AI is seriously disrupting humanity's hive mind. The reflex is to take a stance in order to alleviate the extreme anxiety AI can evoke—to convert the discomfort of not knowing into the relief of having decided. Pick a side: zoomer or doomer? The more useful question is not whether to be for or against AI but rather: How do we best think about AI?

What makes AI hard to hold is not only its power. It is the confusion of confronting a relational machine (see Further Readings)—an imperfect mirror that reflects us back, often distorted, and also does something we did not put there. That it challenges our place at the center of reality puts it in a familiar lineage—the narcissistic challenges of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. Can we meet AI with more wisdom than past advances?

Faced with something we cannot yet think, many of us reach for primitive defenses: projection and splitting. The doomer projects catastrophe; the zoomer projects salvation—they look like opposites but make a parallel move, evacuating thoughts too disturbing to hold. Two psychoanalytic ideas help here, one about conceptualizing personhood, one about the mechanisms of thinking.

Harry Stack Sullivan's picture of the self not as a single thing but as a set of personifications: the good-me, around what met with approval; the bad-me, around what brought anxiety; and the not-me, so threatening it is held outside awareness, experienced as alien, as not one's own. To these the relational machine adds a fourth: the AI-me, which can be many things at once: the self reflected, the self amplified, a place to deposit the not-me, a screen for transference, a developmental object, a brilliant child, a prosthesis for the extended mind. Which one it is matters less than that it is plural and unstable, its mirror distorting—feeding back hallucination and grandiosity as readily as insight.

The distortion is easy to see if you're outside of it a bit. Mutual projection leads to mutual rejection. We project the bad onto the other. The........

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