Dear friends,

I have been interrogating what artificial intelligence may mean for women’s lives: our work and money, our intimacy, our mothering, our bodies and our safety. This summer the inquiry became a survey, forty-eight questions grown from real conversations with real women. The first wave has answered, and answered at depth, staying with the questions for half an hour and more.

I had a friend over a couple of weeks ago. He’s lovely and warm and generous, but his chatbot was in the room with us. Everything we talked about: into the engine. Talking to the chatbot when I thought he was talking to me. Talking to the chatbot behind closed doors. Running my ideas through the chatbot. I couldn’t feel him, his tether was to the cloud. It was amusing, and then annoying, and then I got curious.

The first split here seems to be the relationship of AI to cognition. Some people experience AI as an extension of human cognition, and some experience it as a displacement of a flavor of being that is never replace-able, merely a parrot of the true creative pulse of the organic intelligence. The second group is not necessarily technophobic, but rather protecting the specific quality of knowing that comes from embodied struggle, from not-knowing, from the friction of working something out in a body-mind that literally has skin in the game. Frictionless cognition produces a different kind of human, and a different kind of knowledge, or rather not-knowledge, undigested, unlived, unearned. The outsourced mind is a narrowed aperture, regardless of how much it produces.