Voices of VR

I participated in another Socratic Debate about the Future of "AI" and XR at Augmented World Expo 2026 with Leslie Shannon, Alvin Graylin, and Louis Rosenberg (you can listen to last year's debate in episode #1611). Shannon and Graylin argued for "AI," whilst Rosenberg and I argued against "AI."

In my write-up, I wanted to leave some breadcrumbs to more in-depth, skeptical arguments against "AI" that we didn't have space or time to dig into during the debate, but "some breadcrumbs" ended up being over 30k words, and more like an outline for an entire book.

Writing a book isn’t on my to-do list at the moment, but disseminating the work researchers, journalists, linguists, and critics of "AI" have done is urgent and necessary, so I’m sharing the results of this deep dive here, in bullet list format. My fellow panelists, Alvin Graylin and Louis Rosenberg, indulged me in extending our debate offline after AWE, pushing me to test my ideas further and demonstrating how and why this is an extremely active field of study with polarizing points of view that often come down to philosophical differences. Clearly, it’s just getting started.

My objections to "AI" is loosely organized by various themes, but some framing may be helpful in approaching it. My objections to "AI" center around the limitations of LLMs, the consolidation of wealth and power from Hyperscaler companies, and threats from automated decision making systems and surveillance capitalism melded with democratically-backsliding authoritarian governments. I'm including a broad range of critiques spanning the domains of philosophy, technology, sociology, politics, economics, culture, and ethics.

I'm coming from the orientation of Process Philosophy & Peircean Semiotics that emphasizes the relational and contextual dimensions that the "AI" field tends to de-emphasize or completely collapse. I see process-relational philosophy as a necessary paradigm shift away from the underpinning philosophies of the "AI" community, which tend to be Functionalism, Naturalism, Computational Theory of Mind, Physicalism, & the TESCREAL bundle.

Below you'll find my own process philosophical emergency response to "AI embedded within my curation of excerpts and commentary of primary sources that I'm leaning upon.

The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (2025) by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna (also see episode #1563).

Bender & Hanna say, "To put it bluntly, 'AI' is a marketing term. It doesn’t refer to a coherent set of technologies. Instead, the phrase "artificial intelligence" is deployed when the people building or selling a particular set of technologies will profit from getting others to believe that their technology is similar to humans, able to do things that, in fact, intrinsically require human judgment, perception, or creativity."

Emily M. Bender wrote the "Artificial Intelligence" [preprint] (2026, June 25) entry for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Society.

Bender's concluding paragraph gives a great overview of the seven different ways that the idea of "artificial intelligence" operates in the world. She says, "The notion of artificial intelligence is frequently sold as present or near-future and inevitable technology. In fact there is no coherent set of technologies that can serve as the denotation of the phrase, nor do any of the technologies so marketed rise to the fantastical but ill-defined claims of 'AI' is or soon will be. Nonetheless, the idea of artificial intelligence has been extremely impactful in the world. In order to better understand and deal with those impacts, it is helpful to look at artificial intelligence through the varied lenses of how the idea operates in the world: as the name of a research field, as one approach to cognitive science, as a parlor trick, as a an ideology, as a way to hide and devalue human labor, as a way to shift and/or obfuscate accountability, and as a means to centralize power."

Inventing Intelligence: On the History of Complex Information Processing and Artificial Intelligence in the United States in the Mid-Twentieth Century [dissertation] (2020, December 14) by Jonnie Penn.

Penn says, "The phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined by John McCarthy, an American mathematician, in 1955. It has travelled with a noticeably amorphous definition since."

"AI" has always had a spotty history of technologists using a "brain is a computer" metaphor while also using "poor citation practices." From page 14, Penn says, "The vocabulary Simon, Rosenblatt, McCarthy and Minsky chose to describe new techniques in major newspapers and scholarly journals informed Americans' still plastic understandings of what was possible, and indeed desirable, in the emerging information age… During the mid to late 1950s, these men turned to clannishness, self-aggrandizement, speculative rhetoric, fluid definitions of key terms and poor citation practices to shore up legitimacy for their controversial new techniques — actions that drew attention toward questions of how to accomplish such aims and away from whether they were well founded."

Part II: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence: Philosophy as Emergency Response (2026, June 9) by Matt Segall.

