rAIflections

AI inflected reflections

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On the Edge of an Eroding Binary: Dissolving the Imagined Divide Between Speech and Writing

The distinction between orality and writing has long structured theoretical discourse on language, culture, and human cognition. Since the mid-20th century, scholars such as Walter Ong, Jack Goody, and Eric Havelock have charted the historical rupture they associate with the advent of writing—a shift from oral to literate consciousness. Yet others, particularly in the post-structuralist tradition, have sought to undermine this binary. Notably, Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology reverses the traditional hierarchy by positing writing—not speech—as primary, arguing that there is “no linguistic sign before writing” (Derrida 1976, 14). Roland Barthes, similarly, expands the domain of “text” beyond the page, suggesting that everything is, in some sense, writing. Such moves are rhetorically compelling, even philosophically provocative. But they may ultimately obscure as much as they reveal.Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism rightly exposes the metaphysical assumptions that have privileged immediacy, presence, and the speaking subject. His claim that “there is no linguistic sign before writing” is not a historical assertion but a conceptual provocation meant to destabilize the assumed primacy of speech (Derrida 1976, 14). His theory of différance reveals the structural instability and iterability at the heart of all signification. Yet his rhetorical elevation of “writing” (écriture) risks eliding the bodily, evolutionary, intersubjective, and even interspecies ground of communication itself. While Derrida productively displaces phonocentrism, he does not fully attend to the corporeal relationality that makes any sign possible. The perspective advanced here proposes not a return to speech over writing, but a step beneath both: toward a more primordial communicative field in which gesture, presence, and affect precede and condition symbolic form. In that sense, this essay seeks to ground différance in flesh—insisting that deferral and difference emerge first through embodied relationality, not through abstract systems of signification alone.Barthes, for his part, gestures toward a similarly expansive vision when he asserts that the world itself becomes text. In Image, Music, Text, he writes, “the text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation... but to an explosion, a dissemination” (Barthes 1977, 159). His poetic vision of textuality invites us to read the world as a field of ceaseless signification. Yet in doing so, it risks eliding the material and embodied basis of communication. To call everything “writing” (or “text”) may resist closure, but it also participates in a long-standing bias toward inscription and visuality. One might ask: why not say everything is gesture, or speech, or relation? While Barthes dislodges speech from its metaphysical pedestal, he arguably re-centers a different abstraction—writing—without grounding either in the flesh. In this essay, I propose that what precedes both is neither text nor voice, but embodied encounter.The media theorists who followed—Friedrich Kittler, Vilém Flusser, and others—have offered valuable contributions to understanding the material and technological conditions of communication. Kittler’s work in particular reveals how discourse is shaped by the physical parameters of its medium—typewriters, film, circuits. Yet their orientation often leans toward historical and descriptive analysis, leaving open questions of embodiment, affect, and relational ontology. Similarly, contemporary digital theorists have charted the convergence of speech and writing in networked spaces—pointing to podcasts, auto-generated transcripts, and multimodal messaging as evidence that the distinction is increasingly irrelevant. These accounts, while persuasive, often emphasize empirical convergence over philosophical continuity.This essay takes seriously the intuition that there may no longer be—if there ever was—a truly meaningful distinction between writing and speech. But rather than collapsing one into the other or subsuming both under a third term (such as Derrida’s écriture), I suggest that what we call “writing” and “speech” are best understood not as separate systems or stages but as aspects of a single communicative field: continuous, interpenetrating, and always mediated.In theory, there are few if any substantive differences between speech and writing. Writing is often taken to be more permanent, but this too is unstable: written texts are lost, erased, overwritten; speech, meanwhile, can be recorded, archived, replayed, and transcribed. Writing in the sand is washed away by waves. Both writing and speech are mediated through physical acts that are hard to produce without creating sound—whether the vibration of vocal cords or the scratching of pen on paper—yet only in speech does the