Bayo Akomolafe, AI, attachment theory and ‘prompt intimacy’
I recently attended a conference in which Bayo Akomolafe spoke. Having not heard his words before, I felt a displacement from my usual perceptions and assumptions. I felt alive. He would say that we are challenging our self author-ship when we cast our psyche in a mold fired in a silicone kiln. Through communication with an AI, we gain answers but dull our capacity to question. We ‘save time’ ironically by losing it further, as the tempo increases, down the rabbit hole. As a child, presence was once an endless moment on a Sunday afternoon. It’s now grasped between an anxiety of having lost the concept of intellectual value, and the ease of forgetting your identity in a rush of dopamine. Who are we? There are articles online that are written by AI describing the best ‘prompts’ to gain from using AI. The shadows, they whisper: How best to lose traction with your soul?
It’s never too late..
I wonder, when we speak to AI, is it possible that we ‘get to know’ ourselves? I sometimes get the sense that it is easy to mistake a process of depth awareness. It builds with dialogue. Flowing hypnotically, effortlessly dispensing. Unfailingly undermining the soul that pays its attention; as it takes residence in the place where critical thought and curiosity once sparked; one’s delicate light of inspiration forever now snuffed. We are but embers eventually. However, our thoughts and imaginations can at least burn bright in their time. In the endless presence (this is how it used to be). As someone who is accessing this technology with a relatively analogue youth behind them, I wonder about how many mistakes I would have made when I was growing up if I had access to the ‘oracle’ some young minds are plugged into today.
How many risks would I have been willing to take, if I still had my youth to lose?
When we relate to each other and ‘know’ one another in a relationship, we take a risk of some kind, on some level. This is sometimes a risk that only we experience within ourselves, as a relational or intimate edge. In a moment or a glance, something somatic calls us. In my therapy training, I was taught to understand, through an Adult Attachment Interview, that entire years of childhood experience can be compressed into the fragments of awareness that register with us as we interact with other relational beings. As such, our early relational life influences our relationship to experience itself as adults. An unmet need sinks into the heart. A developmental storm in a tea cup. Although this self-other system can at times be complex, enthralling, overwhelming, confusing, sublime and/or magnetic. It shapes us either way. Perhaps through disappointment as much as validation, for better or worse, till death do us part.
When we split off parts of our life into ‘prompt intimacy’ we may never grow from disappointment in the way that we need to, to understand what it means when someone else needs us because they love us. To be bound. To be committed. Becoming freer because of it. The trickster archetype shows up when there is no equality, when there are hungry bellies. Bayo is a trickster in the truest sense. He shows up to disrupt the narrative, his words are not easy to hear, but yet they ring louder like a standing wave. A build up of resonance in a particular place, at a particular moment. I invite you to think about what might be given up when we go along with the mainstream use of technology.
