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Human & Machine Hallucinations: Bayo Akomolafe, Vanessa Andreotti & Alnoor Ladha

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.

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.

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.

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