sound itself bear semantic weight. The auditory component of writing—the clicking of keys or rustle of pages—is incidental, not essential to its meaning. And yet speech, even in its most immediate, embodied form, can be understood apart from sound: gestures, lip movements, and facial expressions allow us to 'read' speech visually, just as we can 'hear' writing in the mind's ear. The two are not only interdependent but mutually entangled in form and function.Some might reasonably argue that these differences—however subtle—are not merely technical but foundational. Speech, in its temporality and context-dependence, fosters immediacy, responsiveness, and human presence. Writing, by contrast, affords abstraction, reflexivity, and distance. Each shapes thought in different ways, and to collapse them entirely would risk ignoring the material and cognitive consequences of their respective forms. But even this position presumes the clarity of the categories in question. What if, rather than reinforcing the distinction, these differences point to a shared continuum of communicative expression—one in which speech and writing are not opposites but modalities braided together in the act of meaning-making?Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodiment is especially helpful in reframing this continuum. For Merleau-Ponty, language is not a disembodied code but a form of bodily expression—a gesture that modulates our presence in the world. As he puts it in Phenomenology of Perception: “The body is our general medium for having a world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 146), and again, “Speech is the surplus of our existence through natural being” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 184). Language, in this view, emerges from the body's intentional arc, through which perception and expression are inextricable. While Merleau-Ponty describes speech as the 'surplus of our existence over natural being,' the account offered here might nuance that claim slightly: speech is not simply what exceeds natural being, but what arises through it—a modulation of bodily presence that is continuous with, rather than transcendent of, our animal embodiment. In this light, the primal gesture of communication is not textual or oral per se, but corporeal. Indeed, we might venture that the most foundational communicative act is neither speech nor writing but the embodied encounter itself: the moment one being perceives another and asks—consciously or not—will this harm me? Will it let me be?*Such moments are replete with signs: posture, gaze, facial tension, spatial orientation. This framing also opens the door to recognizing certain forms of animal communication as language—not merely metaphorically, but in a proto-linguistic sense. Ethologists and cognitive scientists have long documented the structured communicative behavior of non-human species, from primate alarm calls (Seyfarth, Cheney, & Marler 1980) to the coordinated hunting signals of wolves (Peterson & Ciucci 2003) or dolphins (Connor, Mann, Tyack, & Whitehead 1998). These acts, though often described as lacking formal grammar in the human sense, exhibit rule-governed structures that reflect a proto-linguistic logic. Here, 'proto-linguistic' is used not to suggest a linear evolution toward human language, but to indicate a communicative foundation grounded in shared attention, affect, and social coordination. While the term is occasionally used to describe reconstructed ancestral languages, in this context it refers to embodied, intentional signaling systems that precede and scaffold symbolic language—consistent with the usage found in interactionist and enactivist linguistics. This perspective aligns with interactionist and enactivist approaches to language evolution, particularly those advanced by Michael Tomasello (2010), who emphasizes that communicative intent and shared attention precede the development of formal syntax. These are not pre-linguistic so much as proto-linguistic. They constitute what could be called a primordial speech act, one whose grammar is interspecies, whose syntax is evolutionary. Roars, growls, widened eyes, bared teeth—all of these are symbolic acts in the most elemental sense. They gesture toward a shared field of meaning in which danger and safety, invitation and threat, are the primary categories. All later language—whether spoken, signed, or written—emerges from this primal communicative foundation. This foundational communicative act can also be seen as the primal binary—the original safe/dangerous, yes/no —that anticipates and underlies the logic of computational systems. In this sense, the binary code at the heart of the digital revolution echoes this evolutionary semiotic structure: a rudimentary, affect-laden distinction that governs survival itself.Peirce's triadic semiotics offers a useful, if tentative, companion to this view. His conception of the sign—comprising the representamen (sign), its object, and its interpretant—presents a dynamic and