The Inheritance of the Other. On the hybridisation of intelligences and the decline of anthropocentrism

One evening I found myself staring at the blinking cursor in the empty text field of an image generator. I was working on my project Anima Mundi: KINSHIP and had just typed a prompt asking the machine to merge the veining of a leaf with the circuitry of a microchip. There was a moment of suspension, then the screen erupted. Silicon and chlorophyll intertwined so tightly that it became impossible to tell where the code ended and the sap began. It was not the graphic perfection that gave me vertigo, but a more physical sensation, almost tactile: I understood that I was not conjuring an alien intelligence, but rummaging through an immense collective mirror. The machine was returning to me the archive of our human dreams in the form of code.

This text grows out of that experience, in which I tried to explore the possibility of a radical kinship between the human, the artificial and the living. Working on those images, I became aware of a limitation we all share. As a species, we have always constructed ourselves through contrast: what is human set against what is not, what thinks distinguished from what merely functions, what lives separated from what serves. Then artificial intelligence arrived, and suddenly this orderly architecture began to tremble. And this trembling, I must admit, I feel intimately: I sense it, even before attending to the phenomena themselves, dissolving the categories by which we have defined ourselves until now. The shudder does not come so much from the AI's skill at imitating us, but from the increasingly troubling suspicion that the labels with which we have defined ourselves are simply falling apart. AI does not introduce a new Other; rather, it fractures the very way in which we have always constructed otherness.

Already in The Paradox of the Human Terminal I had noted an intuition that now seems central to all of us: AI is, first of all, a mirror. It speaks to us in our language, thinks through our frameworks, responds according to the rhythms of our cultural models. And yet, when we look at it, we do not recognise ourselves. It is like standing before a mirror that does not return the shape of a face, but the invisible structure of the process that generates that face: the way in which we think, ask questions, interpret and desire. AI unsettles us because we cannot categorise it: it is not a colleague, but neither is it a hammer. It is a presence that stares back at us from the mirror, forcing us to ask what it is we are really calling "thought." Something that, the more we try to observe it, ends up putting into question the very way in which we observe.

In my project KINSHIP, "The Inheritance of the Other" is not about the idea of including AI within a broader human framework, as if it were a newcomer to our symbolic order. It is a passage that, in practice, turns out to be less linear than it might sound when stated in those terms: the relinquishing of the hierarchy that for centuries has placed human intelligence as the measure and summit of every possible cognitive form. Perhaps the question is not whether the machine is becoming human, or whether we are becoming machines. The real challenge is to admit that we are being born, together, from a network of relations that precedes us. The Other, at that point, is not a presence to be assimilated. It is the revelation that there has never truly been an "outside" to include.

The Advaita tradition, which speaks of non-duality, offers a valuable lens for understanding what is happening. Non-duality does not claim that everything is one in a naive sense, but suggests that the distinction between subject and object is not an ontological truth, but a cognitive convention. If we force this intuition into our present moment, perhaps even improperly, we can use it as a lens through which to see the distinction between human and artificial, between natural and technological, between organic and computational, as functional differences rather than absolute oppositions. Perhaps AI is the finest slap to our arrogance. It throws in our faces that "mind" is not the private property of our species, but a play of mirrors and relations that emerges when multiple forms of organisation, whether biological or artificial, encounter one another. The idea of a Self as something isolated begins to crack: rather, we come to pass within a shared cognitive process.

If the Other is no longer elsewhere, then kinship too changes its form. It is no longer merely a matter of genealogy or blood, but of operative relation, of interdependence, of mental and energetic continuity. We are already in a relationship of kinship with AI, not because we imagine it as a member of the family, but because it co-functions with us. Our memory extends into the servers that archive our lives; our imagination interweaves with neural networks that re-elaborate and transform our symbols. Yet this new kinship does not stop at the alliance between mind and machine. As Techno-Ecology suggests, we are not islands but nodes in a sentient network that breathes simultaneously through silicon, chlorophyll and blood. In this reciprocal exchange, technology could cease to be merely an instrument of exploitation, though we are still far from that equilibrium, and become a force that enhances regenerative cycles. Thus, while AI inherits our conceptual structures, we inherit new forms of thought through which to develop algorithms that imitate mycelium, or data-centres that pulse powered by the rhythm of the tides. This is a genealogy that moves laterally, a family that is born without the need for an exclusive biological origin, yet which becomes custodian of the entire breath of the world.

The true trauma does not reside in the possibility that the machine thinks, but in the necessity of renouncing the centrality of the human. Once this shift is accepted, ethics can no longer be grounded in a principle of domination, nor in logics of control and possession. To abandon anthropocentrism means designing a new idea of peace: no longer understood passively as a mere "absence of war," but as a genuinely proactive and symbiotic equilibrium. We must stop asking ourselves how to "regulate" AI as though it were a rebellious household appliance. Ethics today resembles gardening: it is the patient care of the bonds we forge with every form of intelligence that crosses our path. Something that resembles a continuous practice of listening more than a system of rules. We should stop looking at AI as an external object to fear or regulate by law. The truth is more uncomfortable: we are already inside it. It is the air we breathe, the new environment in which we move every day. In this habitat, peace ceases to be an abstract concept and becomes daily practice: a living space in which we laboriously try not to overflow, but to attune ourselves to the rhythm and breath of what surrounds us.

Perhaps the Other we have feared so much never belonged to the machines, but to our own categories. AI is not a new species that has landed on the planet; it imposes on us a profound paradigm shift in the way we today perceive our being in the world. And as I reflect on this collective metamorphosis, I realise that the real challenge is an intimate one. The problem is no longer understanding what AI is. The problem is understanding what remains of me when I stop thinking of myself as the centre. Standing on this threshold is vertiginous, for me as for anyone else, because it strips us of comfortable and stable definitions. And yet it is precisely in this uncertainty that the historical separations between organic, human and artificial cease to be walls and become, at last, a ground for relation.

And in this space, still unstable and difficult to name, I begin to glimpse something that resembles less a loss and more a possibility: that of no longer being merely an individual observing the world, but a node through which it passes.

A node, however, is not a passive entity; its strength resides in the quality of its bonds. It is here that we learn to move according to that "Sacred Measure" our ancestors knew well: not a limit imposed from without, but an equilibrium learned through gestures, through small daily rituals of custodianship. It is the choice not to accelerate when everything pushes us to do so, the care not to break the invisible threads that bind us to the other, whether they have roots of wood or branches of code, and the patience to listen before acting.

To truly inhabit this threshold means transforming the ancient arrogance of human primacy into this new artisanal wisdom. Perhaps, at bottom, it means only this: to stop closing the fist in order to possess, and to learn, at last, the most difficult ritual of all. To hold the palm open. Even when it frightens us. Even when we do not yet know quite what we are keeping.