The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive

A clinical exploration of artificial intelligence (AI) that Amy Levy renames “alien intelligence”, a phrase coined by Yuval Noah Harari to demonstrate that this creation is a not an artifact, but a new being. Levy contends with this new “other” threatening to supplant human mentation and offers an analysis of our uniquely human drive to innovate.

The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive is a meditation on a technology that manifests all the hallmarks of human relating, human needs, and human complexities in its interactions with another subject. Amy Levy’s approach applies the psychoanalytic clinical attitude, with its sensitivity to enactment, into the investigation of AI. She makes use of her encounters with AI via media, research, personal usage, and traces woven into her day-to-day relations with people to apprehend the essence of what humanity is enacting. Levy retains an inquisitive, factual stance while noting her emotional reactions, using such tension to best perceive the Other. The New Other contains compelling accounts of her direct engagements with artificial intelligence and intriguing new ideas, such as the concept of the smartphone as “cult groomer”. Levy uses a Bionian framework to chart AI transformations of human sensory experience. Leaning on Freud’s life and death drives, she discusses how the potential and dangers of AI are inseparable from the potential and dangers of human beings. This intelligent book is our guide to a future of unprecedented psychological complexity.