Teaching Silicon How to Feel

Teaching Silicon How to Feel reframes the whole AIdebate at a stroke. Instead of asking “how do we stop machines from harmingus?” we need to ask “what have we already normalised as acceptable harm?”. Richard David Hames argues that contemporary AI is being trained on acivilisation, culture and history shaped by slavery, genocide, colonialism,factory farming, drone warfare and extractive capitalism – and that withoutdeliberate intervention, those patterns of cruelty and indifference will bequietly hard-wired into our most powerful systems. Organised around 17 theoretically ‘unresolvable’ catalysts –from The Inheritance of Cruelty and The Unseen Economies of Suffering to TheAlgorithm of Oblivion and The Fractal of Indifference – the book probes thedarkest angels of human nature. Drawing on philosophy, political and economichistory, trauma science and critical technology studies, Hames shows how ourinstitutions encode violence, how that violence shows up in data andinfrastructures, and why AI magnifies whatever we feed it. This is not another abstract ethics treatise or tech-doomprophecy. Each catalyst is paired with a ‘From Theory to Praxis’ section thatspeaks directly to people building and governing AI systems. Readers learn howto:curate healing-focused and relational datasetsembed epigenetic empathy checks and ethical audit loopsredesign recommender systems to interrupt isolation feedback loopsconstruct ‘metabolic vetoes’ and governance architectures that refuse to profit from sufferingWritten in accessible, lucid prose for a generalaudience, Teaching Silicon How to Feel will also inform softwareengineers, machine learning practitioners, UX designers, policymakers,ethicists, systems thinkers and anyone alarmed by the speed and direction of AIdeployment. It offers a stark diagnosis of our current trajectory and aradical, practical invitation: to enlist AI as an ally in dismantling thehidden economies of suffering that have defined the worst of humancivilisation.