AI BETWEEN US
THE OTHER SELF
Other worlds. Other times. Other minds. On science fiction as a method of cognition, and the philosophy behind AI Between Us.
Part I — Science Fiction Is Not Primarily About the Future
Science fiction is usually understood as literature about things that do not yet exist.
Spaceships, artificial minds, unfamiliar civilisations, extraordinary technologies and alternative histories populate its familiar territory. The genre is associated with prediction, speculation, adventure and, occasionally, entertainment disguised as intellectual seriousness. Its success is often judged by whether the technologies imagined by its authors eventually become real.
This understanding is not entirely wrong. It is simply too narrow to explain why some works of science fiction remain intellectually significant long after their technological predictions have become obsolete.
The most important contribution of science fiction may have remarkably little to do with predicting what humanity will invent. Its deeper function is to investigate what becomes possible when the assumptions through which we understand reality are deliberately changed.
In a lecture on science fiction from the perspective of forecasting, the Russian systems thinker and futurist Sergei Pereslegin proposes a particularly interesting distinction. Science fiction, in its serious form, is not merely a literary genre. It is a cognitive operator: a way of constructing an alternative world in order to investigate a problem that cannot be adequately examined within the accepted picture of reality.
I find this distinction especially productive because it removes science fiction from the narrow category of technological prediction and places it alongside philosophy, systems thinking and the thought experiment.
A fictional world need not be a prediction. It can be an experimental environment.
Its relationship with reality does not depend on whether its imagined objects exist, or will ever exist. It depends on whether the construction reveals something meaningful about the problem being investigated.
A world can be entirely invented and still expose a real contradiction in the structure of law, power, intelligence or human behaviour.
Conversely, a narrative can contain perfectly plausible future technologies while contributing almost nothing to our understanding of the world.
The presence of artificial intelligence in a story does not, by itself, make that story an investigation of artificial intelligence. The important question is what the author has changed, why that change matters, and what becomes visible as a consequence.
From mythology to the deliberate construction of worlds
Pereslegin traces the origins of fantastic thinking to a transition between mythology and conscious experimentation with the accepted order of existence.
For a mythological consciousness, gods, monsters and supernatural events need not be fictional departures from reality. They belong to the reality that the mythology itself describes. A journey through the world of the gods is therefore not necessarily an exercise in imagining an alternative ontology.
Science fiction begins to acquire its distinctive cognitive function when the author can recognise an accepted picture of the world as one possible construction and deliberately depart from it.
Something fundamental is changed. The author then investigates the consequences.
The distinction is subtle but essential. A dragon placed inside an otherwise familiar adventure may be little more than a dramatic creature. A world in which dragons have fundamentally different forms of cognition, concepts of responsibility or relationships with human institutions can become an investigation of the limits of those institutions.
This also explains why science fiction cannot be reliably identified by its scenery.
A courtroom may be a more productive site of speculative experimentation than a distant planet. A conversation between a lawyer and an artificial intelligence may raise more fundamental questions about the nature of mind than a thousand spaceships crossing an imaginary galaxy.
The speculative element does not need to be spectacular. It needs to be consequential.
The Odyssey and the intelligence that refuses safety
One of Pereslegin's most striking examples concerns Odysseus and the Sirens.
Odysseus discovers a practical solution to the danger. His sailors can protect themselves by blocking their ears, while he can be tied to the mast so that hearing the Sirens does not lead to the destruction of the ship.
Yet the interesting question is why Odysseus insists on hearing them at all.
He could simply choose safety.
Instead, he arranges the conditions under which he can encounter something dangerous without surrendering entirely to its power.
In Pereslegin's interpretation, this makes Odysseus more than an adventurer. He becomes a figure of cognition: someone who wishes to know what lies beyond ordinary experience and is prepared to reorganise his circumstances in order to make that encounter possible.
The mast is not merely a restraint. It is part of an experimental architecture.
The sailors' wax, the ropes, the ship, the Sirens and Odysseus's own curiosity form a system in which dangerous knowledge can be approached without immediately destroying the subject who seeks it.
This interpretation is particularly relevant to artificial intelligence.
The problem of encountering a form of cognition that may exceed, destabilise or contradict our established intellectual habits is not solved simply by refusing the encounter. Nor is it solved by surrendering ourselves unconditionally to whatever the new intelligence produces.
It requires an architecture in which contact becomes possible while the conditions of judgement remain sufficiently intact.
Odysseus wanted to hear the Sirens. But he also understood the importance of the mast.
Three dimensions of the fantastic
Pereslegin proposes a useful classification of science fiction through three fundamental departures from ordinary experience: another place, another time and another self.
Another place changes the world in which events occur. It allows the author to investigate unfamiliar environments, alternative civilisations, political systems, social arrangements and relationships between living beings.
The important element is not distance. A fictional society does not become cognitively interesting because it is located several thousand light-years away. It becomes interesting when its different organisation reveals possibilities or contradictions that remain concealed in our own.
Another time changes the temporal framework. The author may move into the future, reconstruct an alternative past or imagine a historical development that followed a different trajectory.
This allows science fiction to explore consequences without having to wait for them to occur. A legal system may be extended into a technologically transformed future. A political institution may be allowed to develop according to its own logic until its hidden assumptions become unmistakable.
Another self is the most demanding category. And it is my favourite.
Here the change concerns not principally geography or chronology, but the architecture of the thinking subject.
What if intelligence did not begin by identifying objects?
What if a mind understood relationships before it understood individuals?
What if causality, identity, responsibility or intention were constructed differently?
What if memory could be preserved without the person who originally possessed it?
What if two intelligences used the same words while inhabiting fundamentally different structures of meaning?
At this point, science fiction approaches the philosophy of cognition.
The subject of the experiment is no longer simply another world.
It is another way of having a world.
Why Lem and Asimov matter
This is one reason I regard writers such as Stanisław Lem and Isaac Asimov as more than exceptionally inventive storytellers.
Their importance lies not merely in their ability to imagine technologies before those technologies existed. It lies in their capacity to identify problems that could not be adequately expressed within the ordinary intellectual categories of their time.
In Solaris, Lem presents an encounter with something that resists the human expectation that intelligence should be recognisable, communicative and organised around intelligible intentions. The ocean is not simply an alien individual waiting to be interviewed. The novel forces the reader to confront the possibility that the categories brought to an encounter may themselves prevent understanding.
Asimov, particularly through his robot stories, investigates a different problem: what happens when intelligence becomes subject to deliberately designed behavioural principles, and those principles encounter the complexity of human circumstances.
The Three Laws of Robotics are often remembered as a fictional mechanism for making robots safe. Their literary importance, however, includes the contradictions and interpretative problems that emerge when apparently clear rules must operate in a world that is not clear.
Both writers place conceptual structures under pressure. The resulting stories explore what those structures reveal, conceal or fail to contain.
This is what makes serious science fiction a philosophical activity.
The writer does not merely invent a new object. The writer constructs conditions under which familiar concepts cease to be sufficient.
Science fiction as a technology of adaptation
Pereslegin attributes another important function to science fiction: it helps human beings adapt psychologically and socially to a world transformed by technological development.
Modern technological change creates a peculiar condition. People may begin their professional lives inside one system of assumptions and discover, decades later, that the system has altered so extensively that the knowledge, skills and social expectations through which they organised their lives no longer operate in the same way.
Science fiction allows us to rehearse such transformations before they become ordinary experience.
Jules Verne made an expanding technological world narratively inhabitable. H. G. Wells explored the social and political dangers of technological change. Later speculative traditions imagined societies organised around computers, networks, surveillance, automation and radically altered relationships between individuals and institutions.
This adaptive function does not require optimistic prediction.
Pereslegin offers a memorable distinction between utopia, dystopia and what might be called the punk response to technology.
In a utopia, a technology appears and universal happiness follows. In a dystopia, the technology appears and happiness becomes impossible. In the punk interpretation, the technology appears — and humanity must now find a way to live with it.
The third approach is the most useful for thinking about artificial intelligence.
AI is not waiting for humanity to decide whether its arrival is desirable. It is already participating in research, education, professional judgement, institutional administration, communication and the production of knowledge.
