Prosthetic Gods
Welcome to “Prosthetic Gods,” the podcast where bioethicist James Hughes and philosopher Nir Eisikovits engage in spirited debates on the ethics and politics of emerging technologies. Hughes, a pro-technology transhumanist, and Eisikovits, with his Luddite stance, explore topics from brain-computer interfaces to artificial intelligence. Tune in and explore the promise and perils of technological advancements with us!
Episodes
Our guest this week has done something few philosophers of war can claim: he has flown the aircraft he writes about. We sit down with drone pilot and philosopher Joe Chapa to interrogate the widening gap between technological capability and moral judgment on the modern battlefield. Chapa deconstructs the rush to embed machine learning across military hierarchies, c...
This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir and J discuss the transhumanist concept of brain uploading, exploring everything from cutting-edge connectomics and artificial intelligence to ancient philosophical views on personal identity. We debate the metaphysics of “substrate independence,” “computational functionalism,” and religious views of the soul to weigh the prospec...
This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir and J. dissect the rapid dismantling of the animal-testing paradigm. We explore the legal and political shifts sweeping the EU and the United States—including the surprising federal momentum under the current HHS framework. From the utilitarian calculus of sentient consciousness down to the moral weight of insect neurology, we interrogate whether high-tech alternat...
This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir and J speak with Major Michael Brodka, a U.S. Army military intelligence officer and author of the July 2026 Military Review article “By Algorithm or Order.” Major Brodka argues that the U.S. Army's human-paced targeting doctrine is dangerously misaligned with the rapid emergence of machine-speed, AI-enabled warfare being pursued by adversaries li...
Nir and J discuss the show Black Mirror, the now archetypal tech dystopian cultural phenomenon. In almost every episode, technology is the villain. What rarely appears is a legislature, a regulator, or anyone organizing with anybody else. Technology simply arrives, and the only available moral is individual failure. Dystopian narratives are popular, but what work do they do? Do they spur us to action or di...
Henry Shevlin, DeepMind's first in-house philosopher and associate director of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, joins the show to sort through the hardest question in AI: are these systems conscious, and would we even know? Drawing on his background in animal cognition, Shevlin argues that the consciousness debate has never been sett...
This week Nir and J discuss the evolving ethical, political, and strategic landscape of autonomous weapons systems, contrasting historical methods of remote warfare (such as landmines and guided missiles) with modern AI-driven autonomy. They debate the necessity of keeping a "human in the loop," weighing consequentialist arguments—such as sparing soldiers' lives, acting faster than human cognition, ...
This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir and J discuss patient autonomy and the "right to try". The debate surrounding medical autonomy is intensifying as desperate patients use federal "Right-to-Try" laws and amateur biohackers bypass traditional regulations to create and access unapproved treatments. A booming gray market has emerged for unproven, compounded peptide shots, and RFK’s FDA wants to protect t...
This week, J and Nir talk to Father Michael Baggot about Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which outlines Catholic positions on AI and other emerging technologies. Father Michael Baggot is an Associate Professor of Bioethics at the Vatican’s Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome, a member of the Scholarly Advisory Board for Magisterium AI, and the chief ed...
This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir and J discuss the ethics of brain-computer interfaces. What role do they play in the futurist imagination, and what is the reality of their current use? How quickly will they be available for consumer use, and what ethical issues do they pose?
Show Notes:The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces Conference - UMass Boston - June 5-6, 2026
In this special live episode, recorded before an audience at Long Now Boston, Nir and J dig into existential risk. J takes seriously the prospect of catastrophic AI outcomes even absent consciousness or agency in any rich sense, while Nir worries less about civilization-ending scenarios than about a quieter, lowerc...
This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir and J discuss the tradeoffs of GLP1 drugs. Their use has reversed the obesity epidemic and has proven to have myriad medical and psychological benefits. But they also come with risks, and are seen as a technofix replacing the need for diets. Are GLP1s another step to the posthuman body, and is that a good or bad thing?
Errata: The first GLP1s were appro...
This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir and J discuss the role of disgust in morality. Neuroscience suggests that feelings of disgust underlie many moral judgments, especially in the treatment of sexuality. Conservatives have long defended disgust as a source of moral intuition, while liberals seek to minimize it. Can we suppress disgust? Should we?
Show Notes:Dr. Nicholas Christakis is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University and the Director of the Human Nature Lab. His research sits at the intersection of the social, biological, and computational sciences, exploring how our evolutionary biology and social network structures shape human behavior, health, and society. His groundbreaking work on "s...
In this special live episode of Prosthetic Gods, we bring you a night of big ideas recorded on April 2nd at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Presented as part of the University of New Hampshire's Sidore Lecture Series, "Artificial Intelligence and Human Values" gathered three le...
This week on Prosthetic Gods we are talking to Sven Nyholm about his new book The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. If our thinking relies on external media, where do we stop and the AIs start? What is the moral status of LLMs? Are they sentient? Are AI relationships any good? And should we raise robots like children?
Sven Nyholm is Professor of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at...
This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir and J talk about the distinctive ethical issues raised by the humanoid robots coming to homes and workplaces. Their presence and human-like form elicit unique responses compared to those of non-embodied AI. The appearance of a robot can manipulate human empathy and consent; robotic caregiving could be used as a pretext to dismantle the social safety net, and robot lover...
This week on Prosthetic Gods, J and Nir are talking to Alan Rozenshtein, professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, senior editor of Lawfare, fellow at Brookings, and former attorney at the Justice Department specializing in national defense. We talked about the legal and political implications of the Trump administration’s conflic...
This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir is interrogating an essay by J. on Buddhism, enhancement, and the self. They discuss the appeal of Buddhism for teenage Hughes, and how Buddhism reconciles a radical deconstruction of the self with moral commitment and principles.
Show Notes:Buddhism and Our Posthuman Future - J. Hughes
Cyborg Buddha - A conversation with transhumanist James Hughes
This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir and J are discussing the hit Apple TV show Pluribus. Created by Vince Gilligan, the show runner of Breaking Bad, the show explores a world taken over by a very nice hive mind that wants to give you anything you want. Would you take advantage of the perks, appreciate that the hive reduced humanity’s suffering, or fight like hell to give us all back our miserable individua...
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