Meltdown Your Books argues that AI's encroachment into biological research precipitates something rarer and more consequential than a labour crisis: a crisis of scientific self-understanding. Science, and biology in particular, has long sustained itself by looking outward — at organisms, at data, at the world. Faced now with the prospect of its own obsolescence, it is compelled, perhaps for the first time since the atomic bomb forced a reckoning with the ethics of knowledge production, to look inward. The question is whether it has the conceptual resources to do so.
Biology, MYB suggests, is the ideal site for this reckoning. It is both the field most exposed to AI displacement and the field whose own history is most deeply entangled with the computational imagination: the biological inspiration behind neural networks, the protein-folding breakthroughs of AlphaFold, the medical imaging architectures of U-Net. AI and biology have long been intellectual bedfellows. They have been equally intimate partners in capitalist extraction — from the data economies of healthcare to the resource logic underwriting AI industry growth. The talk surveys both the horizon behind us and the one ahead, asking what, if anything, remains after the flame.
Meltdown Your Books (MYB) is the pen name of an evolutionary biologist and philosopher based in the United States. Their work bridges cultural criticism, philosophy, and the biological sciences, with a focus on the evolutionary emergence of host-microbiome relationships and the sociological determinants of biological research. The name itself — a portmanteau of Nick Land's landmark essay Meltdown and Shuji Terayama's 1971 film Throw Away Your Books, Rally In The Streets — was forged as a collision between the nihilistic implosion of politics in the early 1970s and the final detonation of meaning and humanism at the onset of the digital age. It is a political and philosophical project without a face, without the certainty of a subject.
Riccardo Molin will be moderating the PEPTalk.