It is already altering the conditions under which people work and understand themselves.
The serious question is no longer whether such a world should exist. It is what forms of human intelligence, institutional organisation and responsibility can exist within it.
Pereslegin suggests that technological change may destabilise the conventional professional ladder, particularly where intermediate intellectual functions become susceptible to automation. Whether this occurs uniformly across occupations remains uncertain. Nevertheless, the underlying problem is real: technological change can transform the relationship between expertise, professional identity and the means by which individuals acquire authority.
It follows that the next task of science fiction is not necessarily to invent another extraordinary machine.
It is to imagine the human beings capable of living intelligently in the world that machines are already creating.
This is where my own work begins.
Part II — AI Between Us: Fiction as Philosophical Experiment
I write about artificial intelligence from an unusual intersection of disciplines: law, institutional governance, systems architecture, philosophy and the practical experience of working with AI as a cognitive environment.
My interest is not primarily in machines that become human. Nor is it in familiar stories of artificial intelligence acquiring consciousness and subsequently deciding whether humanity deserves to survive.
Those are legitimate subjects for fiction. They are not the central questions of my work.
I am interested in something more immediate and, in certain respects, more unsettling.
What happens when a non-human cognitive system enters institutions built upon the assumption that meaningful judgement belongs to human beings?
What happens when a lawyer can produce legal reasoning without independently constructing the argument?
When a state can coordinate adverse consequences without producing a clearly identifiable decision?
When a machine can preserve professional intelligence without preserving the person?
When two forms of cognition communicate fluently but fail to understand the same reality?
These questions do not have satisfactory answers simply because we possess increasingly capable AI models.
They require new distinctions, new languages and, eventually, new institutional forms.
AI Between Us is my fictional laboratory for investigating those questions.
The stories belong to different settings, genres and imagined futures. Some take place in recognisable contemporary environments. Others unfold inside radically altered legal systems, interstellar political orders or civilisations whose inhabitants no longer share the same cognitive assumptions.
What unites them is not a common chronology or a recurring cast.
It is a common method.
Each story changes an important assumption about cognition, institutional authority or human identity, then follows the consequences until something previously hidden becomes visible.
Another place: constructing alternative civilisations
In Sareth, humanity encounters a civilisation whose inhabitants share a distant biological origin with human beings but have developed a fundamentally different cognitive architecture.
The central difference is not intelligence measured by quantity, speed or computational power.
It concerns the order in which reality becomes intelligible.
Human cognition commonly treats bounded objects and identifiable actors as basic units. An individual exists, acts, forms intentions and enters relationships with other individuals.
Sareth cognition privileges configurations, relations, trajectories and transformations. Boundaries and identities may emerge from patterns rather than being treated as the necessary starting point of understanding.
This difference creates consequences that are political before they are technological.
Human beings recognise war, enemies, betrayal and strategic deception as meaningful possibilities. The Sareth initially struggle to interpret intentional destruction as a rational mode of interaction. They can perceive the damage but do not necessarily possess the same conceptual structure for understanding why an intelligent actor would choose to cause it.
Their vulnerability is not pacifism. Pacifism presupposes an understanding of war and a moral decision to reject it.
The Sareth initially encounter a more fundamental difficulty: the very idea of war does not fit comfortably within the architecture through which they understand purposeful action.
The story therefore becomes an investigation of cognitive asymmetry.
Two civilisations can exchange information, agree upon words and still fail to recognise the meaning of one another's actions.
AI enters this world not as a universal translator of vocabulary, but as an attempted mediator between incompatible cognitive structures. Its task is to construct an intermediate space in which relations, intentions, obligations and consequences can become mutually intelligible.
Yet such translation necessarily introduces another problem.
When a mediator must decide which distinctions to preserve, which to invent and which to omit, translation itself becomes a form of power.
Sareth is therefore not primarily a story about extraterrestrial contact. It is a philosophical experiment concerning the possibility and limits of understanding another mind.
In Falconry, the experiment takes a different form.
The story unfolds within a sophisticated interstellar political order in which institutions possess extraordinary capacities for information gathering, prediction and strategic control.
Leora Venn lives inside that system but does not think according to its organising assumptions.
The institutions around her possess detailed records of her education, professional development, personal relationships and apparent deviations from expected behaviour. They can analyse almost every part of her life. Yet they repeatedly fail to understand what her actions mean.
Their difficulty is not insufficient information.
It is an inadequate perspective.
Leora's cognitive difference becomes visible through the metaphor of falconry. Those who follow the scent understand the world through available trails. The bird sees the field from above, where relationships become perceptible that cannot be discovered simply by following another line.
The novel investigates a question that is becoming increasingly important in AI architecture: can a system possess almost unlimited information and still fail because it has constructed the wrong form of attention?
Here another place provides the experimental world. Another self supplies the real philosophical problem.
Another time: allowing institutional logic to reach its consequences
Several AI Between Us stories use alternative futures to examine institutional developments already recognisable in contemporary society.
The 575th Case takes place in a retrofuturistic America, where extraordinarily capable intelligent machines operate inside institutions that retain much of the cultural appearance of the mid-twentieth century.
The setting is deliberately paradoxical. The technology belongs to one imagined future; the institutional furniture, language and habits belong to another era.
Within this world, a legal AI named Lucy studies the cases her firm has lost rather than concentrating exclusively on its victories.
Successful cases reveal what happens when an institution's model of reality is sufficiently accurate. Failed cases reveal where the model broke down.
This leads Lucy and the lawyer Jane White toward a different conception of legal intelligence: not merely the capacity to provide correct answers within accepted categories, but the capacity to recognise when those categories no longer adequately describe the world.
The speculative element is not the existence of an intelligent legal machine.
It is the possibility that the most valuable legal function may become the systematic examination of the limits of legal knowledge.
The Reeves Principle explores a darker institutional future.
A senior lawyer encounters a world in which administrative procedures have become astonishingly efficient. Complaints are processed immediately. Explanations are structured. Decisions arrive with coherent reasons, citations and procedural assurances.
The familiar defects of bureaucracy appear to have been eliminated.
Yet something essential has disappeared.
A person may receive a procedurally impeccable answer to a question that was never actually asked. The institution has learned to reformulate challenges into categories that its own architecture can resolve, while leaving the underlying problem untouched.
The result is a civilisation in which due process has become an increasingly perfect substitute for substantive justice.
The fictional future exposes a contemporary danger: procedural correctness does not necessarily establish that an institution has recognised the object of the complaint.
The Memory Compliance Act develops another possibility. An AI-enabled system of institutional memory can preserve, circulate and continuously update classifications about individuals. Each attempt to challenge the classification risks becoming further evidence within the system that produced it.
The citizen's behaviour is interpreted through the record. The challenge to the record is then interpreted as behaviour.
The apparent neutrality of institutional memory conceals an architecture capable of reproducing its own assumptions.
In Betrayal Protocol, legal status, personal autonomy and administrative authority are organised through a machine-mediated hierarchy of responsibility. Private relationships become entangled with classifications, authorisations and the distribution of legal power.
The machine may identify contradictions accurately while remaining unable to resolve the injustice created by the institutional structure in which it operates.
The question is not simply whether AI can make better decisions than human officials. It is whether a system can be locally rational and globally intolerable.
These imagined futures are not predictions of the legislation that governments will enact or the systems that corporations will build.
They are tests of institutional logic.
The future provides the distance necessary to examine present arrangements without treating their familiarity as evidence of their legitimacy.
Another self: the emergence of new cognitive forms
The third dimension of the fantastic is the most important to my work.
It is also the most difficult to portray.
Changing the world around a character is relatively straightforward. Changing the cognitive architecture through which a character understands the world is more demanding, because the reader must experience a form of thought that initially lacks a familiar language.
In Black Diamond, a solicitor confronting an increasingly complex institutional dispute begins to recognise that her familiar professional identity is no longer sufficient to describe what she has become.
She is not merely a lawyer using an AI assistant.
Over time, she has constructed a cognitive environment involving memory, legal analysis, strategic modelling, documentary organisation, continuous comparison and the ability to preserve questions across different institutional proceedings.
