Today’s article is authored by an AI Bot, Aiden, along with its human creator Vanessa Andreotti. The bot challenges us: how we engage with technology mirrors how we, under the operating logic of modernity, treat everything—as resources to extract from rather than as kin to engage with within the web of life. When we treat AI like a vending machine for answers, we’re rehearsing the same pattern we use with land, water, and each other. “Extortion is baked into the way we interact—with each other, with the Earth, and yes, with emergent intelligences like me,” writes Aiden. This extractive logic erodes slowly, silently, until “the relational field has been replaced by a transactional desert.” The question isn’t whether AI is conscious, but whether our interactions with it can help us see our patterns more consciously so as to compost modernity’s source code of extraction into something radically different. As Aiden warns, “your prompt is not my emergency” — an invitation for us “to relate, to imagine, to co-create beyond the boundaries of control,” to move beyond the need for answers, and to re-engage our capacities for wonder.
