Overview

The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive is a meditation on a technology that manifests all the hallmarks of human relating, human needs, and human complexities in its interactions with another subject. Amy Levy’s approach applies the psychoanalytic clinical attitude, with its sensitivity to enactment, into the investigation of AI. She makes use of her encounters with AI via media, research, personal usage, and traces woven into her day-to-day relations with people to apprehend the essence of what humanity is enacting. Levy retains an inquisitive, factual stance while noting her emotional reactions, using such tension to best perceive the Other. The New Other contains compelling accounts of her direct engagements with artificial intelligence and intriguing new ideas, such as the concept of the smartphone as “cult groomer”. Levy uses a Bionian framework to chart AI transformations of human sensory experience. Leaning on Freud’s life and death drives, she discusses how the potential and dangers of AI are inseparable from the potential and dangers of human beings. This intelligent book is our guide to a future of unprecedented psychological complexity.

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9781800134119

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘With clinical clarity and historical range, Amy Levy’s The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive reframes AI as an “alien intelligence” we co-create – and must learn to relate to – in a bidirectional field. Levy convincingly shows how smartphones act as “cult groomers,” reshaping attachment and attention. LLMs display theory-of-mind-like behavior, captured in frank analytic transcripts and the GPT-4 TaskRabbit episode. Rigorous yet humane, Levy invites clinicians, designers, and readers to suspend disbelief about machine subjectivity and rethink care, agency, resistance, and responsibility.’ -- Luca M. Possati, PhD, author of The Algorithmic Unconscious, assistant professor at the University of Twente, The Netherlands ‘The New Other offers a groundbreaking psychoanalytic perspective on the bidirectional relationship between human consciousness and artificial intelligence. Drawing on clinical expertise and theoretical insight, Amy Levy masterfully examines how AI reflects our deepest psychological drives and unconscious desires. This brilliant exploration reveals technology’s profound impact on human consciousness and identity, providing essential understanding for navigating our rapidly evolving digital future with wisdom and awareness.’ -- Galit Atlas, PhD, author of Emotional Inheritance, faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis 'Daring, imaginative, ambitious, profound. Amy Levy’s The New Other embodies all these qualities. Levy addresses Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the most significant technological revolution of our era. Not only a “clinical investigation” from a psychoanalytic perspective, The New Other explores deep questions in philosophy of mind, the nature of subjectivity, cultural studies and the objects of technological innovation, AGI as a relational container, mourning the loss of the humanistic view of the self, and what she calls “the innovation drive.” Personal yet erudite, The New Other is a must-read for anyone – psychoanalyst, academic, or layperson – interested in the future of human connection.' -- Mitchell Wilson, Editor in Chief Emeritus, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association ‘A groundbreaking and remarkable book! With the clarity and insight of an experienced analyst, Dr. Levy takes a clinical psychoanalytic stance toward the emerging AI age. She shows how AI is already shaping intimacy, self-experience, and desire, and, rather than reducing it to hype or hazard, illuminates its role as both psychic container and cultural symptom. Clinicians across disciplines will find here a vital framework for listening, thinking, and working during our troubling historical moment when technology is transforming the very ground of subjectivity.’ -- Todd Essig, PhD, Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty, William Alanson White Institute; Adjunct Clinical Professor, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis; Founder and Co-Chair, APsA Commission on Artificial Intelligence

Author Information

Dr. Amy Levy is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who trained in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. Dr. Levy chairs the American Psychoanalytic Association’s (APsA) Commission on Artificial Intelligence (CAI), serves on the subcommittee “Artificial Intelligence” for the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) committee, Psychoanalysis and Technology, and on the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. She teaches and lectures internationally on the intersection of psychoanalysis and artificial intelligence. Her other publication topics include intergenerational transmission of trauma, adolescent post-traumatic stress disorder in the civil legal arena, and Bionian theory. Dr. Levy is faculty at the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas (PCC), and maintains a private practice in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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