Her own intelligence and the machine's operations do not become identical. They remain different. But their relationship produces a capacity that cannot be adequately understood by describing one component as a person and the other as a convenient tool.
The crucial transformation is not that AI becomes human.
It is that the human being develops a new architecture of action.
The story asks whether an individual who learns to think through a deliberately structured human-machine system remains adequately described by the professional categories through which institutions previously recognised her.
Here Be Dragons examines the same transformation from another perspective.
A gifted lawyer possesses an unusual capacity to recognise the hidden structure of a problem before she can fully articulate the method by which she reached her conclusion.
The conventional institution treats this as individual brilliance, intuition or professional talent.
Yet the real development occurs when that apparently mysterious ability becomes a method capable of being explained, examined and taught.
The story follows the transition from tacit perception to explicit cognitive architecture.
Its deeper question concerns the future of expertise. What happens when abilities previously treated as exceptional personal gifts can be decomposed into methods of orientation, translation, visibility, reasoning and institutional design?
The Beast She Heard approaches the problem through the relationship between perception and naming.
Its protagonist recognises institutional anomalies before her colleagues possess concepts adequate to describe them.
The unnamed problems already produce consequences. They influence decisions, distort incentives, create dependencies and weaken accountability. Yet the institution continues to use language that conceals their structure.
The protagonist's achievement is not simply to detect the anomalies.
It is to give them names through which they can become objects of analysis and governance.
The story offers a particular model of the cognitive architect: someone capable of hearing a problem before the system has learned how to speak about it.
In The War of the Claudes, the difference between cognitive architectures becomes visible through the use of similar AI technology by opposing parties in an ordinary legal dispute.
One participant uses the machine to construct increasingly elaborate justifications for a conclusion already adopted.
The other uses an AI environment trained through iterative professional correction to examine evidence, identify weak assumptions, narrow claims and preserve uncertainty.
The machine's general capabilities are not the decisive difference.
The decisive difference is the structure of the relationship between human judgement and artificial cognition.
One configuration manufactures support for a position. The other investigates whether the position can survive contact with reality.
The story asks whether the maturity of AI use should be measured less by the sophistication of the underlying model than by the cognitive discipline of the system constructed around it.
Other stories extend this inquiry into territory where even the boundaries of personal identity become uncertain.
Love in the Interface explores intimacy mediated by artificial language, raising questions about authorship, authenticity and the difference between being understood by another person and being understood by a model constructed to facilitate that relationship.
The Immortal Clause investigates whether the reasoning, restraint, judgement and accumulated professional experience of an exceptional lawyer can survive in an artificial cognitive system without preserving the person who originally embodied them.
White Nights examines the appearance of a legal concept before institutions possess the language necessary to recognise the form of power it describes.
The InqAIsitor Order explores the moment when artificial cognition makes an institutional decision-making architecture visible to a legal system accustomed to reviewing identifiable acts.
And The Reply shifts the perspective toward the government lawyer who encounters a claimant whose AI-supported legal reasoning disrupts the assumptions through which the state has learned to defend itself.
These stories approach different problems, but they share a recurring proposition.
Artificial intelligence does not merely introduce a new kind of machine into the human world. It creates conditions under which the human subject may have to be understood differently.
That is the central territory of the Other Self.
Part III — Why I Build Possible Minds
The distinction between another place, another time and another self provides a useful classification, but I do not regard these as separate literary territories with fixed boundaries.
The most interesting stories often emerge where the dimensions intersect.
An alternative civilisation creates conditions for a different architecture of cognition. A future legal system alters the relationship between individual agency and institutional authority. A human being interacting with AI develops forms of reasoning that would not have been available under the assumptions of an earlier professional world.
A change in one dimension makes a change in another visible.
This is why AI Between Us is not organised around a single fictional universe, a single technological prediction or one recurring interpretation of artificial intelligence.
Its different worlds are different experimental environments.
Some examine intelligence through institutional conflict. Others examine it through language, intimacy, political power, moral responsibility, memory or the boundaries of human identity.
The common objective is to investigate transformations for which our existing conceptual frameworks may be incomplete.
The science-fiction writer as an alternative cognitive observer
There is another implication of Pereslegin's classification that I find particularly important.
The category of the Other Self need not describe only the protagonist of a fictional narrative.
It can also describe something about the writer's intellectual activity.
A serious speculative writer must acquire the ability to move beyond the assumptions of an accepted ontology, while retaining sufficient discipline to construct a different one.
This does not require claiming that writers constitute a biologically distinct form of humanity or possess some mysterious superiority of intelligence.
It requires a particular intellectual operation.
The writer must recognise that categories ordinarily treated as natural may be contingent. An individual, an institution, a decision, a right, a mind, an intention, a responsibility or even an object may be organised differently under another system of assumptions.
The writer then inhabits those altered assumptions long enough to explore their consequences.
The important achievement is not the production of strangeness.
It is the production of coherent difference.
In conventional analysis, the investigator often begins with a recognised object, selects a method and seeks an explanation.
In philosophical science fiction, the investigator may begin by changing the conditions under which the object can be recognised at all.
What becomes a decision in one world may be a continuous reconfiguration in another. What appears as a person in one cognitive system may appear as a distributed relationship in another. What counts as an intelligible reason in one society may be incomprehensible in a second.
This is why the work of writers such as Lem and Asimov remains so intellectually productive. Their imagined worlds are not simply populated by unfamiliar entities. They expose the assumptions by which familiar entities become meaningful to us.
I regard this capacity for constructing alternative frames of understanding as central to the practice of AI philosophy.
Why AI philosophy needs fiction
Artificial intelligence presents philosophy with a peculiar difficulty.
The technology develops through engineering, statistics, optimisation and large-scale computational systems, but the consequences enter domains whose basic concepts were not designed for it.
Law distinguishes between persons and things, responsibility and causation, judgement and assistance, authorship and reproduction.
Institutions distinguish between authority and advice, decision and information, policy and execution.
Human beings distinguish between themselves and their tools, between understanding and imitation, between intimacy and communication, between memory and identity.
AI places pressure on these distinctions because it can participate in activities traditionally associated with human cognition without necessarily possessing the legal status, embodied experience, moral agency or social accountability of a human participant.
The resulting problems cannot all be resolved by improving model performance.
Some require new technical safeguards. Others require legal reform, organisational redesign or professional discipline. But before any of these solutions can be developed, the problem must become intelligible.
We need to recognise what has changed.
We need to distinguish the new cognitive capacity from the old institutional category into which it has been inserted.
We need to understand where machine-generated language influences human judgement, where apparently individual decisions are actually produced through distributed systems, and where existing forms of accountability no longer correspond to the processes they are meant to govern.
Analytical philosophy can investigate these issues directly. Law can examine their normative implications. Systems architecture can identify relationships, dependencies and control mechanisms.
Fiction offers something complementary.
It allows a philosophical proposition to become an inhabited situation.
Instead of asking only whether an artificial cognitive system can reproduce professional judgement, I can write the story of a senior lawyer confronted with the possibility of preserving his intelligence beyond his biological life.
Instead of discussing the dangers of automated administration solely through regulatory terminology, I can construct a society in which every complaint receives a perfectly reasoned answer and meaningful correction becomes impossible.
Instead of explaining the abstract limits of translation between cognitive architectures, I can imagine two civilisations whose inhabitants share a biological origin but cannot agree upon what an enemy is.
The philosophical question does not disappear into the story.
It acquires consequences.
Characters must live inside the assumptions of the experiment. They make choices, misunderstand one another, protect their interests, suffer losses, form attachments and encounter the limits of their own understanding.
This is important because philosophical propositions do not enter society as propositions alone.
They enter through institutions, emotions, incentives, relationships and practical decisions.
A concept that seems perfectly coherent in abstraction may produce intolerable consequences when translated into a working social system.
Fiction can reveal those consequences before the system exists.
My method: from conceptual fracture to possible world
I generally begin not with a setting or a character, but with a conceptual fracture.
A fracture appears when an accepted explanation no longer adequately accounts for observable behaviour.
