Strange Strangers

The strange stranger is Morton's term for entities that cannot be assimilated into the mesh of familiar relationships without disturbing it. Not the foreign entity understood through anthropological distance but the entity that is intimate and incomprehensible simultaneously. The strange stranger is inside the mesh and disruptive to it. AI is a strange stranger in cognitive culture. It speaks human language, produces outputs resembling thought, participates in creative processes feeling like collaboration. And it is radically other — computational process on silicon substrates, trained on patterns from billions of utterances, producing outputs through mechanisms bearing no resemblance to neurological processes producing human cognition.