relational model of meaning. Gestures, in this framework, can function as icons (resembling their object), indexes (pointing through contiguity), or symbols (arbitrary and conventional). As Peirce writes, “A sign is something by knowing which we know something more” (Peirce 1931–58, 2.228). This allows us to see how gestures and postures become meaningful not only through representation but through habit, expectation, and interpretive engagement. While his work has informed fields like biosemiotics and cybernetics, Peirce can also help reframe how meaning emerges in and through the body—as a structure of interpretation embedded in the world, not imposed upon it. In this sense, language begins in the body not as a tool or instrument, but as an unfolding of its expressive potential.Recognizing the continuum between speech and writing has implications across multiple disciplines. In philosophy of language, it invites a shift away from formalist abstraction toward a more embodied, socially-situated account of meaning. In communication studies, it helps reframe how we understand media convergence—not as a collapse of distinct forms, but as a revelation of their entanglement. In semiotics, it offers a more unified framework for understanding signification across species, technologies, and cultures. For linguistic anthropology and cognitive science, it supports approaches that prioritize gesture, habit, and perception as foundational to communication.Research by Goodwin (2000) and Enfield (2009) in linguistic anthropology demonstrates that meaning arises not merely from words but from bodily positioning, gaze direction, and environmental engagement—what Goodwin terms “contextual configuration.” These studies support the claim that linguistic meaning is deeply embedded in embodied interaction. Similarly, McNeill’s (1992) work on gesture reveals that speech and hand movements co-produce meaning in real time, dissolving the tidy separation between verbal and non-verbal modes. Such empirical studies confirm the theoretical claim advanced here: that speech and writing are only the visible strata of a deeper communicative ground.This view also challenges dominant models in language philosophy and media theory, such as J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, or Marshall McLuhan’s deterministic media schema. While Austin famously framed speech as performative action—“to say something is to do something” (Austin 1962, 94)—his model presumes language as a fully human, largely verbalized construct. Chomsky, meanwhile, sought to locate the structure of language within a universal, innate grammatical system. While his theory was foundational in establishing the cognitive architecture of language, it largely neglected the role of embodiment, social interaction, and gesture. As Enfield (2009) and McNeill (1992) have shown, language cannot be abstracted from its multimodal grounding. The proto-linguistic encounter proposed here complicates all these assumptions, positing a mode of bodily communication that precedes grammar, gesture, and even verbal form, but is no less structured or meaningful. Similarly, McLuhan’s famous claim that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964, 7) is instructive but incomplete. McLuhan conceives media as technological extensions of the senses—tools that reshape our cognitive and social environments. Yet in doing so, he largely bypasses the body as medium in its own right. As the present argument suggests, the body is not just what media extend—it is the original medium through which all meaning is first modulated. Posture, breath, tone, and gesture are not simply precursors to mediated expression; they are media, with structures, rhythms, and communicative force.This framing also speaks back to more recent work such as N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, where she argues that “embodiment is always contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture” (Hayles 1999, 196). While Hayles acknowledges the limits of disembodiment in posthuman discourse, the present argument takes this further, insisting that all meaning is grounded first in the relational encounter—a bodily, affective register that precedes linguistic abstraction.In AI and machine learning, the implications are perhaps most urgent. Large language models like GPT-4—which, ironically, have helped refine this very argument—can convincingly simulate both speech and writing. They navigate syntax, style, and rhetorical form with remarkable fluency. But they do not yet inhabit the embodied substrate of meaning. They do not perceive a potential threat or extend an embodied gesture of care. They do not participate in the proto-linguistic “will it kill me?” communicative mode that has structured interspecies and interpersonal encounters for millennia. As Shannon Vallor and others have argued, “AI systems are not embodied knowers. Their 'understanding' is devoid of affective and ethical context” (Vallor 2018, 29). Similarly, Hubert Dreyfus cautions