A new episode of the Pathfinders Podcast is now available wherever you get your podcasts. In the latest episode, we dance with the question: How might we stop role-playing as machines?
In our last Newmoonsletter, we shared reflections on lives lost, mugs broken and repaired, and an invitation to give love one more chance before we collectively break under pressure beyond repair.
Because it does feel like so many of us are close to our breaking point in these End Times. And yet, we talk about our need to recharge as if we were mere batteries in the Matrix. Batteries, running on low, while also being pressured to increase our output with the help of AI companions that need no rest.
“Work happy with Zoom AI Companion” is the message we now have to stare at while waiting for another soul-draining Zoom meeting. “Try the AI calendar that optimizes everyone’s schedules for effortless productivity”, goes another sales pitch in an attempt to convince our exhausted bodies that salvation is just an AI assistant away.
Oddly enough, we have yet to receive offers for AI companions willing to cover our rising costs of living with their magic of effortless productivity. Or AI companions helping us to speak out against injustice. The more machine intelligence we use, the more machine-like we make ourselves, leaving little room for silly human things like grieving, loving, being. How do you find time for those in your optimized calendar?
Aren’t you tired of role-playing as a machine, expected to increase your output every quarter, schedule your existential crisis in between meetings now largely attended by AI notetakers, expected to recharge over the weekend as you watch the world you took for granted crumble?
Throughout our meandering exploration, we talk about how we collectively internalised this industrialised logic, how language shapes our role-play as machines, and what might be needed to challenge the stories of separation and seeing ourselves and others as just cogs in the greater machinery of progress.
We also explore our strange relationship with time and how we simultaneously act like we have all the time in the world, yet are afraid to slow down and rest. We share rituals and practices we’ve found helpful for challenging the machine role-play, as well as remind ourselves of the importance of communing. Especially when it comes to the modelling and mimicry of the human behaviour we want to see more of in our lives, and how showing up as human beings for ourselves and others is a radical act in times when we’re not seeing healthy leadership modelled on the world stage.
You can watch the full episode on YouTube, or listen to it on Substack or in your favourite podcast app.
About the podcast
Pathfinders Podcast is a podcast for wondering wanderers, eager to explore paths to better tech futures, together. Each podcast episode is a meandering exploration inspired by the seeds planted in our Pathfinders Newmoonsletter at the beginning of the lunation cycle, and the paths illuminated during our Full Moon Gathering.
