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.