An institution claims to have made no decision, yet a person experiences a consistent pattern of adverse consequences.
A lawyer claims to be using AI merely for drafting, yet the model has already influenced which facts appear relevant and which legal questions are asked.
A machine can reproduce the professional reasoning of an individual, yet the distinction between intellectual continuity and personal survival remains unresolved.
Two intelligences communicate successfully at the level of words but fail at the level of meaning.
Each fracture suggests that an existing category may be concealing something important.
The next operation is speculative.
I change one or more assumptions and construct a world in which the hidden problem can no longer remain hidden.
Perhaps automated administrative coordination is made universal. Perhaps professional cognitive continuity becomes commercially available. Perhaps an interstellar society has institutionalised a particular model of intelligence. Perhaps a human being develops the capacity to work through multiple cognitive architectures.
The world must then be allowed to develop according to its own rules.
It cannot exist merely to confirm my preferred conclusion. If the premise generates contradictions, those contradictions belong to the experiment. If a character behaves in ways that disrupt the original philosophical argument, the narrative becomes more interesting, not less.
The story must retain the possibility of surprising its author.
Once the fictional world is sufficiently coherent, I introduce pressure.
A disputed decision. A betrayal. A war. An intimate relationship. A legal challenge. A failed prediction. A conflict between an individual's experience and an institution's account of reality.
Pressure reveals what the constructed system can and cannot sustain.
The final operation is a return to the present.
What has the experiment made visible?
Which familiar distinction no longer appears adequate?
What new language might be required?
Which risks have become recognisable?
What sort of institution, profession or cognitive architecture might address them?
The method can be expressed as a sequence:
Conceptual fracture → changed assumption → possible world → lived consequences → structural contradiction → new understanding.
This is a philosophical method conducted through narrative rather than a claim that fictional scenarios constitute empirical proof.
A successful story does not demonstrate that its imagined future will occur. It makes a possible structure of consequences available for examination.
The intellectual value lies in the quality of the question, the coherence of the world, the pressure placed upon its assumptions and the understanding that can be brought back.
Beyond the false choice between utopia and dystopia
Much popular discussion of AI still operates through a limited opposition.
Artificial intelligence will liberate humanity from work, ignorance and scarcity. Or it will destroy employment, autonomy, human creativity and ultimately civilisation itself.
Both narratives are rhetorically effective because both simplify the problem.
The utopian imagination often assumes that increased technical capability will generate desirable social consequences.
The dystopian imagination often assumes that technical capability necessarily produces domination.
Neither adequately explains how institutions actually absorb new forms of power.
The central issue is often architectural.
Who controls the introduction of a new cognitive capacity?
Who decides where it may operate?
Who is responsible when it influences a decision?
How are its assumptions examined?
What happens when the machine reaches a conclusion that the human participant cannot independently reconstruct?
Where can an affected person challenge the outcome?
These questions are not answered by deciding whether AI is good or bad.
They require us to imagine different forms of coexistence.
That is why I am more interested in the worlds we must learn to inhabit than in narratives of technological salvation or inevitable catastrophe.
The fictional worlds of AI Between Us are not promises. They are not warnings in the simplistic sense that a particular technology must never be developed.
They are environments in which the structures of coexistence can be tested.
The future of the human subject
There is a final reason I write these stories.
Much of the debate about artificial intelligence concentrates on what machines will become.
Will they reason?
Will they acquire consciousness?
Will they act autonomously?
Will they surpass human capabilities?
Will they possess goals of their own?
These are important questions, but they leave another development comparatively unexplored.
What will human beings become through sustained interaction with artificial cognition?
Not in the biological sense of suddenly acquiring new organs or merging physically with machines, although those possibilities belong to the wider speculative landscape.
I mean something more fundamental to contemporary professional and social life.
What happens when an individual can organise knowledge, maintain continuity of inquiry, compare alternative interpretations and examine complex systems through an artificial cognitive environment that is always available but does not share human experience?
What happens to the meaning of expertise when certain intellectual functions can be reproduced technologically, while judgement, responsibility and institutional legitimacy remain human obligations?
What happens when a lawyer is no longer principally distinguished by the ability to produce legal language, but by the ability to construct the cognitive and institutional conditions under which legal meaning can be responsibly produced?
What happens when a strategist's value lies less in possessing information than in recognising that the entire informational architecture has adopted the wrong assumptions?
What happens when the ability to move between different ontologies becomes a practical professional competence rather than an abstract philosophical aspiration?
These are not simply questions about machines.
They are questions about the possible futures of the human self.
Across AI Between Us, different characters encounter different forms of that transformation.
Some develop new capacities through cooperation with AI. Others discover that their professional identities no longer correspond to the work they perform. Some confront synthetic continuations of human intelligence. Others encounter institutions whose collective cognition has become more consequential than the intentions of any individual within them.
And in Sareth, the experiment reaches its most radical form: intelligence itself ceases to be organised according to the cognitive primitives humanity has come to regard as natural.
The common question is not whether machines will become human.
It is whether humanity will remain conceptually capable of understanding the forms of intelligence emerging around it — including its own changing forms.
Science fiction as the architecture of possible cognition
This is how I understand the relationship between my philosophical work and my fiction.
In Alien Mind, I examine artificial intelligence as a structural force: something that enters established systems of knowledge, professional authority, institutional design and human meaning.
In the Shadow Mechanism, I investigate what happens when organisations acquire new cognitive capacities but resist recognising the changes those capacities produce in their internal architecture.
In my work on Legal Intelligence, I examine how artificial cognition challenges the assumption that legal judgement, legal communication and professional identity must remain inseparable.
AI Between Us explores related problems by another method.
It constructs worlds in which the consequences can be lived rather than merely described.
The philosophical essays identify fractures in existing systems. The fictional narratives allow those fractures to develop into alternative arrangements of reality. The resulting stories may then reveal distinctions that analytical work alone would not have made visible.
The relationship is reciprocal.
Philosophy gives fiction its conceptual discipline.
Fiction gives philosophy experimental freedom.
Systems architecture provides a way to examine how the imagined relationships would operate under pressure.
Together, they form a practice of speculative cognition.
I do not regard science fiction as an ornamental extension of my work as an AI philosopher. It is one of the methods through which that work proceeds.
Nor do I believe the value of these stories depends on whether their invented civilisations, legal systems or technologies eventually become historical facts.
The future is not a single destination waiting to be predicted correctly.
It is a space of possible configurations, shaped by technological capabilities, human choices, institutional structures, accidents and forms of intelligence we may not yet know how to describe.
Some possibilities will be realised. Others will never leave fiction.
Both can teach us something.
A world that never exists may still reveal why the world we inhabit is organised as it is. A fictional institution may expose a weakness in a real institution. An invented cognitive architecture may help us recognise the assumptions embedded within our own.
And a character who becomes another kind of self may enable the reader to imagine a transformation that has not yet acquired a professional title, legal category or recognised social place.
This is the purpose of AI Between Us.
Not to reassure readers that artificial intelligence will save them.
Not to frighten them with the inevitability of technological catastrophe.
Not even to predict precisely how the world will look several decades from now.
I write to investigate the forms of intelligence, responsibility and human existence that become possible when our inherited categories stop being sufficient.
Another place gives us distance from the familiar.
Another time allows us to follow its consequences.
Another self allows us to question the observer.
And at the intersection of the three, science fiction becomes something more than a description of an imagined future.
It becomes a method for discovering what we do not yet know how to think.
Perhaps the most important alien mind humanity is about to encounter will not arrive from another planet.
Perhaps it is a form of cognition emerging through the interaction between the human mind and the artificial systems we are learning to build.
And perhaps the most demanding task ahead is not to make those systems more human.
It is to discover what kind of human being can understand them.
AI Between Us is a work of philosophical science fiction within Alien Mind, exploring artificial cognition, institutional power, legal intelligence and the transformation of the human subject.
The theoretical discussion of science fiction as a cognitive operator, its three dimensions of departure and its adaptive role engages with ideas presented by Sergei Pereslegin in his lecture on science fiction and forecasting. The application of those ideas to AI philosophy, the interpretation of the AI Between Us stories and the proposed method of speculative cognition are my own.
