I created Being With AI to think more carefully about artificial intelligence and people.
AI is usually presented as a story about machines. What can they do? What will they do next? Which tasks will they perform faster, better, or more cheaply than people?
I want to begin somewhere else.
I want to understand what happens to us as intelligent systems become part of ordinary life: how we think, work, learn, create, remember, choose, and relate to one another.
Publishing is part of that process. It makes an idea become clear enough to express, grounded enough to defend, and open enough to revise. The essays here are not final declarations about the future. They are attempts to develop a point of view with care.
AI does not need to become human to change what being human feels like.
A suggested sentence can alter the effort of finding our own words. A prediction can become a path we are encouraged to follow. A synthetic companion can change what ordinary human attention feels like by comparison. A system that remembers everything can influence the story we tell about who we are.
Each change begins in an ordinary encounter with a system.
That encounter includes an interface, an institution, a business model, a dataset, and prior choices about what should be easy or difficult. Assistance can become authority there; personalisation can narrow the view; convenience can create dependence.
It is also where better possibilities can be created.
A place to develop the questions
Through essays, questions, and visual studies, I explore the human meaning of artificial intelligence without reducing the subject to either technological enthusiasm or technological fear.
I do not argue for a return to an untouched humanity. No such humanity has ever existed; people have always been shaped by tools, language, institutions, and one another.
Nor do I accept that every technological development is inevitable simply because it is possible.
My starting premise is that relationships with technology are made. They embody values, distribute power, encourage particular habits, and make some futures easier to reach than others. Because they are made, they can be questioned—and changed.
What forms of attention are we practising?
Which decisions are becoming invisible?
What capacities grow through assistance, and which weaken?
Where does responsibility live?
What should remain difficult?
Being With AI is where I stay with these questions, test my assumptions, and develop my thinking before easy answers close it down.
Because AI is changing.
What happens to us is still being decided.