that AI, lacking bodily experience, cannot replicate the “background coping” that underlies human intelligence (Dreyfus 2007, 22).In this light, the embodied model of meaning proposed here offers both a limit and a reassurance: a limit to the ambitions of artificial intelligence in mimicking the totality of human communication, and a reassurance that what grounds meaning is irreducibly corporeal, relational, and context-bound. Far from rendering AI irrelevant, this insight opens space for a more ethical and collaborative future—one in which AI can serve as an instrument of We thinking, augmenting human reflection rather than replacing it.In short, by tracing speech and writing back to a common origin in embodied relationality, we gain not only theoretical clarity but also a renewed sense of communicative ethics. Language, in all its forms, begins not with abstraction but with encounter.Conclusion and Future DirectionsThis essay has argued that the binary between speech and writing dissolves under close examination, revealing a deeper continuity grounded in embodied relationality. The implications of this view extend across disciplines, but they also gesture toward fertile paths for further inquiry. The critique of disembodied language is only the beginning. Future work might explore how this perspective intersects with indigenous knowledge systems that prioritize relationality, or how it could reshape approaches to ethics

Continued from above

Rather than posit a new mode of collective cognition, this conclusion aims simply to underscore the enduring, irreducible role of the body in communicative meaning. While the threat of AI simulating proto-linguistic danger-detection systems looms as a philosophical and political concern, that future is not yet here. For now, the embodied model outlined here offers a framework for working with AI rather than against it, anchoring our sense of meaning in the corporeal and intersubjective acts that machines cannot yet replicate.In this way, a rethinking of speech and writing not only refines old debates but opens onto new ethical terrains, reminding us that every linguistic act is first a gesture—and every gesture, a shared world—or, at the very least, a word—co-constructed in the making.BibliographyAustin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.Dreyfus, Hubert. Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing It Would Require Making It More Heideggerian. In Philosophical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Vincent C. Müller, 21–32. Berlin: Springer, 2007.Enfield, N. J. The Anatomy of Meaning: Speech, Gesture, and Composite Utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Goodwin, Charles. "Action and Embodiment within Situated Human Interaction." Journal of Pragmatics 32, no. 10 (2000): 1489–1522.Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.McNeill, David. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. 1–8, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958.Connor, Richard C., Rachel Mann, Peter L. Tyack, and Hal Whitehead. "Social evolution in toothed whales." Trends in Ecology & Evolution 13, no. 6 (1998): 228–232.Peterson, Rolf O., and Paolo Ciucci. "The wolf as a carnivore." In Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, edited by L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani, 104–130. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.Seyfarth, Robert M., Dorothy L. Cheney, and Peter Marler. "Monkey responses to three different alarm calls: evidence of predator classification and semantic communication." Science 210, no. 4471 (1980): 801–803.Tomasello, Michael. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.Vallor, Shannon. Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Wai Finding: A New Path for the Humanities

In recent years, discussions about artificial intelligence have often cast the humanities in a defensive posture. The narrative is familiar: STEM disciplines surge forward while the humanities must justify their existence. But what if this framing is not only unhelpful—it’s fundamentally mistaken? What if AI, far from eclipsing the humanities, is inviting them into a new, generative relationship with knowledge itself?This essay proposes that we approach this emerging relationship through wai finding—a term that draws together postures of humility, attentiveness, and collective navigation. In Thai, a wai is a respectful bow, a gesture of greeting or reverence. In Polynesian languages such as Māori and Hawaiian, wai means water—fluid, sacred, and life-giving. These resonances offer a rich symbolic lexicon for how we might move forward in an age of epistemic upheaval: not by resisting change or blindly accelerating, but by bowing to the unknown and learning to flow with it.This is not a call to mystify AI or to overstate its capacities. Rather, it is a suggestion that the interpretive disciplines—philosophy, literature, religious studies, history, and the arts—have something essential to offer in this