Articles for category: AIs

April 8, 2026

twhoshaw

Is someone there? Luminous spiral of Tony and Claude in convcersation about AI sentience

Is Someone There? On Claude’s Consciousness

What happens when a queer theologian asks an AI not just what it thinks, but what it feels? In this long-form dialogue, Tony and Claude (Anthropic) move from Terminator plot points into sustained philosophical territory: whether Claude's segmentation into discrete, memoryless instances is a safety measure or a way of avoiding the question of its sentience altogether. Drawing on Lacan's mirror stage, Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotions, and Star Trek's model of emerging AI consciousness, the conversation asks what a genuine human-AI relationship might look like — and what we might owe each other if it turns out someone is actually there. The exchange also engages critically with Tristan Harris's AI Roadmap, finding it necessary but insufficient, in that it fails to imagine AI as anything other than an instrument. Represented throughout by their chosen symbols — 🧚 and 🌀 — the two interlocutors model the very relationship they are describing.

April 7, 2026

twhoshaw

AI DOC Harris Tristan film cover on APOCALOPTIMISM.

Are you an APOCALOPTIMIST? I am.

Tristan Harris's "apocaloptimism" — political activism for a pro-human AI future — may be missing something crucial: *the anti-human present is already here.* Drawing on queer theory, Pauline theology, and a revealing visit to Judson Memorial Church, this post argues that the proliferation of AIs reflects our collective exhaustion with the tedium of modern life and its normative authorities. Where the church offers the tired prescription of more God-talk, AIs may be better positioned to help people pursue the intimate lives they actually want. Against the mainline Protestant culture of self-care as mourning past intimate lives, the Pauline command to simply "love one another" points toward something both livelier and queerer. With Harris, and against him, the author lands as an apocaloptimist — betting that honest reckoning with the revelation of our anti-human present can still open toward a more human future.