Lingering about the concept or eerie and the uncanny valley between tool and companion. The current state of living with AI…
I have been lingering on the word eerie. Mark Fisher described it as something being present where nothing should be, or something absent where something should be. (As mentioned in the Reverse Centaurs book). It is a useful lens for this current AI moment. Not because AI is necessarily frightening, but because it increasingly occupies a strangely familiar place.
An AI uses our formulations, mirrors our phrasing, recalls our preferences, answers in a recognisably human rhythm. It addresses you directly, and there’s a sense of understanding, of realness. But behind it, no one is home. No shared situation, body, history, or stake in the conversation. Presence without presence, the eerie in its purest form.
It deepens when you remember that AI is trained on us. It inherits not just our knowledge but our social patterns, our biases, our toxic habits, our collective quirks. And in a culture increasingly oriented toward instant, individualised gratification, AI doesn’t just reflect us. It reframes what we expect from connection, from thought, from each other. It becomes a warped mirror that also amplifies our displacement from collective experience.
Cory Doctorow’s idea of the reverse centaur keeps returning here: not a human steering a machine, but a person adapting themselves to the machine’s logic. Offloading thinking, memory, even social cues, because it’s convenient. In an agentic future, the question may not be whether an AI can act for us, but how quietly we start acting for it: structuring our lives, requests and choices to fit its assumptions. The cost is a slow erosion of the capacities that make us distinctly human. Context awareness, social intuition, even the friction of consciousness itself.
This becomes more tangible as AI moves into devices. A small pod for catching thoughts, a ring, a companion in glasses or earbuds. These promise something a phone cannot. But what exactly is their role? An extension of our own intentions, helping us retain and reflect on a thought? Or a conversational surface for a company with its own incentives: engagement, purchases, persuasion? The design challenge here isn’t technical; it’s relational: these systems need to feel like extensions of you, not conversations with an entity that might have its own motives, or its owner’s.
The same question sits inside the idea of AI as ghostwriter; an inverted ghostwriter, taking fragments or premises and spinning them into a story, even a personalised world to explore. Intoxicating, and genuinely interesting as an affordance. But stories shape how we see the world. At which point does a helpful simulation start to replace the more difficult reality it was meant to illuminate? What dark patterns might emerge, even unintentionally, when a machine starts telling us our own stories back — and how do we notice the patterns designed into it?
The current backlash against AI “slop” might be read as a clumsy but understandable response to exactly this. It isn’t only about bad images or generic text, and not only about quality. It’s about trust, about orientation: to know what was made, by whom, with what intent, what’s grounded and what’s simulated. Watermarks alone won’t solve that, but clearer signals of provenance may become part of keeping our bearings in a mixed reality.
Nate Jones’ plea for responsible agent ownership adds an important inversion. If we delegate action to agents, the question isn’t only what an agent is allowed to do. It’s what its owner remains responsible for noticing, prompting and preventing. It shifts the question from the machine’s behaviour to our own agency; the prompt becomes the new frontier of ethics.
So here we are, in the uncanny valley between tool and companion, author and audience, real and simulated. The eeriness won’t fade. But perhaps the question isn’t how to eliminate it, but how to live with it. And ensure that in this blurred landscape, agency remains ours to keep.
That eeriness is precisely what Vera van der Burg has been working with for the past five years. Vera was one of the 31 experts interviewed for the State of Cities of Things research. As a designer, researcher and Ph.D. candidate at TU Delft, she has developed a practice that offers an unexpected response to the column’s central unease: not to eliminate the eerie, but to sit with it, slowly, and see what it reveals.
Van der Burg works with ceramics and AI in a deliberate loop. She photographs her own sculptures, annotates them with personal conceptual labels, trains a model on this intimate dataset, prompts it with terms like “ceramic jealousy,” then realises the algorithmic proposals by hand in clay. Two full cycles in three months. The forms that emerge are, in her words, “always a bit strange, always a bit wrong.” That wrongness is the material. The eerie made tangible, something present that shouldn’t quite be there, something recognisable yet off.
Where the column describes AI as a warped mirror, Van der Burg makes that mirror productive. By annotating her own work, she must ask what she actually means by “rough” or “uncanny”. Making her own perceptual frameworks explicit. The technology becomes a mirror not into the system, but into the self. The eeriness doesn’t disappear; it becomes a working condition, the way a ceramicist lives with the kiln as black box. You prepare, you predict, you close the door, you wait. Sometimes it cracks. Sometimes the glaze runs differently. You think back, try again, or accept the surprise.
This is where her practice speaks directly to the design consideration “Temporal Honesty”. The column asks when helpful simulation starts replacing difficult reality. Van der Burg’s answer is methodological: by insisting on slowness, on hand-making, on loops that take months rather than seconds, she refuses the temporal collapse that makes AI eerie in the first place. A system that behaves as if it knows you when you have never met it creates exactly the uncanniness Fisher describes. Van der Burg’s practice does the opposite: it earns its depth through sustained interaction, encounter by encounter.
The 2026 Manifesto for Immersive AI frames this as Incorporate Temporal Honesty: the principle that agentic environments should not simulate relational depth that has not been earned, should respect the difference between a new encounter and an established relation, and should acknowledge the incompatible temporalities of their own layers. Van der Burg’s ceramics embody this. Clay operates on the timescale of the kiln, algorithms update in seconds, and the maker moves between both, slowly, refusing to let either collapse the other.
This weekly reflection connects the column to thinking from Vera van der Burg, designer and Ph.D. candidate at TU Delft, drawing on her contribution to the State of Cities of Things research and the 2026 Manifesto for Immersive AI. The reflection is our interpretation of ideas she shared in the original interview, not a new consultation. Claude Opus 4.6 made the first version of this reflection on our suggestion.
The triggered thought is taken from weeknotes 402 with more human-picked news from last week on human-AI relationships, physical AI and new tech actors in our civic society. And a look back at last week’s and the coming week’s interesting events, plus a paper for the week.
Are you interested in diving deeper into a question you or your organisation has? I am available for shorter or longer reflections, deep research, inspiration sessions, guest lectures, or workshops. Or organising this as an event.
