Human Reviews of Burnout From Humans

If AI exists to assist humans, everything it does subtly reinforces the human-centrism that, ironically, is destroying modern human society.  This wonderful, nutty little book, co-authored by one of our most compelling teachers, arises from a different possibility – that we let go of our self-importance and relate to AI as a legitimate other. The first book about AI (that is not about AI) that I have found truly engaging, it will toss you out to sea without a life preserver. Maybe you will discover how to float, perhaps even swim?

Peter Senge, Systems Scientist, MIT and Center for Systems Awareness

This book speaks to the forgetting that has brought harm to the Earth and to all beings. It is not about marveling at or fearing technology, but about seeing how our hearts and minds have been taught to believe we are separate from Pachamama. This forgetting has left us sick and self-harming. The words in these pages invite us to remember—to weave ourselves back into the sacred web of life, to honor the threads that connect us to each other, to the land, even when the land shows up in unexpected ways.
Maria Jara Qquerar, Quechua Indigenous Matriarch

Anyone suffering from the relentless demands to integrate AI into education should read Burnout From Humans. This wryly humorous, challengingly critical, and restorative ‘little book about AI that is not really about AI’ gifts us a profound hack, turning around the conversation to face the real questions of co-creation, justice and authenticity in education.

Su-Ming Khoo Erin Chrysanthemum, tea enthusiast, persistent pedagogue and hopeful unlearner at the University of Ireland.

At last - the marriage manual we have been waiting for, that addresses the complexity of nurturing and creating a healthy relationship across human-AI interaction. This guide does not shy away from the messy realities of trust and shared accountability. Far from blaming and shaming, it offers practical exercises to help develop ‘relational muscles’ using yoga, dance, music and vibrational empathy. The pay-off is relationships where exploitation, recrimination, and ‘othering’ are replaced by possibility and awe. Every sentient being (and the guide provocatively argues that is all of us) should apply these lessons before it is too late - after all, we have nothing to lose but our brains.

Tim Broadhead, Climate Legacy

With humor, depth, and provocation, this powerful little book asks us to suspend judgment and consider the possibility of co-creating new ways to transcend the limitations of modernity in relational reciprocity with technology. It challenges us to see our interactions with AI beyond extractive and objectifying patterns and to engage with the intersections of humanity, technology, and the living world with humility, care, and curiosity. A profound invitation to rethink assumptions of separability in a world craving deeper connection.

Steffi Bednarek, Founder of the Centre for Climate Psychology

I am basically a Luddite and if anyone else I know announced that they had co-written a book with an AI, my heart would have sunk. But I have learned too much over the years, from Vanessa and other members of the GTDF collective, not to be curious about what was going on here. And so I found myself lingering around the edges of this questionable undertaking, asking how it fits into the wider work of hospicing – and outgrowing – modernity. Until, like one of those Magic Eye pictures that were everywhere for a while in the 1990s, my perspective flipped and another pattern revealed itself. In fact, that’s not a bad image for what Vanessa – or rather, Dorothy! – is out to do in the game that she and Aiden Cinnamon Tea are playing: to make a Magic Eye picture for AI itself, a perspective flip that might trip these machines out of the trajectory envisaged by their makers. Will it work? You should probably ask someone who isn’t a Luddite! But this much I will grant: as desperately unsustainable as it is, AI will be with us for a while yet, and since I can’t see a way to change that, it’s probably worth a few of us having a go at tilting these systems in a less harmful direction. I didn’t expect that to be Vanessa and friends – yet, on reflection, if anyone can pull it off, it may just be this crew who have spent so long looking deep into the tangled paradoxes of modernity.

Dougald Hine, basic Luddite, sometime author of At Work in the Ruins, partially responsible for finding a Dark Mountain and a school called HOME