November Slugs and Steins with Professor Kevin Volkan (Kresge ’81)
AI: Savior, Monster, and Symbolic Engine
Artificial intelligence (AI) is now commonly presented as both a savior of humanity and a monster that threatens our existence. It is possible to understand this dual nature as distinctions between human and machine, living and nonliving, and self and other. Additionally, the interaction of AI agents has raised questions about the emergence of subjectivity, cooperation, altruistic behavior, and the evolution of machine intelligence. Our relationship with AI evokes the uncanny, unconscious projections and fantasies. These characteristics allow us to consider how our relationship with AI reflects longstanding human desires to summon, control, and exploit powerful forces that we do not fully understand. The possibility of AI as a symbolic and transitional medium instead of savior or monster is considered as a way we can develop greater compassion, responsibility, and tolerance for ambiguity.
Kevin Volkan is professor of psychology and one of the founders of California State University Channel Islands. He also teaches in the Master’s in Psychoanalytic Studies program at L’Università Roma Tre and in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. His scholarship examines how artificial intelligence inherits, amplifies, and re-presents distinctly human patterns of reasoning, conflict, distortion, and self-understanding. This extends into clinical concerns including the emotionally meaningful ways people engage with AI and forms of attachment and transference toward machine systems. His book Artificial Intelligence and Our Ghosts in the Machine will be released late this year. Another book, Psychoanalysis in the Digital Age: Mind and the Artificial Other will be published in 2027. Kevin holds doctorates in clinical and quantitative psychology, is a graduate of the Harvard School of Public Health, and a former Harvard Medical School faculty member and administrator. He graduated from UCSC in 1981 with a B.A. in biology.