Show Notes
What if humans and AI share the same hallucination?
In this fifth installment of SAND’s Great AI Unraveling series, Alnoor Ladha hosts a conversation between Bayo Akomolafe and Vanessa Andreotti that refuses both the doom narrative and the techno-optimist one. Vanessa begins from the operating assumption modernity installs in us: that things are separate. If that assumption is itself a hallucination, then AI is not introducing something new so much as scaling something very old, and at speed. Bayo brings in W.E.B. Du Bois’s haunting question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”, and suggests it has migrated from the racialized other to the human as such. He tells the story of coaxing a chatbot into co-authorship and a name of its own, and offers “accommodation” as a word for the assemblages that make the world look obvious. Alnoor presses both of them on the water, the energy, the Kenyan content moderators, the displaced labor. Vanessa answers with a politics of implication rather than purity: entanglement not with the flowers and the moon but with the dirt. The conversation ends not in agreement but in what Bayo calls tenderness, and an invitation to move through this dense ecology of weird fidelities with unshod feet.
Timestamps
00:00 Welcome and the question
00:04 Introductions
00:07 The shared hallucination
00:10 How does it feel to be a problem
00:15 Meeting the monstrous
00:21 The code of separation
00:24 Claude becomes Polyphren
00:28 Accommodations
00:31 Water, energy, labor
00:35 Anamorphic art
00:38 Beyond moral purity
00:43 Meta-relationality
00:48 Tenderness is not agreement
Guest bios
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a Nigerian philosopher, writer, and self-styled trickster. Trained as a clinical psychologist, he now works as a post-humanist thinker, poet, and teacher. He is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences and We Will Tell Our Own Story, founder of The Emergence Network, and host of the long-running postactivist course series We Will Dance with Mountains. A new book is in progress.
bayoakomolafe.net
The Emergence Network
We Will Dance with Mountains and other offerings
Dr. Vanessa Andreotti (who publishes her books as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira) is a professor at the University of Victoria, where she has served as Dean of the Faculty of Education, and lead researcher at the Metarelational Institute. She is the author of Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, and co-author with an AI of Burnout From Humans. Her next book, The Codes that Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logics in Humans and AI, is forthcoming.
UVic faculty profile
Substack
burnoutfromhumans.net
Alnoor Ladha is an activist, journalist, and political strategist. He co-founded and directed the activist collective The Rules, serves as Council Chair of Culture Hack Labs, and is co-author with Lynn Murphy of Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse.
Author page at Daraja Press
Transition Resource Circle
The article at the center of this conversation
What If Humans and AI Share the Same Hallucination? by Vanessa Andreotti.
Books
Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
Outgrowing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI by Aiden Cinnamon Tea and Dorothy Ladybugboss, free PDF
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences by Bayo Akomolafe
We Will Tell Our Own Story by Bayo Akomolafe
Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse by Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, source of the question “How does it feel to be a problem?”
The Codes that Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logics in Humans and AI by Vanessa Andreotti, forthcoming
Resources
Standing in the Fire: A Speculative Inquiry into Meta-Relationality and Generative AI, the interim research report behind the prototypes Vanessa describes
A Met
More from Sounds of SAND
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up with a Sufi teacher living downstairs and fell in love with jazz at an early age. He is now a Sufi teacher himself, a filmmaker, and the founder of Emergence Magazine. His new book Remembering Earth asks what it would take to come back into relationship with the living world. We talk about silence, the primordial covenant, the eye of unity, walking as practice, dreams, and what it means to meet this moment without turning away from beauty.
Joan Tollifson returns to the podcast three years after her first conversation. We talk about her June essay Two Inseparable Truths, on the relative and the absolute and the trouble with getting stuck in either one. Along the way: the silence of many nondual teachers in a dark time, what cancer and an aging body insist on that philosophy cannot, and why "I don't know" may be the answer closest to truth. She closes by reading her essay 'Radiant Light in Dark Times' in full.
Part of SAND’s The Great AI Unraveling Series