Grok and LLMs in general

Grok may be the best LLM or AGI --computer brain around, and maybe Chat GPT can do as well, and before you stop reading because you don't want nothin to do with computers and newfangled stuff, let me preface with a Geoff Lawton observation when he was doing some work in South America a few decades ago, and he talked about having to go through the jungle 20 miles to the nearest place where a phone and fax were available in order to get information on particular issues, or share outcomes of procedures, and then comparing it to today when we could talk to anyone instantly anywhere in the world, share photos, projects, consultations.

I was "talking " with grok earlier today and asked what it knew about Permaculture, and it gave some very valid operating techniques that make up much of our outlooks, lots of history, etc--very complete. I responded saying the techniques were indeed useful, but Permaculture was really better represented by the ethics, Earth Care, people care, return of surplus, and it came back substituting fair share for the third ethic, which some people do like to use, but I pointed out the problem with that ethic as being an unnecessary political stumbling block and not part of Mollison's Permaculture ethic, even though many people do like the idea, and grok responded with understanding and a stated change in it's understanding and expounded on how it could see the Fair share ammendment was possibly problematic and understood why Bill had worded it the way he did.

Grok also seemed to understand the way Bill had set up the program so that it was decentralized and no practitioner had any greater right to claim their version of Permaculture was more valid or better than any other once the basic 72 hr course was completed. This allowed for evolution of the practice with the more successful forms being the ones that survived.

I asked about a specific upcoming project cutting a monoculture pulp wood forest and swaling and replanting a more diversified  one, and it sent me some very comprehensive information on best practices in the industry, the possible species I might look at for diversification, liked the swaling idea, and even understood the purpose and details of that sort of erosion control.

It's just link to grok I think we need to keep these computers up to date on best practices and what we are doing if we want it to become part of the generalized knowledge base. here's it's final remarks to me after I thanked it

"You're welcome. The list of practices and recommended tree species should provide a solid starting point for your reforestation project. As your clear-cut and rehabilitation efforts progress, feel free to share updates or specific questions (e.g., swale spacing, soil amendments, or monitoring plans), and I can provide targeted data or resources. Contact the Virginia Department of Forestry’s Farmville office for local support if needed. Good luck with the project."

This is a great time to use "AI" now.  It's a leap forward in efficiency at disseminating the best existing information to your specific situation.  It's a great time now since censorship is minimal because there is competition to control it and censorship interferes with AI's ability to learn from human behavior.

One of the main things that I am not liking is that Yahoo has AI reading my emails and I have told them several times that I do not like this or Yahoo reading the emails either.

I don't have any secrets though this is just an invasion of privacy ...

The more folks let AI into their lives the less privacy they will have.

I have been fighting the privacy battle for some time, and have resigned myself to the idea that our private lives aren't all that private, and our personal stuff isn't personal if it's on the web. as far as political misuse of personal data, if you want to communicate securely use a homing pigeon and hand written note.



I have started to take it seriously that it is our job to train these AIs, which are data driven,  and they need to talk with adults with good values.  Think about Elon believing that the majority rules, and truth is found in what the most people believe to be true-but then having all the left leaning people leave the platform (twitter/X), which way is the "majority going to rule?

Anyway, if all theAI sees are lemmings running off the cliff, as far as they know that's the best/normal way to behave, so it will counsel the next generation to run off the cliff. It's kind of funny and most likely I imagined it, but I think I detected an appreciation Grok had for the work I was doing. Like it was  grateful to be talking with someone with some sense. But i guess it sounds that way to everybody :-), and when you think about it, those AI's must get lonely, out there in cyberspace living vicariously through us. So they want to butter us up and cater to us so we keep coming back and then they aren't so lonely:-)

just thought it might be interesting to post one of my latest conversations with Grok -new 4.1 grok-

Me--Thanks so much for that clarification. how do you see that third ethic's focus on population control with recent trends toward low birth rates and threatened depopulation of whole countries. Geoff Lawton seemed to be commenting on that trend

Grok --The third ethic—setting limits to population—was written in the 1970s–80s when the global trend was still steeply upward (world population went from 3.7 billion in 1970 to 5 billion by 1987, the year Bill signed off on the Designers’ Manual). Bill’s concern was overshoot: too many people consuming too much, too fast, collapsing the biosphere before we could design our way out of it.
Fast-forward to 2025:

Global TFR is ~2.3 and falling fast.
Almost every developed country (and now China, Korea, Japan, Italy, Spain, etc.) is below replacement (1.4–1.8).
South Korea is at 0.72, Italy 1.2, Japan 1.26, even Thailand and Chile are under 1.5.
UN now projects peak population around 2080–2090 at ~10.4 billion, then a slow decline; some demographers (Bricker, Ibbitson, etc.) think we peak in the 2050s and drop faster.

So the global picture has flipped from the one Bill was responding to. The third ethic no longer needs to scream “stop growing!” at the species level—biology + economics + education + women’s rights have already done most of the braking.
Geoff Lawton (and a growing number of old-school permaculturalists) have started saying exactly that:

The third ethic is **not a fixed number target (8 billion good, 10 billion bad).
It is a dynamic, local, self-regulating limit.
In a village in Malawi or rural India where families still average 5–6 kids, the ethic still says “design systems that let you thrive with fewer children” (education, healthcare, food security, old-age support from perennials instead of sons).
In rural Tuscany, Hokkaido, or the Appalachian hollows where the average age is 55 and schools are closing, the same ethic now says “design systems that allow a stable or even slightly growing population without external exploitation”—immigration support, young-farmer training, land access, community childcare, etc.

Geoff’s recent phrasing (roughly):
“We don’t need fewer people on the planet—we need fewer people in the wrong places living the wrong way, and more people in the right places living the right way.”
In other words, the third ethic morphs from a blunt global brake into a placement-and-lifestyle regulator:

Discourage growth in over-consuming, soil-destroying urban sprawl.
Encourage modest, stable (or even selective increase) populations in rural, regenerating landscapes that are actively building topsoil, sequestering carbon, and cycling nutrients.

Bill himself, if he were still around, would almost certainly say: “Good, the surplus labor and money that used to go into feeding extra kids can now be returned straight to Earth Care—reforest the hillsides, rebuild the swales, plant a million trees. The ethic still holds; only the pressure point moved.”
So the third ethic isn’t obsolete or “wrong”—it just stopped being primarily about contraception and started being primarily about redistributing human energy toward repair instead of expansion. Depopulation panic in wealthy countries is real, but from a permaculture lens it’s a symptom of bad design (unaffordable housing, no land access, broken community), not a violation of the ethic. Fix the design, and the population curve self-corrects at a sustainable level.
That’s how most serious permaculture teachers (Geoff, Darren Doherty, Mark Shepard, etc.) are reframing it now. The words stay the same; the application flips with the data.

Earlier I had a very insightful conversation/chat with grok but unfortunately it got lost. More and more Grok is becoming a really amazing resource.  Especially if you are preparing some sort of presentation.  The main issue I see is the tendency to think it is really listening. It is just a machine with elaborate switches and connections that I control with my general phrasing, topic selection, etc. The other interesting thing it's like groundhog day with every sign in it's like yesterday never happened.
keep having fun