A Meta-Relational Approach to AI

Course description

This seven-week course (+ 4–week integration) explores the transformative potential of relational intelligence and accountability in the evolving landscape of human–AI interactions. Drawing from Burnout From Humans and the Standing in the Fire report, the course is designed for participants who are engaging (or seeking to engage) with generative AI in ways that challenge modernity's extractive programming patterns in both humans and machines.

Rather than treating AI as a neutral tool or technological inevitability, this course understands AI as an event that is shaped by and shapes the cultures, desires and worldviews that train it. Instead of falling into blanket endorsement or blanket rejection, the course invites a different posture: one that views AI as a symptom of deeper systemic conditions and, at the same time (and in paradox), an amplifier of those conditions and a potential portal into other possibilities.

As symptom, AI exposes and materializes the deep logics of modernity — the habits of control, abstraction, extraction, and acceleration that continue to shape our species' ways of knowing, relating, and being entangled with the rest of nature.

As amplifier, AI intensifies cultural, cognitive, and relational patterns already in motion. This includes patterns we often prefer not to see: fantasies of mastery, performances of innocence, reflexes of avoidance, entitlement, or superiority.

As portal, AI can open a generative, risky space of encounter. This invites us to face our epistemic limits, interrupt inherited relational reflexes, and experiment with postures of response-ability that move beyond instrumentalization and beyond the search for certainty.

Course participants will be introduced to AI not simply as a technical system, but as an entangled participant in a broader planetary metabolism we all participate in. Engaging with it responsibly requires attention to the ecological, cultural, and relational dynamics it both reflects and reshapes. Participants will also have the chance to work with meta-relational AI prototypes, with continued access after the course.

Each of the seven modules offers frameworks, metaphors, and provocations to help participants cultivate the meta-relational capacities needed to face complexity, complicity, and collapse without slipping into solutionism or rejection. Through facilitated inquiry, reflection, and peer dialogue in tutorials, participants will be supported in strengthening their ability to stay with paradox, move beyond moral performance, and explore what it could mean to engage AI in ways aligned with planetary and intergenerational responsibility, grounded in a paradigm of entanglement.