On the path
...and avoiding AI in SLO CO
We spent the weekend at the home of some college friends in Los Osos, hiking, talking, reading1 and generally unplugging. We noshed on local pastries and noodled on guitars on the porch, we explored heron rookeries, coastal trails and the town of Cambria. Like everything for us these days, such weekends take advance planning. I think we figured out a date in January. I’m glad we stuck to our plan! We both relaxed more than we had in some time.
Before I met Mat as an undergrad at UCSC, he had attended culinary school. Everything he makes has that special extra touch. On Sunday night, after a delicious dinner featuring half the vegetables in Mat’s abundant garden, Becca wanted to get back outside. We put our shoes back on and ventured down a neighborhood trail, to a side street and the back entry to Sweet Springs Nature Preserve, a lovely 32 acres of wooded, waterfront trails where I enjoyed co-leading a birding trip at the Morro Bay Bird Fest in January.
Being May, most of the waterfowl were gone for the summer, but the treetops were full of swallows and Acorn Woodpeckers and the bushes busy with California Towhee and Scrub Jay. Some sort of toad was calling from the stream where a few Mallards were dabbling. We stood a while at one of the blinds watching the remnants of the sunset. A few Great Egrets flew by on their way to roost. Just as we were looping back to the main entrance, I noticed something large, land on the top of a dead tree trunk. Once we got our binoculars on it, we saw from the fuzz on its head and around its large eyes, that it was a young Great Horned Owl! Within seconds another young owl flew to the trunk, followed by an adult with some sort of rodent. We watched them feed a bit before the two new fledges started taking short flights to the nearby trees, flapping their wings, and making soft, raspy sounds. Another person in the park stopped to inquire so I shared my binoculars and we all stood, ooohing and ahhing together for several minutes. By that time, the adult owl flew to another nearby treetop, where it set its gaze firmly on us, seeming to both assess our threat and pose one to us. As we left, the adult flew to another tree along our route, as if making sure we were really leaving. It was another little bit of magic to sleep on.
Natural intelligence blows me away in the best way, and the weekend was full of it, from Mat’s bountiful garden to the abundance of new birds hatching and learning to fly. Before we headed up the coast, we visited the Heron Rookery Preserve which was full of Great Blue Heron, Great Egret and Double-Crested Cormorant nests, hatchlings and brooding and incubating adult birds.
At Harmony Headlands, we witnessed another new flyer, a juvenile Northern Harrier, who not so unlike the young owls, made a soft, high-pitched sound as it flew over our heads, its mom not too far away. The projecting/anthropomorphizing part of me imagined it was saying ‘wow, look, I’m flying!’ Because, wow, this bird had gone from hatch to flight in little over a month. In another two to four weeks it would be fully independent.
On Monday morning, we tramped around the woodland, scrub and chaparral of El Moro Elfin Forest, getting yet another vantage of the contours of back Morro Bay, Chumash shell middens and California Quail at our feet, and loads of Cliff Swallow overhead (including one, less-fortunate swallow in the talons of a Cooper’s Hawk, ouch!).
Before we left town altogether, Kwame and I pit-stopped at Morro Rock to check on the Peregrine Falcons who live there. In January, when we visited, I was glad to see the adult falcons preparing for their season atop the storied site. On Monday, we barely needed to leave the car to spot a young falcon on a choice ledge. Within minutes, it took to the sky, making lazy circles and calling occasionally. We never saw an adult, but soon enough, another recent fledge joined the party, testing its wings by making several passes at some nearby gulls.
While we were standing there, a man approached us, expressing his awe at the rock itself, comparing its grandeur to Uluru (or Ayers Rock), in Australia. I wouldn’t know, but Morro Rock is impressive, and was bustling with Western Gulls and Cormorants and White-throated Swifts as well as the young falcons. After he left, a woman came up and wondered if we’d seen any Vaux’s Swifts (we hadn’t). The falcons banked and disappeared behind the rock; behind us, a pair of sea otters did a lazy backstroke toward the harbormouth. A nice coda to a very relaxing, nature-filled weekend.
The weekend was a very welcome palate cleanser to the recurring experiences I’ve had lately of being met by artificial intelligence. In one case, I’d submitted a grant application well before the deadline, after which I expected to hear back, and received a response (a rejection) the very next day, the tone and content of which made it clear it wasn’t a human response. Another time, I wanted to talk to an actual person and got routed to an automaton who couldn’t answer my questions, wouldn’t patch my call through to a human and kept routing the call back to the list of options. I hung up, not a little frustrated and nowhere nearer resolving my issue. Then I went to an arts mixer, one designed to foster community and alliances between working, creative individuals (an excellent idea!) and one of my first conversations was about how someone was using ChatGPT to help them with their grant applications…to make sure they’re ticking all the right boxes.
I imagined two machines talking to one another and assessing whether an application passed or not. I thought of how people were adapting behavior to these machines, learning what hoops to jump through in hopes eventually, their creative idea would be vetted by a human. I thought of keywords and SEO and algorithms and all the bullet-list type social media posts that have been proliferating and I felt my brain start to steam. No doubt, their applications might be progressing further than mine, but at what price?
Price, money, capitalism, there’s the rub. Short term use of these new tools might very well get you the job or grant and pay one’s bills, but the long term cost, not only on one’s imagination but to health? And other animals? Astronomical.
Data centers require more energy than it takes to power some cities2. Data centers eat up land, ousting native species, pollute the air and come with myriad hidden costs.3
“Data centers cost the U.S. about $25 billion in pollution and health costs last year, according to an analysis by Carnegie Mellon economist Nicholas Muller, who analyzed data for about 2,800 data centers operating in the U.S. in 2025.”
“It’s not going anywhere, may as well embrace it,” is a phrase I keep hearing (just now, from a musician on a podcast) which is maddening. Just because something isn’t going away does not mean you need to embrace it. Jeez.
If I have to ‘live with’ AI, I’m going to try to minimize contact, move it to the side, dial down whatever automations my phone and computer updates are defaulting to and take my cues from the world around me. If something actively or passively negates someone or something, which I see AI doing right and left, it’s not for me…and not, in the long-term sense, for anybody.
The new book by Elizabeth Strout The Things We Never Say. It felt a little heavier handed than some of her previous titles, albeit I appreciate that she’s using her platform to address current events… and I still ate it up.
“Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom” in The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
“The $25 Billion Bill: The Hidden Environmental Cost of America’s Data Center Boom” U.S. News