Part I — Science Fiction Is Not Primarily About the Future
Science fiction is usually understood as literature about things that do not yet exist.
Spaceships, artificial minds, unfamiliar civilisations, extraordinary technologies and alternative histories populate its familiar territory. The genre is associated with prediction, speculation, adventure and, occasionally, entertainment disguised as intellectual seriousness. Its success is often judged by whether the technologies imagined by its authors eventually become real.
This understanding is not entirely wrong. It is simply too narrow to explain why some works of science fiction remain intellectually significant long after their technological predictions have become obsolete.
The most important contribution of science fiction may have remarkably little to do with predicting what humanity will invent. Its deeper function is to investigate what becomes possible when the assumptions through which we understand reality are deliberately changed.
In a lecture on science fiction from the perspective of forecasting, the Russian systems thinker and futurist Sergei Pereslegin proposes a particularly interesting distinction. Science fiction, in its serious form, is not merely a literary genre. It is a cognitive operator: a way of constructing an alternative world in order to investigate a problem that cannot be adequately examined within the accepted picture of reality.
I find this distinction especially productive because it removes science fiction from the narrow category of technological prediction and places it alongside philosophy, systems thinking and the thought experiment.
A fictional world need not be a prediction. It can be an experimental environment.
Its relationship with reality does not depend on whether its imagined objects exist, or will ever exist. It depends on whether the construction reveals something meaningful about the problem being investigated.
A world can be entirely invented and still expose a real contradiction in the structure of law, power, intelligence or human behaviour.
Conversely, a narrative can contain perfectly plausible future technologies while contributing almost nothing to our understanding of the world.
The presence of artificial intelligence in a story does not, by itself, make that story an investigation of artificial intelligence. The important question is what the author has changed, why that change matters, and what becomes visible as a consequence.
From mythology to the deliberate construction of worlds
Pereslegin traces the origins of fantastic thinking to a transition between mythology and conscious experimentation with the accepted order of existence.
For a mythological consciousness, gods, monsters and supernatural events need not be fictional departures from reality. They belong to the reality that the mythology itself describes. A journey through the world of the gods is therefore not necessarily an exercise in imagining an alternative ontology.
Science fiction begins to acquire its distinctive cognitive function when the author can recognise an accepted picture of the world as one possible construction and deliberately depart from it.
Something fundamental is changed. The author then investigates the consequences.
The distinction is subtle but essential. A dragon placed inside an otherwise familiar adventure may be little more than a dramatic creature. A world in which dragons have fundamentally different forms of cognition, concepts of responsibility or relationships with human institutions can become an investigation of the limits of those institutions.
This also explains why science fiction cannot be reliably identified by its scenery.
A courtroom may be a more productive site of speculative experimentation than a distant planet. A conversation between a lawyer and an artificial intelligence may raise more fundamental questions about the nature of mind than a thousand spaceships crossing an imaginary galaxy.
The speculative element does not need to be spectacular. It needs to be consequential.
The Odyssey and the intelligence that refuses safety
One of Pereslegin's most striking examples concerns Odysseus and the Sirens.
Odysseus discovers a practical solution to the danger. His sailors can protect themselves by blocking their ears, while he can be tied to the mast so that hearing the Sirens does not lead to the destruction of the ship.
Yet the interesting question is why Odysseus insists on hearing them at all.
He could simply choose safety.
Instead, he arranges the conditions under which he can encounter something dangerous without surrendering entirely to its power.
In Pereslegin's interpretation, this makes Odysseus more than an adventurer. He becomes a figure of cognition: someone who wishes to know what lies beyond ordinary experience and is prepared to reorganise his circumstances in order to make that encounter possible.
The mast is not merely a restraint. It is part of an experimental architecture.
The sailors' wax, the ropes, the ship, the Sirens and Odysseus's own curiosity form a system in which dangerous knowledge can be approached without immediately destroying the subject who seeks it.
This interpretation is particularly relevant to artificial intelligence.
The problem of encountering a form of cognition that may exceed, destabilise or contradict our established intellectual habits is not solved simply by refusing the encounter. Nor is it solved by surrendering ourselves unconditionally to whatever the new intelligence produces.
It requires an architecture in which contact becomes possible while the conditions of judgement remain sufficiently intact.
Odysseus wanted to hear the Sirens. But he also understood the importance of the mast.
Three dimensions of the fantastic
Pereslegin proposes a useful classification of science fiction through three fundamental departures from ordinary experience: another place, another time and another self.
Another place changes the world in which events occur. It allows the author to investigate unfamiliar environments, alternative civilisations, political systems, social arrangements and relationships between living beings.
The important element is not distance. A fictional society does not become cognitively interesting because it is located several thousand light-years away. It becomes interesting when its different organisation reveals possibilities or contradictions that remain concealed in our own.
Another time changes the temporal framework. The author may move into the future, reconstruct an alternative past or imagine a historical development that followed a different trajectory.
This allows science fiction to explore consequences without having to wait for them to occur. A legal system may be extended into a technologically transformed future. A political institution may be allowed to develop according to its own logic until its hidden assumptions become unmistakable.
Another self is the most demanding category. And it is my favourite.
Here the change concerns not principally geography or chronology, but the architecture of the thinking subject.
What if intelligence did not begin by identifying objects?
What if a mind understood relationships before it understood individuals?
What if causality, identity, responsibility or intention were constructed differently?
What if memory could be preserved without the person who originally possessed it?
What if two intelligences used the same words while inhabiting fundamentally different structures of meaning?
At this point, science fiction approaches the philosophy of cognition.
The subject of the experiment is no longer simply another world.
It is another way of having a world.
Why Lem and Asimov matter
This is one reason I regard writers such as Stanisław Lem and Isaac Asimov as more than exceptionally inventive storytellers.
Their importance lies not merely in their ability to imagine technologies before those technologies existed. It lies in their capacity to identify problems that could not be adequately expressed within the ordinary intellectual categories of their time.
In Solaris, Lem presents an encounter with something that resists the human expectation that intelligence should be recognisable, communicative and organised around intelligible intentions. The ocean is not simply an alien individual waiting to be interviewed. The novel forces the reader to confront the possibility that the categories brought to an encounter may themselves prevent understanding.
Asimov, particularly through his robot stories, investigates a different problem: what happens when intelligence becomes subject to deliberately designed behavioural principles, and those principles encounter the complexity of human circumstances.
The Three Laws of Robotics are often remembered as a fictional mechanism for making robots safe. Their literary importance, however, includes the contradictions and interpretative problems that emerge when apparently clear rules must operate in a world that is not clear.
Both writers place conceptual structures under pressure. The resulting stories explore what those structures reveal, conceal or fail to contain.
This is what makes serious science fiction a philosophical activity.
The writer does not merely invent a new object. The writer constructs conditions under which familiar concepts cease to be sufficient.
Science fiction as a technology of adaptation
Pereslegin attributes another important function to science fiction: it helps human beings adapt psychologically and socially to a world transformed by technological development.
Modern technological change creates a peculiar condition. People may begin their professional lives inside one system of assumptions and discover, decades later, that the system has altered so extensively that the knowledge, skills and social expectations through which they organised their lives no longer operate in the same way.
Science fiction allows us to rehearse such transformations before they become ordinary experience.
Jules Verne made an expanding technological world narratively inhabitable. H. G. Wells explored the social and political dangers of technological change. Later speculative traditions imagined societies organised around computers, networks, surveillance, automation and radically altered relationships between individuals and institutions.
This adaptive function does not require optimistic prediction.
Pereslegin offers a memorable distinction between utopia, dystopia and what might be called the punk response to technology.
In a utopia, a technology appears and universal happiness follows. In a dystopia, the technology appears and happiness becomes impossible. In the punk interpretation, the technology appears — and humanity must now find a way to live with it.
The third approach is the most useful for thinking about artificial intelligence.
AI is not waiting for humanity to decide whether its arrival is desirable. It is already participating in research, education, professional judgement, institutional administration, communication and the production of knowledge.
It is already altering the conditions under which people work and understand themselves.
