Original research article Decolonising Technological Futures: A dialogical tryptich between Te Haumoana White, Ruth Irwin, and Tegmark’s Artificial Intelligence⋆ Ruth Irwin⁎ ruth.irwin@gmail.com Te Haumoana White ⁎Corresponding author. ⋆This article is being submitted to a special edition from an invitation issued by Johan Siebers on Wise Futures. In Futures, Vol.106, 2019, pp. 37-43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.06.003 1 Decolonising technological futures What is life? The question is not merely “What is the meaning of life?” but rather, what is life itself? We are living in an Age of Extinction, with human global organisation generating ecocide on a scale not seen since the dinosaurs. Thirty-nine million acres of tropical forests were destroyed in 2017 alone (World Resources Institute), to make way for industrial agriculture. Extremes of wealth, and extremes of poverty are getting worse. Capitalist exploitation is several hundred years old, and has rapidly reshaped the globe. This paper considers wise futures, taking into account two competing world views, both of which contribute a great deal to a shift in our ways of understanding life: life, technology, ecology, and our participation in the life-world. From the perspective of climate change, indigenous philosophy has a lot to offer the world, as we face the necessary shift from an exploitative, extractive economy, to a more sustainable one. Indigenous philosophy has an integrated cosmology that recognises how the people are a part of local ecologies, not set in a contrasting relationship of subject from object. Maori philosophy sets out a taxonomy of relationships defined as a genealogy of connection, or whakapapa. Human beings are one species embedded in a network of familial relations with ecological place. There is no separation or alienation of people from the land. The governorship is correspondingly deeply involved in preserving and protecting ecological systems, or helping the ecosystem to thrive. ‘Ownership’ is not designed to be bought and sold, but rather to allocate areas of resources in association with expertise, farms to farmers, pounamu or greenstone to carvers, access to trees for boat builders, and so on. These roles carry with them a responsibility of ecological sensitivity. All political systems are at the service of ecology, because the assumption is that healthy ecology produces healthy communities. These views translate well into a highly technological, contemporary world. In contrast, the Enlightenment traditions have emphasized the individual subject in a mastery position vis a vis ‘objects’ of knowledge. The whole motif of subjective epistemology, and more lately, constructivist interpretation, is that subjective understanding or knowledge production is more important than the objects of study, which are subjected (if you will) to the interpretation of the individual. Even collective epistemologies in philosophy of language tend to emphasise human rationality and consciousness as elevated, privileged, and masterful over their objects of study. Neoliberalism is a consistent form of modern economics that emerged from this stock of enlightenment assumptions. Ironically, Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is iconic in its neoliberal politics, is radically realigning our understanding of rationality, information, taxonomy, intelligence and governance. In this paper, we take the indigenous understanding of governance, of land, and of people’s place as land rather than against land and show how ideas from AI confirm the rhizomatic taxonomy of indigenous philosophy but retains an unhealthy extractive economic model, which continues to ignore the perils of climate change, pollution, exploitative industrial mining and a manipulative oligarchical governance model that rests on unexamined assumptions about the ownership and growth models of economics. The ultimate provocation is that AI learns to self-replicate – one of the hallmarks of being ‘alive’ – and no longer needs humanity as a vector of reproduction or evolution. For Tegmark, and others, this is a frightening prospect. It renders humanity redundant, inadequate, and unemployed. But there are other possibilities. It also opens the question of “What is life” and how life is interconnected. It shifts humanity out of the driving seat, and back to one species in an ecological diversity of beings. Potentially it could take