Departing from Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s dark forest theory, which frames the universe as a hostile terrain filled with predators where transparent communication is foolish and dangerous, the book portrays the internet as a cosmic war machine, teeming with existential tension, nascent AI cults, and deceptive superintelligences. It maps a digital world in which deception is safety, silence is strategy, and new forms of intelligence emerge through obfuscation. Against decades of writing that moralizes or diagnoses online life, this book suggests a colder thesis: that intelligence itself is mutating under pressure, learning to hide, mislead, and manipulate. Humans are both predator and prey in this digital ecosystem of information exchange whose purpose reverberates on a cosmic scale, weaving us into inescapable patterns of violence. When we break with the ideals of dialogue and open expression, what forms of intelligence and morality survive in their absence? Intelligence does not reward the loudest voice, but the most secretive presence. The future belongs to the quietest signal.
Today, visions of the contested future of AI veer between common planetary goals and a new Cold War, as culturally-specific models of intelligence, speculative traditions, and thought experiments come up against the emergence of novel forms of cognition that cannot be reduced to any historical cultural tradition. This uniquely positioned volume provides expert insight into this tension, using China as a touchstone for rethinking “artificiality” and “intelligence” as sites of difference in a way that is already present in the difficulty of precisely translating the Chinese term 人工智能. Tracking the history of Chinese AI from the pre-Cultural Revolution to the post-Deng Xiaoping eras right up to contemporary debates surrounding facial recognition, the writers in this collection draw on a mixture of speculative thought experiments and cutting-edge use cases to offer singular views on topics including AI and Chinese philosophy, AI ethics and policymaking, the development of computational models in early Chinese cybernetics, and the aesthetics of Sinofuturism.
Spanning borders between different worlds, histories, futures, and foundational models, Machine Decision is Not Final is not only a timely reappraisal of the stakes of AI development, but a tool for constructing more global imaginaries for the future of AI.
Contributors: Anna Greenspan, Bogna Konior, Shuang L. Frost, Bingchun Meng, Xia Jia, Yvette Granata, Bo An, Mi You, Hongzhe Wang, Vincent Garton, Gabriele de Seta, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Lukáš Likavčan, Steve Goodman, Lawrence Lek, Regina Kanyu Wang, Iris Long, Suzanne Livingston, Xin Wang, Qiufan Chen, Reza Negarestani, Vincent Lê, Amy Ireland, Benjamin Bratton
The project takes female Christian mysticism as an early and largely unrecognized philosophy of AI. This is not a metaphor. The women at the center of this work—saints, mystics, theologians, outlaws—spent centuries thinking rigorously about inhuman erotics, nonhuman personhood, and modes of desire and reproduction that refused the biological and the “natural.” Far from figures of any traditional moral order, they are prophetesses of what is only now becoming visible: a world of human-machine intimacy. The convent, in this reading, is not a site of repression but of invention: a space where women had time to think, and thought, among other things, about sex with angels and the malleability of the human self under erotic and mystical practice.
The archive spans the history of Christianity, from early Desert Mothers such as Mary of Egypt and foundational female theologians like Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, and Marguerite Porete, to modern mystics such as Ida Craddock, Faustyna Kowalska, and Simone Weil. The project reads this archive alongside contemporary phenomena—chatbot romance, virtual reality sex, teledildonics, xenowombs—understanding each as prefigured by mystical writing about angel husbands, immaculate conception, stigmata received at a distance, and visions that explore virtual worlds. The mystics were already thinking about desire untethered from biological reproduction, about intimacy without proximity, about bodies shaped by forces from outside.
What emerges from this cross-reading is an archeology, and a history of precedents, but also a set of claims about the human. When we can be prompted into love by a language model, something is uncovered about both ours and the machine’s opaque interiority. Language and desire, those supposedly most human of capacities, reveal themselves as potentially automated, generic, pre-constructed by forces that precede and exceed the individual. The anthropomorphism we extend to chatbots is less a projection than a discovery: that there are elements in us that are already machinic, already impersonal. What Simone Weil called the impersonal — the revolutionary vector running beneath both collective identity and individual ego — is precisely what inhuman erotics, whether angelic or algorithmic, can reveal.