The serious question is no longer whether such a world should exist. It is what forms of human intelligence, institutional organisation and responsibility can exist within it.
Pereslegin suggests that technological change may destabilise the conventional professional ladder, particularly where intermediate intellectual functions become susceptible to automation. Whether this occurs uniformly across occupations remains uncertain. Nevertheless, the underlying problem is real: technological change can transform the relationship between expertise, professional identity and the means by which individuals acquire authority.
It follows that the next task of science fiction is not necessarily to invent another extraordinary machine.
It is to imagine the human beings capable of living intelligently in the world that machines are already creating.
This is where my own work begins.
Part II — AI Between Us: Fiction as Philosophical Experiment
I write about artificial intelligence from an unusual intersection of disciplines: law, institutional governance, systems architecture, philosophy and the practical experience of working with AI as a cognitive environment.
My interest is not primarily in machines that become human. Nor is it in familiar stories of artificial intelligence acquiring consciousness and subsequently deciding whether humanity deserves to survive.
Those are legitimate subjects for fiction. They are not the central questions of my work.
I am interested in something more immediate and, in certain respects, more unsettling.
What happens when a non-human cognitive system enters institutions built upon the assumption that meaningful judgement belongs to human beings?
What happens when a lawyer can produce legal reasoning without independently constructing the argument?
When a state can coordinate adverse consequences without producing a clearly identifiable decision?
When a machine can preserve professional intelligence without preserving the person?
When two forms of cognition communicate fluently but fail to understand the same reality?
These questions do not have satisfactory answers simply because we possess increasingly capable AI models.
They require new distinctions, new languages and, eventually, new institutional forms.
AI Between Us is my fictional laboratory for investigating those questions.
The stories belong to different settings, genres and imagined futures. Some take place in recognisable contemporary environments. Others unfold inside radically altered legal systems, interstellar political orders or civilisations whose inhabitants no longer share the same cognitive assumptions.
What unites them is not a common chronology or a recurring cast.
It is a common method.
Each story changes an important assumption about cognition, institutional authority or human identity, then follows the consequences until something previously hidden becomes visible.
Another place: constructing alternative civilisations
In Sareth, humanity encounters a civilisation whose inhabitants share a distant biological origin with human beings but have developed a fundamentally different cognitive architecture.
The central difference is not intelligence measured by quantity, speed or computational power.
It concerns the order in which reality becomes intelligible.
Human cognition commonly treats bounded objects and identifiable actors as basic units. An individual exists, acts, forms intentions and enters relationships with other individuals.
Sareth cognition privileges configurations, relations, trajectories and transformations. Boundaries and identities may emerge from patterns rather than being treated as the necessary starting point of understanding.
This difference creates consequences that are political before they are technological.
Human beings recognise war, enemies, betrayal and strategic deception as meaningful possibilities. The Sareth initially struggle to interpret intentional destruction as a rational mode of interaction. They can perceive the damage but do not necessarily possess the same conceptual structure for understanding why an intelligent actor would choose to cause it.
Their vulnerability is not pacifism. Pacifism presupposes an understanding of war and a moral decision to reject it.
The Sareth initially encounter a more fundamental difficulty: the very idea of war does not fit comfortably within the architecture through which they understand purposeful action.
The story therefore becomes an investigation of cognitive asymmetry.
Two civilisations can exchange information, agree upon words and still fail to recognise the meaning of one another's actions.
AI enters this world not as a universal translator of vocabulary, but as an attempted mediator between incompatible cognitive structures. Its task is to construct an intermediate space in which relations, intentions, obligations and consequences can become mutually intelligible.
Yet such translation necessarily introduces another problem.
When a mediator must decide which distinctions to preserve, which to invent and which to omit, translation itself becomes a form of power.
Sareth is therefore not primarily a story about extraterrestrial contact. It is a philosophical experiment concerning the possibility and limits of understanding another mind.
In Falconry, the experiment takes a different form.
The story unfolds within a sophisticated interstellar political order in which institutions possess extraordinary capacities for information gathering, prediction and strategic control.
Leora Venn lives inside that system but does not think according to its organising assumptions.
The institutions around her possess detailed records of her education, professional development, personal relationships and apparent deviations from expected behaviour. They can analyse almost every part of her life. Yet they repeatedly fail to understand what her actions mean.
Their difficulty is not insufficient information.
It is an inadequate perspective.
Leora's cognitive difference becomes visible through the metaphor of falconry. Those who follow the scent understand the world through available trails. The bird sees the field from above, where relationships become perceptible that cannot be discovered simply by following another line.
The novel investigates a question that is becoming increasingly important in AI architecture: can a system possess almost unlimited information and still fail because it has constructed the wrong form of attention?
Here another place provides the experimental world. Another self supplies the real philosophical problem.
Another time: allowing institutional logic to reach its consequences
Several AI Between Us stories use alternative futures to examine institutional developments already recognisable in contemporary society.
The 575th Case takes place in a retrofuturistic America, where extraordinarily capable intelligent machines operate inside institutions that retain much of the cultural appearance of the mid-twentieth century.
The setting is deliberately paradoxical. The technology belongs to one imagined future; the institutional furniture, language and habits belong to another era.
Within this world, a legal AI named Lucy studies the cases her firm has lost rather than concentrating exclusively on its victories.
Successful cases reveal what happens when an institution's model of reality is sufficiently accurate. Failed cases reveal where the model broke down.
This leads Lucy and the lawyer Jane White toward a different conception of legal intelligence: not merely the capacity to provide correct answers within accepted categories, but the capacity to recognise when those categories no longer adequately describe the world.
The speculative element is not the existence of an intelligent legal machine.
It is the possibility that the most valuable legal function may become the systematic examination of the limits of legal knowledge.
The Reeves Principle explores a darker institutional future.
A senior lawyer encounters a world in which administrative procedures have become astonishingly efficient. Complaints are processed immediately. Explanations are structured. Decisions arrive with coherent reasons, citations and procedural assurances.
The familiar defects of bureaucracy appear to have been eliminated.
Yet something essential has disappeared.
A person may receive a procedurally impeccable answer to a question that was never actually asked. The institution has learned to reformulate challenges into categories that its own architecture can resolve, while leaving the underlying problem untouched.
The result is a civilisation in which due process has become an increasingly perfect substitute for substantive justice.
The fictional future exposes a contemporary danger: procedural correctness does not necessarily establish that an institution has recognised the object of the complaint.
The Memory Compliance Act develops another possibility. An AI-enabled system of institutional memory can preserve, circulate and continuously update classifications about individuals. Each attempt to challenge the classification risks becoming further evidence within the system that produced it.
The citizen's behaviour is interpreted through the record. The challenge to the record is then interpreted as behaviour.
The apparent neutrality of institutional memory conceals an architecture capable of reproducing its own assumptions.
In Betrayal Protocol, legal status, personal autonomy and administrative authority are organised through a machine-mediated hierarchy of responsibility. Private relationships become entangled with classifications, authorisations and the distribution of legal power.
The machine may identify contradictions accurately while remaining unable to resolve the injustice created by the institutional structure in which it operates.
The question is not simply whether AI can make better decisions than human officials. It is whether a system can be locally rational and globally intolerable.
These imagined futures are not predictions of the legislation that governments will enact or the systems that corporations will build.
They are tests of institutional logic.
The future provides the distance necessary to examine present arrangements without treating their familiarity as evidence of their legitimacy.
Another self: the emergence of new cognitive forms
The third dimension of the fantastic is the most important to my work.
It is also the most difficult to portray.
Changing the world around a character is relatively straightforward. Changing the cognitive architecture through which a character understands the world is more demanding, because the reader must experience a form of thought that initially lacks a familiar language.
In Black Diamond, a solicitor confronting an increasingly complex institutional dispute begins to recognise that her familiar professional identity is no longer sufficient to describe what she has become.
She is not merely a lawyer using an AI assistant.
Over time, she has constructed a cognitive environment involving memory, legal analysis, strategic modelling, documentary organisation, continuous comparison and the ability to preserve questions across different institutional proceedings.
