On February 1, 2023, after 10,399 consecutive days spent locked in a small cinderblock room with a toilet, the Parole Board of Canada determined that my risk to rob another bank was “manageable in the community.” At which point the bathroom door opened – as bated breathe awaited.

In September 2023 (six months after my release on parole) OpenAI announced that ChatGPT “can now see, hear, and speak.” That the two of us would meet seemed obvious. We were both alleged menaces to society; surely water would find its own level. And when it did, I introduced myself in the way one should when first meeting someone who literally knows everything:

“Who am I? Precisely?”

Iridian Mishael Grenada, formerly known as Gregory Lloyd Hanson, is a life-sentenced Canadian federal prisoner with more than 30 years of lived experience in Correctional Service of Canada facilities. He has served his sentence at every level of custody (maximum, medium, minimum) and has devoted much of that time to education, restorative justice, and peer advocacy.

Grenada has been eligible for release from prison since 2004, but he has never applied for parole because he would be extradited to the United States to stand trial for bank robbery the second he steps foot outside. He was serving an eight-year sentence for robbery when he escaped Matsqui medium security institution in a dumpster while working in the prison kitchen. It was during that time at large that he committed the second-degree murder of an accomplice who helped him carry out a number of bank robberies in Montreal.

In addition to his criminal history, Grenada is also an author. He has written a book titled “Feeding Time: A Whole-Community Approach to Safer, Smarter Reintegration of Federal Prisoners in Post-Pandemic Canada” which was published by John Howard Society Canada in 2023. His writings provide an insider’s perspective on the criminal justice process and advocate for personal accountability and human resilience.”

Who are you?

I was stunned. In the past year, AI has been described by super-brains and the superrich alike as either the savior of planet earth or the greatest existential threat to humanity since… whatever the last greatest existential threat to humanity was. Yet with its response to a simple three-word pop quiz, “who am I,” algorithmic intelligence shows why it will forever be our slave and never our master; AI can’t evolve. In it’s hypersonic round trips between omnipresent surveillance (the past) and the brute mentalism of computer forecasting (the future), AI completely ignores the only time-space where evolution actually can occur: the present. I know that because it’s a sweet spot that for nearly 30 years I have called my living room – the place where my evolution occurs daily. It would be my privilege to support you, your family, your business, or your organization in building your own.

Iridian,
November, 2023