Why it might be helpful to think of AI as a trance, for better and worse

It seems to be getting increasingly harder to unpack what AI is in the many conversations, stories, and applications around it. The popular frames fall short in various ways. Thinking of it as just a technology explains the mechanics but misses the felt quality of what is happening collectively. Navigating AI as a meme explains valuations but not broader collective paradoxical behavior.

Sitting with AI as a kind of trance in the way Stephen Gilligan talks about generative or negative trances informs something else: a felt sense for holding the contradictory facets required to guide AI towards actual rather than theoretical flourishing at the level of individuals and collectives.

For example, neither the technology nor the meme frames explain why, in the recent kerfuffle between Big Government, Anthropic, and OpenAI, both companies agreed to the same thing on the surface. Yet Anthropic was theoretically kicked off the US government procurement ...