In a multi-part Substack series, process philosopher Matt Segall calls for a philosophical emergency response to "AI." He says, "In each case a new media technology intended to expand the power of thought ended up transforming the very nature of the thinker who invented it. Each new medium furnishes the very terms in which we come to understand ourselves. This is why the philosophical response is always an emergency response: by the time anyone has noticed what is happening, what may be lost and what gained, the mutation has already done half of its work."

Segall warns about the computational metaphor of the mind by saying, "The large language model now tempts us to adopt an even stranger self-image: that human minds are no different than machines, our thoughts just the statistical echoes of our training data. The creators of this latest technological upgrade are encouraging us to downgrade our estimate of human consciousness, thus narrowing the distance between ourselves and the machines built to imitate us."

"Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of 'AI': The View from the Humanities" [lecture] (2026, February 10) by Emily M. Bender. Here are the lecture slides with a bibliography at the end.

Bender does an amazing overview of how the marketing of "AI" uses pernicious dehumanization tactics built on an underlying "brain is a computer metaphor." From page 15 of her talk: "Scientific metaphor used and debated in neuroscience: "THE BRAIN IS A COMPUTER. "PR metaphor used by technologists: "THE COMPUTER IS A BRAIN"

Bender cites Baria & Cross' paper titled "The brain is a computer is a brain: neuroscience's internal debate and the social significance of the Computational Metaphor (2021), which says “the Computational Metaphor rests on other well-ingrained ideologies in which a hierarchy of human value is tied to a particular notion of intelligence such that the quality of being emotional is considered inferior to being rational."

Bender also cites Dijkstra's 1985 lecture "On anthropomorphism in science": "A more serious byproduct of the tendency to talk about machines in anthropomorphic terms is the companion phenomenon of talking about people in mechanistic terminology."

Here are a couple of examples of how "AI" Hyperscaler companies like OpenAI use dehumanizing tactics to sell us on "AI" Hype.

Sam Altman will say things like, "A kid born today will never be smarter than AI. Ever."

Or another example is when Altman says, "For me, AGI is basically the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker... And then Superintelligence is when it's smarter than all of humanity put together."

These statements collapse the human experience into one dimension of "intelligence," which amplifies the dual harm of treating machines more like humans and treating humans more like machines. It is also questionable the degree to which this statement is even true given the potential non-computational aspects of "relevance realization." More on this down below.

Part IV: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence: Hegel's Loom and the Difference Reason Makes (2026, June 10) by Matt Segall.

Segall brilliantly breaks down the "Brain is a Computer Metaphor" by saying, "Metaphor is not just a shiny paint job on the vehicle of cognition. It is the engine of thought. Its coupling of concepts drives the limits of conceivability, shaping what is thought together and what is not thought at all. The metaphorical imagination is our main means of tuning in to the otherwise invisible effects of new media technologies. Part of the discipline philosophy brings is allowing us to notice an analogy as an analogy before advertising crystalizes it into the unnoticed transparency of common sense. A fact is a fact, but it might also be a fossilized metaphor. The governing analogy of our age is that cognition is computation: the brain an information-processing device, perception its input and behavior its output, memory a form of physical storage, learning the adjustment of weights, and intelligence an algorithm for minimizing error or surprisal. On this view, given enough training data and computational power, consciousness itself will eventually be engineered… The metaphor “the mind is a computer,” for example, tacitly proposes that mind is to brain as software is to hardware… Reiterated in textbooks and earnings calls, in grant applications and policy briefs, the partial comparison congeals into an ontology, until we find ourselves insisting not that the mind is like a computer in some respects but that it simply is one — and,...

I interviewed Caitlin Krause about the experience of XR, Process Philosophy musings, & the ethics of AI on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

I interviewed Trond Nilsen about reluctantly using AI Hyperscalers & the aspiration for open source alternatives on Thursday, June 18, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

I interviewed XR Pioneer Tom Furness about Luminara, Institute Institute of Light that he announced at on June 17th, 2026 during his 1:35p session at Augmented World Expo. He describes the vision on their website as "Luminara is a non-profit research, learning, and humanitarian initiative exploring how emerging technologies, human consciousness, creativity, compassion, and service can work together to uplift humanity." They'll be investigating how to cultivate human flourishing through various research and collaborations to explore human potential through the lens of immersive technologies.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

I interviewed Metaverse Standards Forum President Neil Trevett about key open Standards enabling the Open Metaverse Browser Initiative with RP1 on Tuesday, June 16, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. You can see their AWE talk here, and check out the Open Metaverse Browser wiki for more information.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality