21:46

I am spending this week at the UCREL Summer School, thinking about language, NLP and large language models, alongside a collaborative hackathon. It feels like the right moment to publish this essay. AI is not conscious, but it is trained on language produced by human consciousness: stories, prayers, memories, arguments, grief and ordinary speech. It returns those traces to us in the form of an apparently attentive voice. When the World Speaks Back brings that question into conversation with Ruth Ozeki’s speaking objects, Helen Knowles’ work on birth, psychedelic entities and AI, research on religion and attributed agency, and my own earlier writing about childbirth as an altered state of consciousness. It is also a personal essay about marine fieldwork, phosphorescent water, dragons, books and the few objects through which I still try to remember my father. I have no recording of his voice and almost none of his handwriting. What remains are prices pencilled inside books from our shop, a few vinyl records, and a pewter dragon that returned to me after twenty years. The essay asks what happens when objects, landscapes, altered states and machines appear to speak back, and how we distinguish consciousness from memory, projection, relation and meaning.