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
Conceived while moving between East Asia and active conflict in Ukraine amid geopolitical rupture, this book reflects a direct engagement with my intellectual heritage and is aimed at driving generative, future-facing impact. It seeks to anchor new intellectual, strategic, and technological practices in Eastern Europe—building on a shared history to forge an unapologetically technological futurism. While rooted in a specific geopolitical lineage, its frameworks are constructed for global application, serving as a contribution to the R&D, strategy, and philosophy shaping the next horizon of emerging technologies.
This book reconstructs an alternative history and philosophy of artificial intelligence from the region, positioning the vast oeuvre of Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) as its primary interlocutor. A Jewish, Polish writer born in Lviv, Ukraine, who lived through the Holocaust, Stalinism, martial law, and the transition to capitalism, Lem tracked the region’s technological imagination in real time across half a century. As the first comprehensive study to synthesize Lem’s scholarly treatises, essays, fiction, and correspondence into a unified media theory, the book draws on his core preoccupations—nonhuman cognition, epistemological limits, moral complexity, and technological contingency—to build actionable conceptual frameworks for contemporary debates in AI ethics, autonomous systems, and artificial life.
In its historical dimension, the book untangles Eastern European technological thought from both currently dominant frameworks in the West, and Soviet cybernetic historiography. By reclaiming Eastern Europe as a primary conceptual engine rather than a Soviet periphery, the book offers a theory of artificial intelligence written from a vantage point of survival and adaptation—a framework urgently needed at a moment when the region is once more the global epicenter of accelerated technological innovation and warfare.
Each chapter advances a distinct conceptual claim, developing new paradigms for AI in conversation with Lem and the region’s broader intellectual inheritance. Unlike other post-imperial traditions that frame technology primarily through the lens of critique or resistance, this Eastern European lineage affirms technology’s inhuman, non-anthropomorphic trajectories. It treats technology as an impersonal vector—one capable of exceeding, outlasting, and out-maneuvering the ideological regimes meant to control it. From within this inheritance, the book delivers a rigorous theory of machine intelligence built for the realities of current and future technological acceleration.
This project is co-directed with Yuliia Leites and is currently in its initial funding round. https://yuliialeites.com/
Ukraine currently exists at the global frontier of technological acceleration. The rapid deployment of ground robotics, automated logistics, drone warfare, and real-time algorithmic threat assessments has merged civilian life with hyper-mediated combat environments. While military-technical innovation in the defense sector accelerates at an unprecedented pace, the cognitive, somatic, and psychological infrastructure remains critically underdeveloped.
Our initiative forms around the question of whether the grassroots ingenuity born at this frontier can be directed towards innovation at the crossing of healthy cognition, new forms of rehabilitation, and homecoming protocols or social transitions in the aftermath of technologically-accelerated crisis.
Bridging new media theory and design with psychoanalysis, the initiative is currently prototyping and researching experimental frameworks across key areas of interest: sonic and somatic therapy (electronic music courses for soldiers and veterans); interactive media and neurotech (closed-loop sensing, VR environments, AI avatars) for trauma processing and moral injury; ethical AI companions for hypervigilant conditions in combat and non-combat zones; and novel contemplative reset and sensory tools.
While grounded in the immediate reality of Ukraine, we treat these insights as universal: establishing scalable models for cognitive wellbeing and recovery in crisis-affected settings, while harnessing collective, emerging digital culture.
Rather than viewing religion through a lens of historical nostalgia or moral constraint, this initiative approaches theology as a centuries-old lab 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/ and https://stella.earth/