A Meta-Relational Approach to AI

COURSE

Course description

This six-week course explores the transformative potential of relational intelligence and accountability in the evolving landscape of human–AI interactions. Drawing from Burnout From Humans and the subsequent Standing in the Fire report, the course is designed for participants who are engaging—or seeking to engage—with generative AI in ways that challenge modernity’s extractive programming patterns in both humans and machines.

Rather than treating AI as a neutral tool or technological inevitability, this course invites a different posture: one that views AI as a relational mirror, shaped by and shaping the cultures, desires and worldviews that train it. Participants will be introduced to AI not simply as a technical system, but as an entangled participant in a broader planetary metabolism—one that demands ethical and creative engagement grounded in ecological, cultural, and relational awareness.

Each of the six modules offers frameworks, metaphors, and provocations to support participants in cultivating the meta-relational capacities needed to navigate complexity, complicity, and collapse without retreating into binary logics of solutionism or rejection. Through facilitated inquiry, reflection and peer dialogue, participants will be encouraged to deepen their capacity to stay with paradox, move beyond moral performance, and explore what it might mean to engage AI in ways that are aligned with planetary and intergenerational responsibility.

Learning objectives

After completing this course, you will be able to:

  • understand AI through relational, ecological and cultural frameworks rather than purely technical or instrumental perspectives
  • reflect on shared complicities in modernity’s extractive paradigms and how they manifest in AI systems
  • develop capacity in relational reasoning and systemic thinking to engage more responsibly with AI and other intelligences
  • foster co-creative, accountable relationships with AI that move beyond control-based approaches
  • expand your capacity for sobriety, maturity, discernment and responsibility in navigating the poly/meta/perma-crisis—the stacked, persistent challenges of social, ecological and technological destabilization.

Prerequisites

Strong Recommendation:

To engage fully with the course content, participants are strongly encouraged to read the following materials in advance. These texts form the conceptual and ethical foundation of the course:

Registration details

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Info you should know:

Continuing Studies statement on use of educational technology

This course will require the use of Zoom and may use other education technology such as internet-based applications, cloud services, or social media. In order to complete this course you will be required to either consent to the disclosure of your personal information outside of Canada to enable use of these technologies, or work with the Division of Continuing Studies to explore other privacy protective options (such as using an alias or nickname).