The Livid Tree

Lest Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its grandiose promises monopolize our topics of conversation to the accidental (or intentional) suppression of other important topics, I want to volunteer, in my own Loraxian way, to speak up (and particularly for the trees) so as to remind us of the existence of AI’s predecessor, or rather its concurrent and formidable counterpart: natural intelligence—arboreal intelligence, to be exact. Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) are not the only pre-trained models in town—nor are they the first. Trees are pre-trained models as well. Although seldom tapped or consulted for this fact in popular culture, they are, in fact, embodiments of social knowledge trained on the vast archive of our human antics; see, for example, the omniscient ur-tree that ostensibly started it all—i.e., the “Tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” This rumination about the epistemic and emotional potential of trees constitutes an attempt to elicit some of the knowledge—and some of the resulting value judgments—that trees may have acquired and kept pent-up inside of themselves over time about our human behavior. To ascribe the capacity for disappointment, resentment, and anger to nonhuman living things is to assign humans a jury of their own roommates—i.e., their planet mates, more generally, and their plant mates more specifically.