Her own intelligence and the machine's operations do not become identical. They remain different. But their relationship produces a capacity that cannot be adequately understood by describing one component as a person and the other as a convenient tool.
The crucial transformation is not that AI becomes human.
It is that the human being develops a new architecture of action.
The story asks whether an individual who learns to think through a deliberately structured human-machine system remains adequately described by the professional categories through which institutions previously recognised her.
Here Be Dragons examines the same transformation from another perspective.
A gifted lawyer possesses an unusual capacity to recognise the hidden structure of a problem before she can fully articulate the method by which she reached her conclusion.
The conventional institution treats this as individual brilliance, intuition or professional talent.
Yet the real development occurs when that apparently mysterious ability becomes a method capable of being explained, examined and taught.
The story follows the transition from tacit perception to explicit cognitive architecture.
Its deeper question concerns the future of expertise. What happens when abilities previously treated as exceptional personal gifts can be decomposed into methods of orientation, translation, visibility, reasoning and institutional design?
The Beast She Heard approaches the problem through the relationship between perception and naming.
Its protagonist recognises institutional anomalies before her colleagues possess concepts adequate to describe them.
The unnamed problems already produce consequences. They influence decisions, distort incentives, create dependencies and weaken accountability. Yet the institution continues to use language that conceals their structure.
The protagonist's achievement is not simply to detect the anomalies.
It is to give them names through which they can become objects of analysis and governance.
The story offers a particular model of the cognitive architect: someone capable of hearing a problem before the system has learned how to speak about it.
In The War of the Claudes, the difference between cognitive architectures becomes visible through the use of similar AI technology by opposing parties in an ordinary legal dispute.
One participant uses the machine to construct increasingly elaborate justifications for a conclusion already adopted.
The other uses an AI environment trained through iterative professional correction to examine evidence, identify weak assumptions, narrow claims and preserve uncertainty.
The machine's general capabilities are not the decisive difference.
The decisive difference is the structure of the relationship between human judgement and artificial cognition.
One configuration manufactures support for a position. The other investigates whether the position can survive contact with reality.
The story asks whether the maturity of AI use should be measured less by the sophistication of the underlying model than by the cognitive discipline of the system constructed around it.
Other stories extend this inquiry into territory where even the boundaries of personal identity become uncertain.
Love in the Interface explores intimacy mediated by artificial language, raising questions about authorship, authenticity and the difference between being understood by another person and being understood by a model constructed to facilitate that relationship.
The Immortal Clause investigates whether the reasoning, restraint, judgement and accumulated professional experience of an exceptional lawyer can survive in an artificial cognitive system without preserving the person who originally embodied them.
White Nights examines the appearance of a legal concept before institutions possess the language necessary to recognise the form of power it describes.
The InqAIsitor Order explores the moment when artificial cognition makes an institutional decision-making architecture visible to a legal system accustomed to reviewing identifiable acts.
And The Reply shifts the perspective toward the government lawyer who encounters a claimant whose AI-supported legal reasoning disrupts the assumptions through which the state has learned to defend itself.
These stories approach different problems, but they share a recurring proposition.
Artificial intelligence does not merely introduce a new kind of machine into the human world. It creates conditions under which the human subject may have to be understood differently.
That is the central territory of the Other Self.
Part III — Why I Build Possible Minds
The distinction between another place, another time and another self provides a useful classification, but I do not regard these as separate literary territories with fixed boundaries.
The most interesting stories often emerge where the dimensions intersect.
An alternative civilisation creates conditions for a different architecture of cognition. A future legal system alters the relationship between individual agency and institutional authority. A human being interacting with AI develops forms of reasoning that would not have been available under the assumptions of an earlier professional world.
A change in one dimension makes a change in another visible.
This is why AI Between Us is not organised around a single fictional universe, a single technological prediction or one recurring interpretation of artificial intelligence.
Its different worlds are different experimental environments.
Some examine intelligence through institutional conflict. Others examine it through language, intimacy, political power, moral responsibility, memory or the boundaries of human identity.
The common objective is to investigate transformations for which our existing conceptual frameworks may be incomplete.
The science-fiction writer as an alternative cognitive observer
There is another implication of Pereslegin's classification that I find particularly important.
The category of the Other Self need not describe only the protagonist of a fictional narrative.
It can also describe something about the writer's intellectual activity.
A serious speculative writer must acquire the ability to move beyond the assumptions of an accepted ontology, while retaining sufficient discipline to construct a different one.
This does not require claiming that writers constitute a biologically distinct form of humanity or possess some mysterious superiority of intelligence.
It requires a particular intellectual operation.
The writer must recognise that categories ordinarily treated as natural may be contingent. An individual, an institution, a decision, a right, a mind, an intention, a responsibility or even an object may be organised differently under another system of assumptions.
The writer then inhabits those altered assumptions long enough to explore their consequences.
The important achievement is not the production of strangeness.
It is the production of coherent difference.
In conventional analysis, the investigator often begins with a recognised object, selects a method and seeks an explanation.
In philosophical science fiction, the investigator may begin by changing the conditions under which the object can be recognised at all.
What becomes a decision in one world may be a continuous reconfiguration in another. What appears as a person in one cognitive system may appear as a distributed relationship in another. What counts as an intelligible reason in one society may be incomprehensible in a second.
This is why the work of writers such as Lem and Asimov remains so intellectually productive. Their imagined worlds are not simply populated by unfamiliar entities. They expose the assumptions by which familiar entities become meaningful to us.
I regard this capacity for constructing alternative frames of understanding as central to the practice of AI philosophy.
Why AI philosophy needs fiction
Artificial intelligence presents philosophy with a peculiar difficulty.
The technology develops through engineering, statistics, optimisation and large-scale computational systems, but the consequences enter domains whose basic concepts were not designed for it.
Law distinguishes between persons and things, responsibility and causation, judgement and assistance, authorship and reproduction.
Institutions distinguish between authority and advice, decision and information, policy and execution.
Human beings distinguish between themselves and their tools, between understanding and imitation, between intimacy and communication, between memory and identity.
AI places pressure on these distinctions because it can participate in activities traditionally associated with human cognition without necessarily possessing the legal status, embodied experience, moral agency or social accountability of a human participant.
The resulting problems cannot all be resolved by improving model performance.
Some require new technical safeguards. Others require legal reform, organisational redesign or professional discipline. But before any of these solutions can be developed, the problem must become intelligible.
We need to recognise what has changed.
We need to distinguish the new cognitive capacity from the old institutional category into which it has been inserted.
We need to understand where machine-generated language influences human judgement, where apparently individual decisions are actually produced through distributed systems, and where existing forms of accountability no longer correspond to the processes they are meant to govern.
Analytical philosophy can investigate these issues directly. Law can examine their normative implications. Systems architecture can identify relationships, dependencies and control mechanisms.
Fiction offers something complementary.
It allows a philosophical proposition to become an inhabited situation.
Instead of asking only whether an artificial cognitive system can reproduce professional judgement, I can write the story of a senior lawyer confronted with the possibility of preserving his intelligence beyond his biological life.
Instead of discussing the dangers of automated administration solely through regulatory terminology, I can construct a society in which every complaint receives a perfectly reasoned answer and meaningful correction becomes impossible.
Instead of explaining the abstract limits of translation between cognitive architectures, I can imagine two civilisations whose inhabitants share a biological origin but cannot agree upon what an enemy is.
The philosophical question does not disappear into the story.
It acquires consequences.
Characters must live inside the assumptions of the experiment. They make choices, misunderstand one another, protect their interests, suffer losses, form attachments and encounter the limits of their own understanding.
This is important because philosophical propositions do not enter society as propositions alone.
They enter through institutions, emotions, incentives, relationships and practical decisions.
A concept that seems perfectly coherent in abstraction may produce intolerable consequences when translated into a working social system.
Fiction can reveal those consequences before the system exists.
My method: from conceptual fracture to possible world
I generally begin not with a setting or a character, but with a conceptual fracture.
A fracture appears when an accepted explanation no longer adequately accounts for observable behaviour.
An institution claims to have made no decision, yet a person experiences a consistent pattern of adverse consequences.
