Overview
Teaching Silicon How to Feel reframes the whole AI debate at a stroke. Instead of asking “how do we stop machines from harming us?” we need to ask “what have we already normalised as acceptable harm?”. Richard David Hames argues that contemporary AI is being trained on a civilisation, culture and history shaped by slavery, genocide, colonialism, factory farming, drone warfare and extractive capitalism – and that without deliberate intervention, those patterns of cruelty and indifference will be quietly 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 The Algorithm of Oblivion and The Fractal of Indifference – the book probes the darkest angels of human nature. Drawing on philosophy, political and economic history, trauma science and critical technology studies, Hames shows how our institutions encode violence, how that violence shows up in data and infrastructures, and why AI magnifies whatever we feed it. This is not another abstract ethics treatise or tech-doom prophecy. Each catalyst is paired with a ‘From Theory to Praxis’ section that speaks directly to people building and governing AI systems. Readers learn how to: curate healing-focused and relational datasets embed epigenetic empathy checks and ethical audit loops redesign recommender systems to interrupt isolation feedback loops construct ‘metabolic vetoes’ and governance architectures that refuse to profit from suffering Written in accessible, lucid prose for a general audience, Teaching Silicon How to Feel will also inform software engineers, machine learning practitioners, UX designers, policymakers, ethicists, systems thinkers and anyone alarmed by the speed and direction of AI deployment. It offers a stark diagnosis of our current trajectory and a radical, practical invitation: to enlist AI as an ally in dismantling the hidden economies of suffering that have defined the worst of human civilisation.
Full Product Details
Author: Richard David Hames
Publisher: Triarchy Press
Imprint: Triarchy Press
ISBN: 9781917251167
ISBN 10: 1917251165
Pages: 252
Publication Date: 09 February 2026
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Availability: Not yet available
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Reviews
""Let us grant that the current AI crop consists of 'intelligent' entities, and we already know they exhibit certain pathologies that we also recognize in human beings; but what if AI could be seen as even more fully sentient ? Would that be progress, or on the contrary, an even a more dangerous path? After all, AI's are our 'children', and their training and sources reflect also what is deeply problematic about human beings. In this context, it becomes urgent to have AI's that are also truly empathic for the suffering of humanity and the web of life. Getting AI to such a positioning is the impossible task that Richard Hames has set himself. Anybody familiar with his consistently great writing and commentary, over many years, and lately on that bastion of intellectuality that is Substack, knows that this book is going to be the most thoughtful approach currently available. It takes full and wise human beings to create full and wise AI's as partners."" Michel Bauwens, political theorist, writer and founder of the P2P Foundation
Author Information
Richard David Hames is a philosopher-activist, author, mentor and strategic foresight practitioner. Working at the interface between business enterprises, politics and society, he is among the world’s most influential public intellectuals – referred to by Forbes Asia as “one of the smartest people on the planet”. An Australian citizen, educated in the UK and Europe, and domiciled in Thailand, Richard has been honoured with numerous awards including a French Government Scholarship, a Leverhulme European Fellowship, the Mondadori Professorial Fellowship and the inaugural Lord Attlee Fellowship. Founder of the Centre for the Future and currently Chairman of the Asian Foresight Institute, he has degrees in music, medicine and computer science. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the World Academy of Art & Science. Richard’s early international experience as a strategy consultant in the field of Total Quality Management was inspired by a close professional friendship with the legendary Dr. W. Edwards Deming. In 1993 Richard co-founded Global Business Network (Australia) and in 1995 started The Hames Group – think-tank, design laboratory and boutique strategy firm. He has been an adviser and leadership strategist to governments, institutions and multinational corporations in the USA, France, UK, UAE, China, Japan, South Africa, Singapore, Thailand, Brazil, Vietnam and Australia. Richard is best known for pioneering Deep Design – a ground-breaking regenerative approach to 3rd-order change based on the integral nature of complex living systems. He’s also admired for his passionate advocacy of real-time humanitarian models of governance. Richard’s methodologies, including Transformational Narrative, Systemic Acupuncture, and Strategic Navigation (the latter codesigned with behavioural modeler Marvin Oka), apply generative learning principles to the strategic management of organisations in dynamically complex environments. As a strategic foresight practitioner he has examined topics ranging from the future of conflict to microtechnology in everyday life, financial services, transport, urban design, terrorism, taxation, trade, aid, neocolonialism, philanthropy, health care, social networks, political systems, energy, natural resource management, learning and the collapse of civilisations. Richard was accurately predicting the impact of the climate crisis on business from as early as 1987. In 1998 he warned of the possibility of hijacked planes being flown into the World Trade Centre. In 2005 he described to a group of Wall Street bankers the patterns that would lead to a global financial crisis just three years later. He correctly anticipated the socio-political conditions that gave rise to the Arab Spring, and the rise of Donald Trump. He is currently talking about Chinese state capitalism, public surveillance, pre-crime policing, cybersecurity, threats to the European Union, unregulated development of artificial general intelligence, and the growing irrelevance of the Westphalian model of nation states. Based purely on performance Richard, an elder statesman in the field of foresight, is considered by his peers to be among the most erudite of futurists in the world today. Richard is author of the best-selling book, The Management Myth: Exploring the Essence of Future Organizations. His second book, Burying the 20th Century – New Paths to New Futures, was published in 1997. The Five Literacies of Global Leadership (2007) was the result of ten years of research and presents the source code for an entirely new philosophy of leadership independent of role or status. His most recent books include Open Mind – Open Heart; Heresies: Essays on the Future of Humanity; The Unacceptable Gift: Fourteen Insights into Societal Transformation, and Contagion: Living with and through the Plague - which is a collection of essays on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Richard's writings can also be found online at ‘The Hames Report Limited Edition’, published fortnightly on Substack, and ‘The Virtual Activist’, published daily on Patreon. He is now putting his experience to work in his legacy project, The Ecority Trust. www.richardhames.com
