AI, limbic resonance and the evolution of places of care
By Rachel Cakebread
'Thought and experience had long ago parted ways, creating the conditions for radically distorted ideas about reality to take root in people’s minds and setting the stage for a modernity in which people were alienated from one another. Locked in their own privacy, flying into their inner selves, they had lost faith in their ability to transform their worlds and to create new, plural realities through their actions and their speech. People survived in modernity only by setting their gaze elsewhere, outside the world into ideal abstractions or into some immaterial, heavenly hereafter.' [Jennifer Banks, Natality [1]]
There is a mountain of information about artificial intelligence (AI) and how it is going to change and shape our futures. There is also resistance from the climate and social justice movements due to energy, water and human rights violations, as well as challenges to the colonial dynamics perpetuated in their development.[2] How to begin digesting what the roll out of AI means and how its application relates to climate psychology is a little overwhelming. What do our responses to AI tell us, and should we pursue its use? A recent ‘Thinking Space’ held by CPA emerged feelings from participants of apprehension, pressure, fear and conflict.[3] I personally resonate with all of these, as well as overwhelm, curiosity and a sense of fated resignation in using a system I know to be extractive, built on the same dynamics as all of our modern systems.
I am a bit of a technophobe, I don’t enjoy social media and I do not jump to thinking of Silicon Valley as a force for public good. On the other hand, I do use AI for my work with sustainable material datasets, for navigating Spanish bureaucracy (where I live as an ‘extranjero’- foreigner) and for other advice - like how to help my huerta (food garden) thrive organically. However, I also find the ability for the environmental and climate movements to create polarisation and put all forms of technology to a ‘moral purity’ test quite troubling.
My use of AI falls nicely into the ‘optimisation and extraction’ [of knowledge] category. Sometimes it feels very helpful, at other times it feels that I’m getting more information than I can process. There are also the unnerving queries in my head: ‘Is this actually right?’ ‘Can I trust this information?’ ‘Where am I being directed and by who?’ As illuminated in the Channel 4 documentary by Grayson Perry others are exploring a more relational or emotional engagement with AI, begging the question: ‘Are we seeking love from machines because we can’t face what love looks like in reality?’
Image: Maxim Berg
The quote I’ve included at the start of this piece reflects on the writing of Hannah Arendt from the 1950s, when totalitarianism thrived, due to what she believed was a profound isolation from one another in society. We are now seeing and experiencing these political ideas again;some may argue they never really waned. As Lewis et al. write in ‘A general theory of love’ modernity and information technologies demand us to pursue riches of money, social status and achievement and ‘a more thoroughgoing surrender – less time for relationships, less time for children, more time for impersonal everything.’[4] They propose that as mammalian creatures we have an in-built need for limbic connection, or love, and ‘without that biological anchor, all of us are flung outward, singly, into the encroaching dark.’ They also discuss how the rise of technologies in medicine (particularly in an American context from which they write) improved diagnosis and cure but also unearthed a paradoxical unpopularity, as clinicians began to put less emphasis on human connection and care.
In Issue 8 of Explorations in Climate Psychology,[5] Toby Chown interviewed Glen Slater on his book ‘Jung vs Borg’ where they discuss the archetypes of Hermes and Hestia; the former being the indiscriminate messenger, the latter the attendant to hearth, home and stillness. Slater, building on James Hillman’s idea writes that we are ‘in an era of Hermes intoxication’ where ‘our increasing adaptation to AI is unlikely to solve the climate crisis because it is unlikely to return our awareness to the mind-body-earth configurations that promote ecopsychological integrity.’ He also sees hope (and an opportunity) in a new counterculture that is pushing back against reactionary politics, nationalism and the technocrats of the digital world.[5]
As Jessica Ferrow also points out[3] ‘there are already some beautiful and deeply inspiring examples of AI being used for positive ends.. including Vanessa Andreotti's work Burnout from Humans, which invites readers to imagine how AI might help humanity learn how to navigate the social, ecological, and psychological destabilisation of this moment with greater compassion, accountability and wisdom.’ It feels to me that this is where climate psychology may be well placed to open space, to hold the tension of exploring how AI can give access to more inclusive and regenerative worldviews whilst also factoring the need for relational care and justice, particularly for those in the margins. In these deeply chaotic times – international record-breaking heat, climate disasters and hostile wars – I think we also need to find a way through our own ability to create polarisation so that we might include a broader spectrum of groups and their views into these spaces.
Image: Brian Garrity
Here I am left with the ideas of others - relational and regenerative design thinkers, such as Jenny Andersson, also speak of seeing ourselves as a part of living and evolving systems, all with the potential to adapt and shift to new ways of being. Her words seem fitting here:
'It is the shift from operating within a paradigm to seeing the paradigm itself as one partial and contingent way of understanding a living world. It requires the capacity to sense and act from the emerging future, rather than from the patterns of the past, whilst still understanding those patterns and what the next shift from them looks and feels like. It requires the capacity to perceive the singular essence of a person, place, or organisation, and the evolutionary role they are here to play within the living systems they belong to.’ [Jenny Andersson].
Notes
[1] Banks, J. (2023). Natality Toward a Philosophy of Birth. W. W. Norton & Company
[2] Unveiling the role of Artificial Intelligence in colonial dynamics
[3] From notes shared by Gillian Broad. A useful article by Jessica Farrow that formed the basis of some of the questions explored in that session.
[4] A general theory of love (2000). Lewis, T. Amini, F. Lannon, R. Vintage books, Random House.
[5] Explorations Issue 8 Heavy Weather: Exploring reactionary states of mind. Climate Psychology Alliance (2026). Article: Becoming deeply human in a post-human world, includes all references.
[6] One example that I love that I’ve seen recently are the youth revolts in India
[7] Taken from her Substack piece ‘What is the work of a Regenerative resource’
Author's Bio
Rachel Cakebread is a facilitator and regenerative designer, writer and member of the Explorations in Climate Psychology journal editorial team. She currently resides in Spain.
