Alive to This: AI & Human Futures

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 rea...

Risks large enough to shake human civilisation, and how AI amplifies them. Catastrophic risk experts Devon Whittle, Arnagretta Hunter and Greg Sadler address the threats they work to mitigate.

These are not distant hypotheticals. An AI model now finds software vulnerabilities by the thousands, runs espionage with barely a human at the wheel, clones a child's voice for a scam call, and can walk a novice toward a bioweapon, while ...

A Wiradjuri man, an adventurer, an ethicist and a prison officer turned Sister of Mary sit with what most of us are taught to look away from: grief, and the frames inherited from institutions that no longer hold us.

Gina Chick, Simon Longstaff and Sister Anayah speak of grief not as something to overcome but as something that reshapes us. David Beaumont speaks of the colonial project, and the institutions that carry or fail the ...

Around a coffee table with tea, and the unhurried tone of two old friends. Eleanor is joined by Krista Tippett and Berry Liberman to sit with what is older than any technology: a nervous system, a species in distress and a century of institutions that no longer fit the world they were built to hold.

There’s a temptation, in a moment like this, to reach for collapse, to narrate ourselves into the ending. What’s offere...

A collision of two ideas that don't usually share a room: artificial intelligence and spirituality. Alexander Beiner and Catriona Wallace sit with what is arriving, drawing on psychedelics and animism: a new kind of intelligence even its makers don't fully understand, and the ancient questions it stirs in us.

Most conversations about AI stay safely in the language of tools and use-cases. What's offered here is something stranger...

Author and journalist Sarah Wilson, philosopher AC Grayling and existential risk researcher Luke Kemp bring three vantage points to the same unravelling. Civilisations have always fallen like great Goliaths, but this one is global, and the weapons in its hands are totalising: nuclear, algorithmic, atmospheric.

Compounding these weapons is the logic that wields them. A handful of actors locked in a race no one wins, and the assum...

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, olympic athlete Ian Thorpe and civic leader Jess Scully each name what they see from where they stand: the political, physical and civic body under pressure.

Honest but not despairing, we are here. From AI, energy and political power, the forces reshaping humanity are not separate crises, but interconnected conditions.

With barely six per cent of the world living in a full democracy and...

We're living through a time that's difficult to comprehend and impossible to ignore.

AI is reshaping our work, our decisions, the way we imagine what comes next. Underneath, something quieter is fraying. Our sense of connection, our trust, our capacity to make meaning together.

This series begins in that tension.

Ten chapters. Ten roundtables. Voices gathered not to perform certainty, but to meet what this moment...