A few weeks ago on her substack “How Not to Use AI,” Abi Awomosu published a massive, fantastic piece,“Don’t Start with Silicon, Start with Soul.”
It’s worth the time to read—she starts with the recent turn in Silicon Valley towards hiring philosophers, interrogating the practice as superficial and extractive, before moving into a larger reflection on intelligence, wholeness, and empire. How the story we are told about how to use this new technology is one of accelerating the project of empire, but if we look closer we find that LLMs have blurred the clean categorical lines of what counts as “real” knowledge, making them more akin to a medium than a maker.
My favorite move she makes is to create new meaning from the acronym LLM: she calls them Large Listening Models. Naturally, I love this. This frame illuminates the reflective pattern-matching nature of these systems, such that what we bring when we sit down at the keyboard to interact with them, the exact ways we have automated our own thinking and living, is deftly reflected back to us.
And if we aren’t aware of how we have been shaped, the ways in which our wants, desires, and orientation towards life have been coopted by systems of extraction, then we may just find ourselves using these machines to get infinitely faster in the wrong direction.
AI enters that world as a fork. It can help you run the inherited script faster – better emails, better calendar, better CV, better optimisation of a life you did not choose. Or it can help you see the script. It can dissolve the categories the institution was built to defend, so that a person can move from philosophy to physics to poetry to ancestry to code to theology to grief in a single sitting – the archive turned back into a commons, the walls between the rooms suddenly optional.
There is so much more in this piece than what I am sharing here—go read it!
