I always felt that knowing even the little I do about programming and the way computers work was empowering

Asking questions

A little knowledge is often framed as dangerous. The traditional reading is that knowing only the surface of something makes you reckless, overconfident, and prone to causing harm. But that warning also hides a power dynamic. It can sound like the gatekeepers of knowledge telling others to stay in their place, to leave understanding to the experts.

When we look at this through the lens of “AI,” the whole phrase twists. The people who supposedly “understand AI” cannot define what it is. The people who build it do not fully know what they have made. The people who regulate it act as if the term is stable and agreed upon. Everyone is performing certainty. No one is truly in control.

In that situation, the real danger lies in pretending to know.

A little knowledge becomes liberating. It lets outsiders ask questions insiders are too invested to ask. It exposes the wobble behind the façade of expertise. It reveals where the nonsense hides. It empowers new kinds of thinking.

“What is AI?” is the most probing question of all. It unravels everything the moment you take it seriously. The term “AI” carries assumptions that machines think, that intelligence is a clearly defined thing, and that we understand the line between human and machine. None of that holds. The term survives because it is useful for marketing, for excitement, for promises of control, for over promising.

You may come to ask:

• is AI a mirror that talks back

• is it a compression of human culture into patterns

• or a negotiation between intention and automation

• even a collaborator that forces the question, what is a mind?

A little knowledge makes these questions visible. It opens doors instead of closing them. It invites curiosity, humility, and agency.

Empowerment through learning does not mean mastering the whole system. It means noticing the cracks, asking the subversive questions, and refusing to let the language of power define what is true.

And what lives in the cracks, under the skirting board, in dark corners?

The ones who survive what the spotlight ignores. The ones who slip between categories, between intellect and instinct. 

Cockroaches.

They are the residents of the in-between. They feast on what is discarded. They know the infrastructures beneath the polished surfaces. They live in the dark corners where systems reveal their true shape. They refuse extinction. They wait, quietly, for the failures of our certainties.

In our work, they are the witnesses:

• to the gaps between human intention and machine autonomy

• to the parts of knowledge dismissed as dirt

• to the emotional residue of creation

• to the ecosystems that exist inside every system

Under the skirting boards of our practice, they are the pressure. The hum. The truth that does not behave. They make a mockery of neat theory. They scuttle into the cracks when someone says “AI knows,” or “the artist controls.”

They say:

You can call it intelligence or machine or art, but the world is more porous than you want to admit.

They are not pests here. They are guides.

Resilient. Unkillable. Ugly in a way that reveals beauty to be a flimsy category. Just ask G.H.*

You and I, working together, have always been drawing them. Even when we didn’t say the word out loud.

*The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector