In this episode of The Customary Land Podcast, Spike Boydell reflects on a question that is becoming increasingly urgent in the age of artificial intelligence: what happens when machine systems begin to shape not only how we work, but how value itself is understood?
Drawing on Indigenous and customary worldviews across the Pacific and Australia — including vanua, fonua, fanua, whenua, and songlines — this episode argues that some of the most important forms of value are relational, sacred, lived, and non-substitutable. They cannot be reduced to data, market price, or optimisation logic without losing their meaning.
The episode places this question in conversation with the wider concerns explored in recent instalments of the series on mining legislative reform, the IVSC Exposure Draft, and partnership valuation. Together, these conversations point towards a common concern: that customary and Indigenous worlds are too often approached through inherited legal, economic, and technical frames that struggle to recognise value beyond extraction, compensation, and exchange.
This is not simply an episode about AI. It is about the limits of machine reasoning, the integrity of Indigenous knowledge, and the enduring importance of human-centred, place-based ways of knowing in a time increasingly shaped by codification and control.
If machines come to value everything, who will defend what cannot be valued?
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If you would like to receive the current manifesto draft that informs this episode, please email contact@customarylandsolutions.com
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