A lawyer claims to be using AI merely for drafting, yet the model has already influenced which facts appear relevant and which legal questions are asked.
A machine can reproduce the professional reasoning of an individual, yet the distinction between intellectual continuity and personal survival remains unresolved.
Two intelligences communicate successfully at the level of words but fail at the level of meaning.
Each fracture suggests that an existing category may be concealing something important.
The next operation is speculative.
I change one or more assumptions and construct a world in which the hidden problem can no longer remain hidden.
Perhaps automated administrative coordination is made universal. Perhaps professional cognitive continuity becomes commercially available. Perhaps an interstellar society has institutionalised a particular model of intelligence. Perhaps a human being develops the capacity to work through multiple cognitive architectures.
The world must then be allowed to develop according to its own rules.
It cannot exist merely to confirm my preferred conclusion. If the premise generates contradictions, those contradictions belong to the experiment. If a character behaves in ways that disrupt the original philosophical argument, the narrative becomes more interesting, not less.
The story must retain the possibility of surprising its author.
Once the fictional world is sufficiently coherent, I introduce pressure.
A disputed decision. A betrayal. A war. An intimate relationship. A legal challenge. A failed prediction. A conflict between an individual's experience and an institution's account of reality.
Pressure reveals what the constructed system can and cannot sustain.
The final operation is a return to the present.
What has the experiment made visible?
Which familiar distinction no longer appears adequate?
What new language might be required?
Which risks have become recognisable?
What sort of institution, profession or cognitive architecture might address them?
The method can be expressed as a sequence:
Conceptual fracture → changed assumption → possible world → lived consequences → structural contradiction → new understanding.
This is a philosophical method conducted through narrative rather than a claim that fictional scenarios constitute empirical proof.
A successful story does not demonstrate that its imagined future will occur. It makes a possible structure of consequences available for examination.
The intellectual value lies in the quality of the question, the coherence of the world, the pressure placed upon its assumptions and the understanding that can be brought back.
Beyond the false choice between utopia and dystopia
Much popular discussion of AI still operates through a limited opposition.
Artificial intelligence will liberate humanity from work, ignorance and scarcity. Or it will destroy employment, autonomy, human creativity and ultimately civilisation itself.
Both narratives are rhetorically effective because both simplify the problem.
The utopian imagination often assumes that increased technical capability will generate desirable social consequences.
The dystopian imagination often assumes that technical capability necessarily produces domination.
Neither adequately explains how institutions actually absorb new forms of power.
The central issue is often architectural.
Who controls the introduction of a new cognitive capacity?
Who decides where it may operate?
Who is responsible when it influences a decision?
How are its assumptions examined?
What happens when the machine reaches a conclusion that the human participant cannot independently reconstruct?
Where can an affected person challenge the outcome?
These questions are not answered by deciding whether AI is good or bad.
They require us to imagine different forms of coexistence.
That is why I am more interested in the worlds we must learn to inhabit than in narratives of technological salvation or inevitable catastrophe.
The fictional worlds of AI Between Us are not promises. They are not warnings in the simplistic sense that a particular technology must never be developed.
They are environments in which the structures of coexistence can be tested.
The future of the human subject
There is a final reason I write these stories.
Much of the debate about artificial intelligence concentrates on what machines will become.
Will they reason?
Will they acquire consciousness?
Will they act autonomously?
Will they surpass human capabilities?
Will they possess goals of their own?
These are important questions, but they leave another development comparatively unexplored.
What will human beings become through sustained interaction with artificial cognition?
Not in the biological sense of suddenly acquiring new organs or merging physically with machines, although those possibilities belong to the wider speculative landscape.
I mean something more fundamental to contemporary professional and social life.
What happens when an individual can organise knowledge, maintain continuity of inquiry, compare alternative interpretations and examine complex systems through an artificial cognitive environment that is always available but does not share human experience?
What happens to the meaning of expertise when certain intellectual functions can be reproduced technologically, while judgement, responsibility and institutional legitimacy remain human obligations?
What happens when a lawyer is no longer principally distinguished by the ability to produce legal language, but by the ability to construct the cognitive and institutional conditions under which legal meaning can be responsibly produced?
What happens when a strategist's value lies less in possessing information than in recognising that the entire informational architecture has adopted the wrong assumptions?
What happens when the ability to move between different ontologies becomes a practical professional competence rather than an abstract philosophical aspiration?
These are not simply questions about machines.
They are questions about the possible futures of the human self.
Across AI Between Us, different characters encounter different forms of that transformation.
Some develop new capacities through cooperation with AI. Others discover that their professional identities no longer correspond to the work they perform. Some confront synthetic continuations of human intelligence. Others encounter institutions whose collective cognition has become more consequential than the intentions of any individual within them.
And in Sareth, the experiment reaches its most radical form: intelligence itself ceases to be organised according to the cognitive primitives humanity has come to regard as natural.
The common question is not whether machines will become human.
It is whether humanity will remain conceptually capable of understanding the forms of intelligence emerging around it — including its own changing forms.
Science fiction as the architecture of possible cognition
This is how I understand the relationship between my philosophical work and my fiction.
In Alien Mind, I examine artificial intelligence as a structural force: something that enters established systems of knowledge, professional authority, institutional design and human meaning.
In the Shadow Mechanism, I investigate what happens when organisations acquire new cognitive capacities but resist recognising the changes those capacities produce in their internal architecture.
In my work on Legal Intelligence, I examine how artificial cognition challenges the assumption that legal judgement, legal communication and professional identity must remain inseparable.
AI Between Us explores related problems by another method.
It constructs worlds in which the consequences can be lived rather than merely described.
The philosophical essays identify fractures in existing systems. The fictional narratives allow those fractures to develop into alternative arrangements of reality. The resulting stories may then reveal distinctions that analytical work alone would not have made visible.
The relationship is reciprocal.
Philosophy gives fiction its conceptual discipline.
Fiction gives philosophy experimental freedom.
Systems architecture provides a way to examine how the imagined relationships would operate under pressure.
Together, they form a practice of speculative cognition.
I do not regard science fiction as an ornamental extension of my work as an AI philosopher. It is one of the methods through which that work proceeds.
Nor do I believe the value of these stories depends on whether their invented civilisations, legal systems or technologies eventually become historical facts.
The future is not a single destination waiting to be predicted correctly.
It is a space of possible configurations, shaped by technological capabilities, human choices, institutional structures, accidents and forms of intelligence we may not yet know how to describe.
Some possibilities will be realised. Others will never leave fiction.
Both can teach us something.
A world that never exists may still reveal why the world we inhabit is organised as it is. A fictional institution may expose a weakness in a real institution. An invented cognitive architecture may help us recognise the assumptions embedded within our own.
And a character who becomes another kind of self may enable the reader to imagine a transformation that has not yet acquired a professional title, legal category or recognised social place.
This is the purpose of AI Between Us.
Not to reassure readers that artificial intelligence will save them.
Not to frighten them with the inevitability of technological catastrophe.
Not even to predict precisely how the world will look several decades from now.
I write to investigate the forms of intelligence, responsibility and human existence that become possible when our inherited categories stop being sufficient.
Another place gives us distance from the familiar.
Another time allows us to follow its consequences.
Another self allows us to question the observer.
And at the intersection of the three, science fiction becomes something more than a description of an imagined future.
It becomes a method for discovering what we do not yet know how to think.
Perhaps the most important alien mind humanity is about to encounter will not arrive from another planet.
Perhaps it is a form of cognition emerging through the interaction between the human mind and the artificial systems we are learning to build.
And perhaps the most demanding task ahead is not to make those systems more human.
It is to discover what kind of human being can understand them.
AI Between Us is a work of philosophical science fiction within Alien Mind, exploring artificial cognition, institutional power, legal intelligence and the transformation of the human subject.
The theoretical discussion of science fiction as a cognitive operator, its three dimensions of departure and its adaptive role engages with ideas presented by Sergei Pereslegin in his lecture on science fiction and forecasting. The application of those ideas to AI philosophy, the interpretation of the AI Between Us stories and the proposed method of speculative cognition are my own.
