Technology has allowed us to expand our knowledge of the universe and to reach deep into the molecular level. Our understanding of ‘intelligence’ is also undergoing substantial transformation due to widened perspectives opened up by studying animal cognition as well as the proliferation of computational intelligence – both of which are vastly different from our own. Despite this, we somehow still face a situation where the threat of climate change is often deferred and power relations across most fields and social systems remain deeply unequal. Biases of gender, race, and class are still firmly embedded in many world views – even smart algorithms reflect the implicit values of their human designers, resulting in the Amazon AI recruiting tool showing bias against women, or facial recognition technology demonstrating racial prejudice.

Reed believes that to enact any substantial social change we must intervene not only on the level of symptoms, but on the level of cosmology, or what Foucault called the episteme. Instead of multiplying instructions on “How to create ethical AI,” we need to transform the very core of human self-understanding, from which new modes of governance and world-making emerge.