On AI and Alterity as Edge Detection: Instrument, Model & Agent

6 Sept., 2025

Talk for the Future Fragments series, with this iteration during the Noorderlicht Biennial: Machine Entanglements, in Groningen, NL on Saturday Sept 6, 2025 at 15:00.

The potential of AI in both instrumental and philosophical terms hinges on a social, onto-epistemic, and ethical mediation of alterity. I emphasize ‘alterity’ as a general figure today to evoke a proposition to think an Otherness without Othering in view of the cosmological transformations compelled by Planetary recognition. This premise can be outlined as the engagement of difference without subsuming it into familiar taxonomies that structure our relationship to the Real, thus constructing worlds aligned to such frameworks, nor by hierarchizing encounters with difference in subordinating manners. The former attunes to histories of epistemological paradigm shifts (including the reticence to them), and the latter, to histories of inter-human subjugation – both of which scaffold my elaboration of AI that brings these modes into an ecological view. With this approach my hope is to undermine the doom/hype dichotomy associated with narrow discussions of AI, however without side-stepping real-world historical and present-day risks. The discourses of AI, can’t ignore that it’s present-day use not only perform formidable acts of discovery in, say, life-affirming vaccine development, but also include the automation of death, like in genocidal application by the IDF in Gaza with the Lavender and Gospel programs that are life-negating.