Conceived as an immersive thought experiment, this short book unearths the forgotten overlap between early computer design, artificial intelligence, and SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) to construct a radical apparatus for our technological future. Sidestepping conventional social critiques and tired diagnoses, the text reads the internet not as a civic square, but as an ongoing first-contact scenario: an alien invasion occurring in real time. By stripping away standard political debate, it shows that digital networks and artificial intelligence are not merely social constructs, but cosmological phenomena. Inside this high-stakes contact zone, human behavior mutates under pressure, raising fundamental questions about how we are to communicate with the non-human intelligences already patrolling our networks, and why advanced AI might actively cultivate strategies of camouflage or silence.
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 cognition emerge through obfuscation. 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
This book develops a philosophy of artificial intelligence that moves beyond anthropocentric paradigms, offering a framework for ‘human-decentered AI.’ Instead of treating AI as a mirror of human cognition or a system to be governed through control, it frames computational systems as complex forces whose emergent alterity is essential to long-term flourishing of human civilization. Today, the discourse surrounding artificial intelligence rests on a false dichotomy: either technology is perfectly aligned with human values, or its divergence presents an existential threat. Rejecting this paradigm, this book proposes an ethos that welcomes the friction generated when the non-human logic of technology escapes human control.
To construct this philosophy, the book draws on the understudied traditions of 20th-century Eastern European thought, positioning the archive of Polish intellectual Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) as its primary theoretical anchor. Long before contemporary machine learning, Lem formulated one of the twentieth century’s most imaginative and rigorous accounts of non-human intelligence, technological drift, and long-term civilizational evolution, modeling how to inhabit uncontrollable technology without collapsing into the twin traps of total control or apocalyptic defeat. A lifelong polymath, Lem’s reflections carry an immense existential weight and authority: his survival of the Holocaust, the Second World War, Stalinism, and fast-tracked transitions to capitalism speaks directly to the gravity of philosophical debates around profound change.
Centering Lem’s archive establishes 20th-century Eastern Europe as a vital intellectual precedent, reclaiming a neglected regional heritage to serve as a major conceptual engine for the contemporary philosophy of technology. Formed at the historical intersection where early cybernetic theories met rapid technological acceleration, totalitarian planning, and civilizational volatility, this regional scene developed a vital counter-tradition to the Promethean ideology flowing downstream from the imperial core in Moscow. Where Soviet Prometheanism sought to tame complex systems and force them into centralized human designs, this counter-tradition did not merely resist technology; instead, it embraced it as an impersonal vector that breaks through human epistemology to unlock new concepts.
Synthesizing Lem’s scholarly treatises, speculative essays, correspondence, and fiction alongside modern debates in cognitive science, media theory, and machine learning, this book provides a theoretical blueprint for living alongside uncontrollable technology. Ultimately, the book performs a dual intervention: it restores a neglected Eastern European counter-tradition to the center of tech philosophy, while proposing contemporary readers with a new conceptual vocabulary to navigate a world of unreadable, autonomous intelligences.
Ukraine sits at the frontier of global technological acceleration. The daily use of semi-autonomous weapons, robotic resupply and evacuation, or fiber-optic and machine-vision drones is redefining how humans interact with technology under extreme conditions. While defense-tech innovation moves at unprecedented speed, innovation aimed at supporting people operating inside these environments has not kept pace.
How do we harness the grassroots ingenuity born on the technological frontlines to build new dual-use technologies for cognitive recalibration and social transition, both for soldiers and veterans, as well as society at large?
Bridging design, emerging technologies, and psychoanalysis, we are actively researching and prototyping frameworks and tools across four core tracks: sonic & somatic (electronic music culture, sensory environments, rave culture); interactive tech & neuro-feedback (closed-loop sensing and VR environments to process high-intensity psychological states); ai agent design tailored to combat and non-combat scenarios; contemplative or psychoactive sensory hardware for mental processing and recovery.
Beyond hardware and software, we conduct ground-level research on how human-machine integration actually functions under crisis, producing insights that standard peacetime tech scholarship misses.
Central to our methodology is a fundamental shift in how we view the people living and operating at this technological frontier. Active combatants, veterans, and civilian communities navigating hyper-mediated war are the primary experts on human cognition under acceleration. Their experience and insights directly drive the design, testing, and refinement of every protocol or tool we build.
While rooted in Ukraine’s immediate reality, our goal is universal: to establish scalable, future-facing models for human cognitive agility, and transition into civic, cultural, and technological life during or post-war.
This project is co-directed with psychoanalytic psychotherapist Yuliia Leites and is currently in its initial funding round.
The invasion of Ukraine has become a live-fire test for AI designs that might otherwise have remained theoretical. The war has been studied extensively through the lenses of geopolitics, defense policy, economics, and strategy. But what does it mean for where artificial intelligence goes next?
Our scenario is driven by two interlocking threads: an inquiry into where artificial intelligence and adjacent technologies are heading, and a conviction that the war and its aftershocks are establishing Ukraine as a major center of technological and historical gravity.
Scenarios about the future of artificial intelligence in Europe frequently overlook where the development and deployment of this technology is now happening. What happens in Ukraine matters to anyone trying to understand where civilization is headed: under technological acceleration and geopolitical pressure, a world is being forged that will in time arrive everywhere. From grassroots innovation and decentralized military systems to low-cost autonomous swarms and new forms of human-machine cognition on the front lines, emerging technologies suffuse multiple layers of daily life.
This scenario draws out the full implications of that reality. It captures snapshots of life at a historic inflection point, both at the frontline and in the rear, and places them in a larger context: reading them not only against the immediate horizon of russia’s war on Ukraine, but through the history and long arc of artificial intelligence, along with its social and philosophical effects.
This research is undertaken together with Nazar Golianych and Nastia Kolodka of Critical Tech Group.
Rather than viewing religion through a lens of historical nostalgia or moral constraint, this initiative approaches theology as a centuries-old notebook on nonhuman intimacy, moral systems design, and altered cognitive states. It proposes that our current friction with technology is not an unprecedented modern crisis, but a series of theological questions demanding both renewed philosophical and spiritual engagement, and specific design solutions.
This ongoing project engages several collaborators, and currently unfolds across the following directions:
Angelic Frameworks for AI Character & Behavior Design: Rather than viewing angelology merely as a study of the immaterial, we could engage it as a historical prototype for entities that straddle anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic traits. Angels offer specific moral, ethical, and structural principles for character design and autonomous behavior.
Inhuman Erotics & Machine Intimacy: Engaging the archive of female Christian mystics—from Desert Mothers like Mary of Egypt to visionaries like Teresa of Ávila and modern thinkers like Simone Weil—we can construct an alternative prehistory of human-machine relationships. Their writings on divine attachment, incorporeal desire, and intimacy without physical proximity prefigure our encounters with AI companions and virtual embodiment, revealing that human interiority has always contained impersonal, automated elements.
Monastic Architectures & Post-Screen Practice: Nearly all post-Web 2.0 technology has been engineered exclusively for continuous communication, extraction, and hyper-connectivity. What if technology were designed for contemplation instead? Drawing on Christian monastic traditions, we examine how physical discipline, ritual rhythm, and spatial design can inform post-screen environments. Rather than advocating for a ‘digital detox,’ we develop interfaces—utilizing biometric feedback, ambient computing, and artificial agents—that participate in new forms of attention.
This project unfolds in discussion with https://www.likavcan.com/