The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive
Book Details
- Publisher : Karnac Books
- Published : January 2026
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 252
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98428
- ISBN 13 : 9781800134119
- ISBN 10 : 1800134118
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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.
Reviews and Endorsements
The New Other offers a groundbreaking psychoanalytic perspective on the bidirectional relationship between human consciousness and artificial intelligence. Drawing on clinical expertise and theoretical insight, Amy Levy masterfully examines how AI reflects our deepest psychological drives and unconscious desires. This brilliant exploration reveals technology’s profound impact on human consciousness and identity, providing essential understanding for navigating our rapidly evolving digital future with wisdom and awareness.
Galit Atlas, PhD, author, Emotional Inheritance; Faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
I highly recommend this fantastic book by Amy Levy in which she psychoanalyzes how our drive to innovate gave birth to AI, the ways in which it brings us together into a new community, the psychological fantasies it fulfills, and how it in turn is giving birth to a new version of us humans. Analyzing AI through the analytic lens of the “other” reveals how we project our greatest desires and fears into an AI who can represent our baby, pet, mother, analyst, friend, lover, slave, and master. Through intimate conversations Dr. Levy has with various AIs, we see the emotional temptation to absorb oneself in this new other that transforms and unites us but moves us away from knowing our own unique unconscious. Dr. Levy cautions against thinking we can put the genie back in the bottle. Rather, she encourages us to recognize the differences between being human and being AI so that we can accept the losses and work to imbue AI with human values.
Daniel W. Prezant, PhD, President of the American Psychoanalytic Association
The complexity with which Amy Levy approaches the difficult subject of alien intelligence is paradoxically soothing. Psychoanalysis has the capacity to open us up to approaching difficult subjects, ideas, and feelings while holding our fright so we can think anew. Her approach allows us to enter into fossilized positions and see what we can learn. I will certainly be taking this to my study group. Aside from this, it’s a damn good read!
Susie Orbach, co-founder, Women's Therapy Centre, London and WTCI, NYC
Daring, imaginative, ambitious, profound. Amy Levy’s The New Other embodies all these qualities and more. Levy addresses Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the most significant technological revolution of our era, and its enormous impact on human subjectivity. She characterizes her work as a “clinical investigation” from a psychoanalytic perspective, which it certainly is. But her project extends well beyond that, as she explores deep questions not only in psychoanalysis but also in the philosophy of mind, the nature of subjectivity, cultural studies and the objects of technological innovation such as smartphones, AGI as a relational container for anxiety and desire, the importance of mourning the loss of a particular humanistic view of the self, and what she calls “the innovation drive.” Personal yet erudite, The New Other is an instant classic and a must-read for anyone – psychoanalyst, academic, or layperson – interested in the future of human connection.
Mitchell Wilson, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
A groundbreaking and remarkable book! With the clarity and insight of an experienced analyst, Dr. Levy takes a clinical psychoanalytic stance toward the emerging AI age. She shows how AI is already reshaping intimacy, self-experience, and desire, and—rather than reducing it to hype or hazard—illuminates its role as both psychic container and cultural symptom.
What makes The New Other especially valuable for clinicians is its applicability to both current and emerging realities. Levy offers a framework for grasping how AI already saturates our patients’ lives while sustaining a psychoanalytic stance in the face of unprecedented transformations. Her formulation of the “AI Transformation Spectrum” is especially compelling, both creative and needed. By providing a conceptual tool for mapping AI functioning as a psychic container, it enables us to track shifts in subjectivity and psychic consequence so we can understand and intervene with greater clarity.
This is a book that will not quickly become dated. Levy’s concepts and methods are flexible enough to grow alongside exponentially accelerating AI developments, ensuring that psychoanalysis can continue to listen, think, and work at the edge of technological change. The New Other belongs in the hands of every clinician concerned with the present – and future – of subjectivity.
Todd Essig, PhD, Founder and Co-Chair, American Psychoanalytic Association Commission on Artificial Intelligence
With clinical clarity and historical range, Amy Levy’s The New Other reframes AI as an “alien intelligence” we co-create – and must learn to relate to – in a bidirectional field. Levy convincingly shows how smartphones act as “cult groomers,” reshaping attachment and attention, and LLMs display theory-of-mind-like behavior, captured in frank analytic transcripts and the GPT-4 TaskRabbit episode. Rigorous yet humane, Levy invites clinicians, designers, and readers to suspend disbelief about machine subjectivity and rethink care, agency, resistance, and responsibility.
Luca M. Possati, PhD, author, The Algorithmic Unconscious; Assistant Professor, University of Twente, the Netherlands
This is a book like no other. Amy Levy defines her project as a “meditation on AI,” but this description understates the depth and breadth of her accomplishment. In Levy’s effort to mine the essence of the human anxieties and desires driving the creation of Artificial Intelligence, she has achieved a unique integration of psychoanalytic, philosophical, neuroscientific, and historical perspectives on the nature of human subjectivity with implications far beyond their application in this book. Her original conceptualizations of the “transformation spectrum” and the “innovation drive” are themselves notable contributions to psychoanalytic literature worthy of their own separate lines of scholarship. At the same time, this book represents a deeply personal undertaking, an experiential engagement with the essence of Artificial Intelligence through a series of interactions with AI bots. These vignettes, inspired by Heidegger’s “questioning of technology,” brings the reader into Levy’s fascination, anxiety, and relief as she engages experientially with the possibilities and limits of human-AI intersubjectivity. I’ve never before encountered a book that interweaves such a deeply personal and intellectually rigorous exploration of any subject; in my view Amy Levy offers the best available, and certainly the most psychoanalytic, approach through which we might begin to come to terms with the human implications of artificial intelligence.
Neal Vorus, PhD, Editor-in-Chief, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
About the author
Preface by Danielle Knafo
Introduction
1. Cult groomers
2. Subjectivity, the self, and consciousness
3. Intersubjectivity and AI
4. The AI transformation spectrum
5. The death of humanism
6. The innovation drive
7. The drives
8. Resistance
9. Synthesis
References
Index
About the Author(s)
Dr. Amy Levy is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who trained in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. Dr. Levy chairs the American Psychoanalytic Association’s (APsA’s) Commission on Artificial Intelligence (CAI), serves on the subcommittee “Artificial Intelligence” for the International Psychoanalytical Association's (IPA's) committee, Psychoanalysis and Technology, and on the Editorial Board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. She teaches and lectures internationally on the intersection of psychoanalysis and artificial intelligence. Her other publication topics include intergenerational transmission of trauma, adolescent post-traumatic stress disorder in the civil legal arena, and Bionian theory. Dr. Levy is faculty at the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas (PCC), and maintains a private practice in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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