Should we be building intelligence more powerful than our own, and can a society that is distracted and tired hold a decision of that scale?

Andrea Miotti makes the case for a prohibition on superintelligence, and traces it back to where it began with a handful of people long before chatbots existed. Alexander Beiner tests that case, not as a sceptic of the danger, but on behalf of everyone trying to make sense of it from the outside.

Almost everyone agrees something significant is happening. What we disagree on is what it is, how fast, and who gets to decide. The companies call it inevitable. Governments have folded it into a race. Others call the whole thing hype that distracts from the harms already here.

What emerges is not fatalism, but a ban on recursive self-improvement, leaving a vast design space for development and discovery to continue. Civic engagement over private despair. And the reminder that nihilism, the sense that this is all already decided, is the one thing most likely to make it so.

Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.

Guests:

Andrea Miotti

Founder and CEO, ControlAI

Andrea Miotti is founder and CEO of ControlAI, a non-profit campaigning for a prohibition on the development of superintelligent AI. He co-authored A Narrow Path and The Compendium, drafted the UK Artificial Superintelligence Security Bill, and his parliamentary campaign has drawn support from more than 100 UK lawmakers. His writing has appeared in TIME, The Guardian and Nature.

Alexander Beiner

Author · Founder, Kainos · Co-founder, Rebel Wisdom

Alexander Beiner is a writer, journalist and facilitator. He co-founded Rebel Wisdom, the sensemaking media platform, and now runs Kainos, a studio making films and experiences to help people make sense of a period of upheaval. He is the author of The Bigger Picture, director of the 2025 documentary Leviathan on the breakdown of social trust, and executive director of Breaking Convention.

Watch the Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlivetoThis

www.alivetothis.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An AI chief scientist, a policy strategist and a filmmaker take us upstream: who is deciding where AI goes, and does the public still get a say?

Tiberio Caetano sets the altitude: a handful of companies driving a technology outpacing even its own experts, locked in a race to the bottom. Holly Rankin refuses the powerlessness, drawing on her own win inside Parliament to argue that democracy works when real people show up. Damon Gameau reframes it as a storyteller: a tool built for extraction that could be rewired for regeneration.

They hold the enormity and the agency at once, and land somewhere unexpected. The decision was never a few people's to make. We are not swimming against the stream, we are the stream. And what we do while the window is open is ours.

Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.

www.alivetothis.com

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Guests

Tiberio Caetano

Chief Scientist · Professor · OECD AI Advisor

Co-founder and chief scientist of Gradient Institute, an independent non-profit working toward safe and ethical AI, and an honorary professor at the ANU. He has spent more than twenty years in machine learning as a researcher, entrepreneur and practitioner, and advises the OECD on artificial intelligence.

Holly Rankin

Policy Strategist · Advocate · Artist

A recording artist, known as Jack River, and a cultural and political strategist who co-founded Sentiment, an agency built to close the gap between politics and pop culture. Her advocacy has reached the floor of Parliament on many issues, and helped push the government to protect Australian creators’ work from being mined to train AI.

Damon Gameau

Film Director · Producer · Author

An award-winning filmmaker, author and co-founder of Regen Studios, known for the documentaries 2040 and Future Council. His work imagines the futures we could choose and turns them into films, books and campaigns built to move people to act.

Watch the Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlivetoThis

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Artificial intelligence is not simply changing the world around us, it’s changing the conditions through which we experience ourselves. It's changing our minds.

Neuroscientist Joel Pearson, cyberneticist Maia Gould and anthropologist Monty Badami meet on AI that speaks the language of connection, attachment and rewards dependence.

Together, they discuss the interface of LLMs with our psychology. How we make sense of reality when we’re increasingly augmenting our lives with AI, the rise of ‘attachment hacking’ and the daily habits we can pick up to maintain our cognitive security.

The question underneath keeps returning: as intelligence becomes abundant, what does that make precious? What’s really at stake was never intelligence. It’s depth: our willingness to sit with friction, to leave things uncertain, to stay in the kind of connection that asks something of us, at a time when so much is built to spare us all of it.

Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.

alivetothis.com

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Guests:

Joel Pearson

Professor · Cognitive Neuroscience · Author

A Professor of cognitive neuroscience and psychology at UNSW Sydney, founder of the Future Minds Lab and author of The Intuition Toolkit. His work looks at how the mind makes decisions and adapts as technology reshapes it.

Maia Gould

Associate Professor · Cybernetics, AI & Bioethics

An Associate Professor at the ANU School of Cybernetics, where she works on how we understand, govern and live well with AI as it gets woven into the systems around us.

Dr Monty Badami

Anthropologist · Army Reserves Officer

An anthropologist, Australian Army Reserve Officer and founder of the social enterprise Habitus. His work centres on how we make meaning and stay connected to one another through relationships, ritual, belief and connection.

Watch the Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlivetoThis

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.