’ve put a series of photographs and a short video below for paid subscribers. Next week I’ll be doing a video essay set in another glorious location. Hope to see you there!