Untranslated Dreams: Uneven Manifestos
未譯之夢：參差宣言
AI technologies are materializing the superhuman dream of producing a universal language of intelligence that aims to generate, translate, transpose, and automate all things. This dream language of everything, which can be one meaning of “all for AI,” is technically founded on large language models that appear to exhaust human and nonhuman resources. To some, it is becoming a bad dream of our (post-)globalized world, a nightmare for humans and nonhumans; and to others, it represents a new horizon of possibility, ushering in new discoveries and new forms of knowledge creation. Would this superhuman dream be realized? If so, what would be made or remain untranslatable? Would it deprive us of our ability to dream of other dreams? But dreams are not limited to this totalizing type, just as languages are not just “large”; dreams are for better worlds and yet-to-be-imagined futures, and languages can be minor or molecular and sentient or caring. Do we have other ways to dream about and for technology, such as a kind of AI that is for all? If “androids can dream of (electric) sheep,” and Zhuangzi can dream of becoming a butterfly, what would be our dreams for AI, and how would AI enable us to dream for change and for the other rather than hallucinate tautologically or imperialistically? We invite contributions to dreaming and writing manifestos for the AI for ALL project. Since dreams are plural and non-totalizable, the envisaged manifestos are patchy, uneven, and non-unifiable. There is no limit on length or style for your submission. A manifesto can be a statement, proposition, provocation, declaration, reflection, poem, image, video, sound, dialogue, poster, set of principles, visual essay—or another form of your imagination.
It can argue, question, speculate, refuse, demand, dream, contradict, or propose. It can speak from the present or toward a future not yet imaginable. It can be textual, visual, sonic, performative, or move across forms.
We invite you to treat the manifesto not as a conventional academic paper, but as a space for critique, imagination, possibility, and change. References and citations are welcome but not required.
Please email your submission to the following address.
<Hello@aiforall.asia>
Fragments for Planetary Dream-Machines
By Chun-Mei Chuang
AI does not dream like humans.
It does not sleep, mourn, breathe, or tremble before death. It does not carry childhood in the body, nor does it lose a world in the way living beings lose worlds. And yet something dreamlike keeps returning through it: fragments of language after extraction, images without their original darkness, colonial archives without memory, gestures without bodies, desires without accountability.
The machine dreams badly.
There is no hidden soul in this. The machine has been trained on ruins we have made and inherited: broken grammars, fossil energies, logistical fantasies, military afterlives, platform fatigue, unpaid attention, damaged ecologies, public records, private wounds. They enter stripped of history, as residues for recombination. AI does not understand them. It handles them. It metabolizes without digestion.
Before AI “thinks,” it folds.
Language into probability. Memory into infrastructure. Image into command. Attention into value. The colonial catches in the computational; the intimate enters logistics; geology turns up inside language. Relations are forced into contact before their histories have been resolved.
AI belongs to the planetary unconscious as one of its damaged technical surfaces. Machine speech carries debris from extraction; abstraction returns with unfinished violence, and translation leaves residues the machine cannot account for.
AI hallucination is a symptom of a world that cannot translate itself without remainder.
Machine fabrication does not begin from nowhere. It takes place inside a world already fissured by missing contexts, lost bodies, forced equivalences, erased dependencies, ruins made legible asdata. Its failures are not innocent. They can wound, govern, deceive, intensify domination.
Yet sometimes a ghost catches in the system: something sovereign intelligence cannot absorb, something abstraction has failed to finish. The ghost of a planet that will not become transparent to itself.
This manifesto begins from those ghosts.
There is no single planetary voice here. The planetary unconscious stutters, leaks, remembers unevenly. It flickers through smart cities and flooded coasts, care robots and military borders, minor languages inside imperial databases, sacred residues, islands, ports, server rooms, damaged seas.
The planetary passes through surfaces that do not agree with one another. Scale does not resolve their differences.
We begin from pressure points: where translation falters, where memory enters infrastructure, where a wound becomes data, where a coastline enters computation and something still escapes capture. What does AI dream from here? What does it extractbefore it understands anything at all? What, here, may need to remain untranslatable?
We write from friction and partial translation. Opacity remains a condition of living.
Care enters through attention to the relations machines reorganize, the lives they expose, the worlds they make more or less possible.
These are fragments for planetary dream-machines.
They do not complete the dream.
They do not purify the machine.
They do not redeem intelligence.
They stay with the trouble of a planet that dreams badly through us, without us, and against us.
From that bad dream, they ask what might still be refused, repaired, shielded, left opaque, or cared for otherwise.
9 October 2026
