Triple Contingency and the Ethics of Collective Inscription
2026 CII Workshop: Building an AI Conscience?, Center for Information Integrity, University at Buffalo · Publisher
Keynote address at the 2026 CII Workshop, Building an AI Conscience?, hosted by the Center for Information Integrity at the University at Buffalo. Sponsored by the UB Humanities Institute and the Julien Park Chair, Department of Philosophy.
The talk situates two recent artworks — A Timeline for the End of Time (2022) and Enacting the Circle (2022; 2026) — alongside theoretical understandings of artificial intelligence and human collectivity. Complicating Elena Esposito’s concept of “artificial communication,” in which machines simulate interaction without understanding, the talk argues that generative networked systems do not merely amplify misinformation but participate in the erosion of the very structure of temporal accountability by decoupling cause from consequence. In contrast, Enacting the Circle represents a manifestation of what Sylvia Wynter calls “artificial kinship”: the mutual constitution of self and other through a shared approach to technics.