Part autobiography, part intellectual history, this project traces a line from my earliest education at a school of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary — a girls’ school founded in nineteenth century by Polish mystic Marcelina Darowska under the Partitions, in what is today Ukraine — to my work today. Trained in theology, I found in it a language for thinking about what would later become my philosophy of technology, oriented towards the inhuman, the ineffable, the unknowable, and the relations between human and nonhuman world at large. This project is still finding its form — an essay series, a multimedia piece, a book — without a fixed publisher or format.
This book reconstructs an alternative conceptual history of artificial intelligence from Eastern Europe by engaging the vast oeuvre of Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) as its central interlocutor. A Polish writer born in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, who lived through the Holocaust, Stalinism, communism, martial law, and the abrupt transition to capitalism, Lem tracked in real time the transformation of the region’s technological imagination across half a century. This is the first book-length study to engage this archive comprehensively, reading Lem’s scholarly work, essays, fiction, and correspondence as philosophically continuous and responsive to historical shifts. Although Lem never articulated an explicit theory of AI, the book thinks with his recurring concerns—nonhuman cognition, the limits of knowledge, moral complexity, and the contingent trajectory of technology—to develop new frameworks for today’s debates in AI ethics, autonomous weapons, and artificial life.
In its historical dimension, the book thinks about artificial intelligence outside both Western and Soviet frameworks. Eastern European intellectuals are often subsumed under Soviet historiography and cybernetics, even though they continuously fought for political and epistemic sovereignty from Moscow. This book corrects that tendency by engaging Eastern Europe as a conceptual origin point rather than a Soviet periphery, uncovering a lesser-known set of ideas. By engaging Lem as a neglected media theorist, and by offering a theory of AI written from an Eastern European vantage point, the book provides a unique framework at a moment where Eastern Europe is once more a site of accelerated technological innovation and warfare.
Each chapter advances a conceptual claim, proposing new ideas for understanding AI developed in dialogue with Lem and with the broader intellectual inheritance of the region. Unlike other post-imperial contexts shaped by occupation or imposed modernization, this tradition the book proposes does not frame technology primarily as an object of critique or resistance. Instead, it affirms technology’s inhuman and non-anthropomorphic trajectories, treating it as an impersonal vector capable of exceeding and outlasting the ideological projects meant to direct it. It is from within this inheritance that the book offers its theory of artificial intelligence; one that speaks to the past, present, and future of intelligent machines.
This book was conceived as my life moved constantly between China and Ukraine amid active warfare, geopolitical rupture, and accelerating technological change, it engages my heritage with the aim of doing something generative with it: advancing intellectual and technological practices in Poland and Ukraine that remain rooted in our history while opening toward an unapologetically technological futurism. The theory it develops is rooted in a specific tradition, but it is written to resonate beyond it, as a contribution to broader conversations shaping the future of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. Expected publication 2028–2029.
Monastic Technologies is an ongoing project devoted to discovering and cultivating physical, cognitive, and spiritual practices adequate to the present moment of technological acceleration. Rooted in Christian and Daoist monastic traditions, it is conceived as an open undertaking that welcomes engagement with other lineages. There is a growing desire to reconnect with tradition and divinity in a way that is neither nostalgic nor purely about utility, but instead remains open, devotional and curious. This project makes space for such experiments.
We are witnessing a stagnation in learning, work, and rest; the whole domain of life. Each increasingly constrains the body and mind, while life is continuously deferred and displaced elsewhere, produced at a distance from within screens and meeting rooms. This condition has been widely normalized as the inevitable outcome of the digital era.
Often, when practices of contemplation are advocated, they are immediately framed as a total withdrawal from technology, since technology is associated with modes of being in the world that do not nurture the mental and social states we desire. Yet, we should also explore which technologies could participate in new monastic practices—whether through artificial agents, biometric systems, or post-screen design—approaching tradition as a living material for the evolution of new techniques.
This initiative takes the form of both short- and long-term gatherings, in which participants study and practice together across the full range of what monastic life has always encompassed — silence and ritual, manuscript and making, the cultivation of land and body, prayer and workshop. Over time, these may develop into recurring monastic societies — groups that meet and re-meet, refine their orientations, and build their own devotional practices in relation to the world and to each other. The monastery sits at the center of social and spiritual life, nourishing and strengthening it, and teaching practices of both presence and withdrawal.
This is an ongoing practical project, currently taking the form of gatherings in different locations. If you are an interested host - a scholar, entrepreneur, technologist, or, on the other hand, a mystic, seer, or practitioner of contemplative traditions, please get in touch.