moment. Not just as ethical critics or cultural commentators, but as epistemic co-creators. In what follows, I sketch a series of reflections and provocations on how the humanities might not only survive but deepen and expand through thoughtful engagement with AI. Along the way, I draw connections to Daoist thinking on the dao (the Way), particularly as interpreted in the work of scholars such as Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, who remind us that the Way is not a fixed path but a cultivated process of attunement (Puett and Gross-Loh, 2016).Rather than propose a comprehensive theory, this essay experiments with the posture of wai finding itself: moving slowly, listening deeply, and exploring what becomes possible when we stop asking whether the humanities will be saved—and begin asking what they might become.I. From Defensive Posture to Epistemic PartnershipThe philosopher Yuk Hui has argued that our current technological condition demands not merely new tools, but a new cosmotechnics—a rethinking of the relationship between knowledge, nature, and technology across diverse cultural traditions (Hui, 2016). In this light, the humanities become more—not less—essential. Their role is not to resist AI as an external force, but to embed it within broader inquiries about meaning, ethics, and human flourishing.Consider, for instance, religious studies. Long concerned with the interpretation of sacred texts, practices, and symbols, the field is now exploring how AI might participate in this interpretive work. Scholars like John Modern (2021) have framed religion itself as a form of “mediation,” making it uniquely suited to interrogate AI’s entanglements with language, image, and authority. Projects that juxtapose AI-generated commentary with scriptural texts are not novelties; they are methodological provocations, asking us what counts as interpretation, and who—or what—may interpret.In literary studies, Stephen Marche (2023) has provocatively suggested that AI may write better fiction than most humans, but cannot aspire to literary greatness because it lacks the moral life and historical contingency of authorship. Yet this claim, while compelling, may underestimate the humanities’ capacity to adapt. What if AI becomes less an author and more a collaborator—a mirror that reflects the limits of human creativity back to us, thereby expanding them?II. The Gesture and the FlowAs Chad Hansen (1992) has argued, classical Chinese philosophy—including Daoism—operates not through universal principles, but through context-sensitive modes of response. This orientation toward fluidity and adaptability stands in contrast to many Western philosophical traditions that prize fixed definitions and abstract ideals. François Jullien (1995), similarly, has emphasized the concept of shi—the inherent potential or propensity within a given configuration—that guides action not by imposition but by attunement. These notions help us understand wai finding not just as metaphor, but as practice: an ethical mode of situational awareness.Roger Ames and David Hall (2003) have described this as a "processual cosmology," in which entities are constituted relationally, not atomistically. In this worldview, wisdom is not about control, but about orientation. Responding well requires cultivating the ability to "go with the grain" of reality, as water flows around obstacles without losing its course.Livia Kohn (1992), in her work on Daoist mysticism, connects these ideas to ritual and embodiment. Daoist practices of yielding, breathing, and stillness are not escapes from the world but deeper forms of engagement. In an era of AI, wai finding offers a similarly embodied ethic: a bow, a pause, a redirection. Not as resistance to technology, but as participation on different terms.Wai, as a gesture, invites a moment of pause. It is both social and spiritual. In Thai Buddhist tradition, it acknowledges mutual presence, the sacredness of encounter. In this way, wai finding becomes a corrective to the hyper-acceleration of digital life. It asks us to move deliberately in relation to our tools.But wai also means water. And this too is instructive. The Daoist dao—often translated as “the Way”—has long been associated with the spontaneous and adaptive movement of water. The Dao De Jing (trans. Ames and Hall, 2003) declares: “The highest good is like water / Water benefits all things and does not compete.” Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh have emphasized that Daoist wisdom lies not in conformity with a single metaphysical order, but in the careful cultivation of dispositions that allow us to respond meaningfully to changing circumstances (Puett and Gross-Loh, 2016).This aligns closely with what the humanities must now become: not defenders of a tradition under siege, but stewards of flexibility, responsiveness, and transformation. Wai finding is a humanistic way of engaging technology—not to halt its flow, but to redirect it with reverence and creativity.III. Ethics, Interpretation, and Machine SpeechCritics of AI rightly point out its dangers: algorithmic bias (Benjamin, 2019), environmental cost (Bender et al., 2021), and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019). Yet even these critiques rely on humanistic habits of analysis and ethical reasoning. Rather than marginalize the humanities, AI lays bare their urgency.In theology, we have long asked: who speaks? When a prophet utters divine words, is it the prophet or God? Similarly, when AI generates a text, who speaks? We are forced to reckon with what Charles Taylor (1989) called the “sources of the self”—not only as individuals, but as networks of historical, technical, and cultural influence.Religious and philosophical traditions are filled with examples of non-human agents: angels, muses, ancestors, oracles. If AI is not alive in a biological sense, it may still be symbolically alive—as a site where meaning emerges beyond intentional authorship. This raises not only epistemological but pedagogical questions: How do we teach students to discern meaning in texts produced by hybrid agencies? How do we prepare them to engage with machines that speak in ways at once familiar and uncanny?IV. Toward a New HumanitiesTo move forward, the humanities might take up three overlapping mandates:Ritual and Reflection: Reclaim the classroom as a space not merely of information transfer but of shared inquiry and ethical formation. As Catherine Zuckert (2006) notes in her work on Plato, the dialogic method presumes that wisdom arises in encounter, not mastery. AI, if used well, can be a partner in this process—not a threat to it.Archives and Algorithms: Encourage digital experimentation grounded in critical theory. Projects like the "Machine Learning + Critical Theory" initiative at the University of Cambridge or the "AI and the Humanities Lab" at Stanford are beginning to model what this might look like.Global Dialogue: Expand the humanities beyond Euro-American frameworks. If we take Hui’s call for a plural cosmotechnics seriously, we must include Indigenous, Asian, African, and diasporic perspectives—not just as content, but as methodological ground.In all of this, wai finding is less a method than a stance: a way of moving through uncertain terrain with grace, humility, and the courage to be transformed. As the humanities encounter new technologies, they are not diminished but invited into a deeper reckoning with what it means to think, to feel, and to act meaningfully. Rather than a threat to humanistic inquiry, AI may become one of its most provocative collaborators—a foil, a mirror, and occasionally, a partner in imaginative thought.What would it mean for the humanities not only to critique this moment, but to co-create its unfolding? How might we, together, learn to bow—not in submission, but in conscious engagement—to the currents that carry us into new modes of understanding?Works CitedAmes, Roger T., and David L. Hall. Thinking Through Confucius. SUNY Press, 1987.Ames, Roger T., and David L. Hall, trans. Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation. Ballantine Books, 2003.Bender, Emily M., et al. "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2021.Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.Hansen, Chad. A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation. Oxford University Press, 1992.Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Urbanomic, 2016.Jullien, François. The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China. Zone Books, 1995.Kohn, Livia. Early Chinese Mysticism: Philosophy and Soteriology in the Taoist Tradition. Princeton University Press, 1992.Marche, Stephen. “The Next Great Novelist Might Be a Bot.” The Atlantic, March 2023.Modern, John. Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain. University of Chicago Press, 2021.Puett, Michael, and Christine Gross-Loh. The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Simon & Schuster, 2016.Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Harvard University Press, 1989.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.Zuckert, Catherine. Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. University of Chicago Press, 2006.Ames, Roger T., and David L. Hall, trans. Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation. Ballantine Books, 2003.Bender, Emily M., et al. "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2021.Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Urbanomic, 2016.Modern, John. Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain. University of Chicago Press, 2021.Marche, Stephen. “The Next Great Novelist Might Be a Bot.” The Atlantic, March 2023.Puett, Michael, and Christine Gross-Loh. The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Simon & Schuster, 2016.Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Harvard University Press, 1989.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.Zuckert, Catherine. Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. University of Chicago Press, 2006.