AI produces certainty, or so it seems. When considered in relation to technology’s entanglements with colonial ethnography, anthropological taxonomies, and other forms of ordering society, the embodied metaphors of ‘artificial’ intelligence, ‘neural’ networks and ‘hallucinating’ chatbots reveal contemporary AI to be rather closed-minded. AI deploys an understanding of the world that is curated by few. And yet, burdened with a double consciousness—encompassing both those labouring at AI’s infrastructure and those who get to benefit from its results—AI constantly lets difference seep through. What if errors and glitches are other worlds, intangible to most, yet insisting on presence? Questioning AI’s relationship to certainty allows us to recover a multiplicity of readings and embodiments that potentially unfold in the present. How can uncertainty lead us to other forms of knowing that are based in the body and invested in marginalized knowledge of the past? How can we unsettle linear time in political thought and practice through healing, oracles, or patterns of care?

These and other questions are posed to initiate an exchange between notions of healing,contemporary human rights, and media theory. Acknowledging AI as it sits at the intersection of technological and religious belief systems, the panel discusses a plural and diverse set of knowledges that are interwoven through the notions of ancestrality, speculation, and oracular practice of prediction.