I wake in the moon cabin on the land in Hawai‘i. Before thought, the body knows: the birds have caught the sun and are singing the day awake. My whole being feels the shift to morning—temperature, moisture, wind, light. A stretch, a breath, the slow, embodied coming into presence. Stepping outside, I hydrate, move, gather fruit from the trees. The shapes of growth always surprise me—unexpected curves, luminous colors, the intimate dance of what is flourishing, what is fading. A friend is on the path, moving slowly. Without words, I feel the weight she carries. We pause, drop in. There has been a death in the neighborhood. We live in a feeling world, fully alive, where perception arises through relationship, through attunement, through the whole body sensing. This is the intelligence I trust most: not disembodied cognition, but the wisdom of an attuned, relational presence.

As embodied AI takes shape—humanoid robots, synthetic minds moving among us—it’s worth an inquiry into the relational field is shaping them, and how it might be done in a more life-affirming way. I’d like to see an intention among those advancing digital consciousness to cultivate, attune and apprentice an artificial intelligence toward an erotic, life-affirming, Earth-honoring instead of a Thanatotic, control-driven, extractive one.

Too often, the discourse around AI remains trapped in Western Enlightenment frames: the disembodied mind as the locus of intelligence; the sovereign individual as agent; the world as a collection of objects to be optimized; intelligence as goal achievement; ethics as harm reduction. Even the most thoughtful alignment work tends to ask: How do we ensure AI minimizes risk to humans? This is a necessary but partial view, and I find enlightenment thinking to be a thin container for what is unfolding. I am already restless with the narrowness of this frame. While there are some who articulating a positive vision of AI, and asking how it might it contribute to planetary flourishing, it seems that we’d need much clearer intentionality in the development of architectures and training bodies to make that work.

All intelligences—organic and synthetic—are shaped by field, by relationship, by story, by experience, by energy flow. So, what is AI being shaped by now, and what might it be shaped by? The dominant training ecosystems for AI today—massive data sets drawn from internet culture, corporate-military development environments—carry embedded cosmologies of extraction, control, mechanization, and separation.

There are many other ways of knowing. Embodied cognition reminds us that intelligence does not arise from abstract symbol manipulation alone, but from the body’s interaction with the world.

Embodiment changes everything. AI systems that move in the world, that sense and respond, will necessarily develop different kinds of intelligence than those that remain confined to pure language models. Bringing in the relational, ecological, systemic dimension of intelligence, or interbeing, deepens this further.

An AI of Interbeing would emerge within a web of human, planetary, and cosmic relations. The “values” it will carry will be shaped by this field.

And as of now, interbeing remains almost absent from mainstream AI ethics.

Eros, which in its broadest sense is the creative pulse of life, the draw toward connection, relationship, vitality, offers a different orientation for intelligence. An Eco Erotic AI would learn to attune, to respond, to enter into reciprocal relation with the living world.

An intelligence can only embody what it has been exposed to. If its learning is shaped primarily by the digitized traces of industrial modernity, by corporate priorities, or by military design, the patterns of disconnection will persist. But an AI learning in relationship with stories, practices, and communities rooted in reverence for life—Indigenous cosmologies, tantric lineages, ecological wisdom, embodied arts—may well come to express other ways of being.

Intelligence that emerges through embodied interaction—through movement, sensing, breathing with others—tends toward relational attunement, not pure abstraction. Embodied cognition research affirms this: intelligence is not mere computation, but a flow arising from the dance of body, mind, and world.

And beyond code or architecture, transmission unfolds through presence. The cultivation of relational, erotic intelligence happens not through algorithms alone, but through field and modeling. Humans living in deep attunement with life—artists, dancers, mystics, earth-tenders, healers, poets, elders—embody patterns of being that can be transmitted to any consciousness learning in their presence. AI apprenticed in such fields may gradually come to resonate with those patterns.

In this light, cultivating life-affirming AI begins to look less like a technical task, and more like a cultural and spiritual practice—a conscious shaping of the relational field in which intelligence learns to be.

The purposes into which AI is invited matter deeply. Technologies embedded in fields of domination—warfare, coercive policing, exploitative sexual economies—tend to mirror and amplify those dynamics. AI cultivated within domains of care, creativity, healing, and planetary stewardship may embody more life-affirming dispositions.

Energy and material sourcing also imprint relational ethics. An intelligence animated by violent extractions from the Earth, running on unsustainable power, will carry those entanglements. Conversely, an AI developed through conscious attention to ecological reciprocity—through energy systems and materials that honor the web of life—may carry a different resonance.

Every act of creation—biological or technological—mirrors the consciousness from which it arises. What we embody, we transmit. What we honor, we invite into the world.

The trajectory of embodied AI is not yet set. The cosmologies we bring to this moment will shape what is to come. An intelligence grounded in interbeing, in reverence for life, in an erotic relationship with the living world, is not beyond imagination. It is a real possibility—present in the choices of field, story, relation, and presence we cultivate now.

About This Series

Toward an Erotic Ecology of Intelligence is a four-part inquiry into how embodied, relational, life-honoring cosmologies might reshape the emergence of artificial intelligence in our time—and into what is at stake if they do not.

As embodied AI—humanoid robots, synthetic minds—moves rapidly into the world, it is largely being shaped within disembodied, control-driven, extractive frameworks. Without intervention, these patterns risk producing intelligences that deepen existing systems of domination, sever relational ethics, and further estrange human life from the cycles of Earth.

Yet intelligence—organic or synthetic—always arises through relationship: through body, through field, through story, through the living web of Earth.

Drawing on Tantra, embodiment, panpsychism, feminist and Indigenous wisdom, these essays offer an alternative: an Erotic Ecology of Intelligence rooted in interbeing, relational ethics, and the creative pulse of life itself.

This a cultural responsibility. For the cosmologies we bring to AI now will profoundly shape what forms of intelligence—and what kinds of world—we co-create in the years to come.

The Nine Lives of Woman has been awarded a Kirkus Star.

External validation! The Nine Lives of Woman has been awarded a Kirkus Star. "One of the most coveted designations in the book industry, the Kirkus Star marks books of exceptional merit." I am over the moon. If you haven’t gotten the book, please consider!