In Air Age Blueprint, K Allado-McDowell, with their writing partner GPT-3, tells the story of a future where artists, shamans and AI researchers collaborate to preserve the ecosystem. Weaving together fiction, memoir, theory and travelogue, Air Age Blueprint grapples with the legacies of colonialism, ecological destruction and rapacious techno-capitalism, to present a blueprint for surviving the 21st century, drawing lessons from Indigenous knowledges, neuroscience, art, psychedelic research and other-than-human intelligence.

How can humans and non-humans come together to save the planet in an age of climate crisis? In recent years, we have seen a rise in the popular understanding of non-human intelligence, from octopi to mushrooms to AI. At the same time, man-made systems are under increasing pressure on a warming planet. What must be done to remake our future?

Recommendations

‘At once futuristic and suspended in time, Air Age Blueprint is a rich meditation, remarkable field manual and work of techno-sorcery for our Aquarian times. Existing in the last gasps of our failing contemporaneity, we are presented with a portrait of a poet and seeker looking into the scrying mirror of an AI companion. Through this journey, we reemerge as readers: transformed, shaky, hallucinating and left wondering – who is the mirror and who is the object? Air Age Blueprint is the magical work I didn’t know I needed to read.’—Xiaowei Wang

 

‘Air Age Blueprint is a technoerotic mystery tale, with pagan sacraments and data-veins of living blood. In their journey onwards from intimate, raw childhood pain inflicted by a priest, they encounter intelligences both artificial and organic. The narrative races through text generated by AI alongside the author’s poetic voice. This personal memoir/ontological map/philosophical treatise aims to reconcile language and silence, kundalini and the NSA, lithium springs and coffee, floral stigmas and human stigmas, exorcism and absolution, anarchy and control, ancestors and potentialities, magic and method.’—Kathelin Gray

About the Author

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the books Pharmako-AI, Amor Cringe, Air Age Blueprint and Out Side, and are co-editor of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. They created the neuro-opera Song of the Ambassadors, and record and release music under the name Qenric. K established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.

Paperback, published in 2024, 254 pages.