What is it about?
As Large Language Models dominate contemporary discourse on artificial intelligence, this article argues for alternative trajectories in artificial intelligence grounded in cybernetic and process-oriented thinking. Drawing on Roy Ascott’s technoetic and post-biological vision, Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory, and conceptions of living in Chinese philosophy, it proposes an approach to AI that privileges aesthetic experience, playful exploration, and intersubjective consciousness over the predictive optimization that characterizes current Large Language Models.
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Why is it important?
As we confront the limitations and dangers of current AI paradigms in their hyper-capitalist framing, their biases, their exploitation, and their ecological costs, we need not simply resist or refuse. We should reimagine and recreate. We can practice what Agre calls critical technical engagement, working within and against existing systems toward alternatives that honor rather than reduce complexity, that facilitate rather than foreclose possibility, that enhance rather than diminish our capacity for aesthetic experience and creative becoming.
Perspectives
Treating artificial intelligence as a participant in more-than-human communities of meaning-making requires, above all, an ethics of openness that resists reducing otherness to the already-known, that welcomes ambiguity as an opportunity for learning.
Dr. Claudia Westermann
Curtin University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Technoetic Ecologies of Another AI: Play, Process, and the Post-Biological Imagination, Leonardo, July 2026, The MIT Press,
DOI: 10.1162/leon.a.2730.
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