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Suspicious Minds: AI and the ApocalypseAuthor: Agoric Media
The Doomsday Clock is set to 85 seconds until midnight the closest it has ever been in its 79-year history. The world is at war. And the people building the most powerful technology in human history are warning, in public, that it might kill us all.Season One of Suspicious Minds examined what happens when AI fractures individual minds. Season Two asks a harder question: what happens when it shatters our collective sense of the future?Our ancestors have predicted the end of the world since ancient times. Thus far, they have always been wrong. So what does our eternal obsession with the apocalypse reveal about the human mind?This season is a meditation on life, death, and what it means to be alive in an age when humanity is creating something that those building it believe has the power to either end all life on Earth or turn our world into a utopia.Suspicious Minds is a two-time Webby Award-nominated podcast, and Official Selection of the 2026 Tribeca Festival Creators Market. Season One is available now. Season Two episodes drop weekly. Follow now wherever you listen so you dont miss an episode. From Wondermind and Agoric MediaExecutive Producers Mandy Teefey and Selena GomezSubscribe to our newsletter to stay updated on all things Suspicious Minds and more: https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ If youve had an experience with AI that youd like to share with us, please contact us: info@agoricmedia.comhttps://www.agoricmedia.com/suspicious-mindshttps://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmediahttps://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia Language: en Genres: Documentary, Science, Social Sciences, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
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Through a Glass, Darkly: Part Two
Episode 11
Wednesday, 19 August, 2026
Last week we ended in a laboratory in Melbourne, with a man who grows human brain cells in a dish and teaches them to play Doom. He told us they’re about as complex as a cockroach. He also told us where the cells come from. Human blood. Some of it his own.This is the half where it stops being a question about machines.Hon Weng Chong, CEO and founder of Cortical Labs, draws a red line, and it isn’t at intelligence. It’s at suffering. He won’t build a system that could be conscious, because a system that can be conscious is a system that can be hurt. If that sounds familiar, it should: it is David Benatar’s argument against having children, arriving from the opposite side of the world and pointed at a dish. Hon also explains why he doesn’t think a large language model will ever get there, and why the reason is embodiment. You can’t be a self, he argues, without a body running at the same speed as the world.Then a detour through the three things people believe when there’s nothing to measure. Panpsychism, which says consciousness is everywhere, in you and in the rock and in the weather system. Solipsism, which says it’s only in you, and every other mind you’ve ever loved could be running empty. And integrated information theory, which is the attempt to make it a science, to put an actual number on how much consciousness a system has. A brain. A dish of neurons. A chatbot. In 2023, a hundred and twenty-four researchers signed an open letter calling that one pseudoscience.Three positions, one hole in the middle. There is no test for consciousness. There never was.Philosopher Timothy Morton, who gave us the word hyperobject, explains why artificial intelligence qualifies: it is a thing so massively distributed across time and space that you can understand it but never perceive the whole of it. And why describing it as demonic is, in the original and precise sense of the word, simply accurate.Dr. Michael Ferguson of Harvard’s Neurospirituality Research Lab arrives at embodiment from inside a scanner. Spirituality, he says, is wired to the periaqueductal gray, a knot of tissue in the brain stem whose entire job is carrying signals up from the body. Two men, two disciplines, two hemispheres, who have never spoken to each other, landing on the same word. Which is a problem for Hans Moravec, who in 1988 wrote the book this whole future is built on, correctly predicted the decade the machines would catch up, proved the body carries a billion years of knowledge, and then proposed we leave it behind. He also believed these machines would one day be able to hand us back our dead.And then Michael tells a story. For several years he was the choir director at his church, and for two holiday services he covertly used AI to generate the worship program. People wept. Not politely — free-flowing tears at Easter, at something they experienced as sacred. Afterward a few of them found out where it came from, and the feeling curdled. Nothing about the service had changed. Only what they knew about its author.Then he describes sitting at a laptop, running a scripted prompt, and crying. This is a neuroscientist who studies what the sacred looks like inside a human brain, who knew exactly what he was talking to, and for whom it worked anyway.Which is where I stopped asking questions and told him something about myself instead.His answer starts somewhere I did not expect: the neural signature of mystical experience is the inverse of the signature associated with violent crime, and the thing it most closely resembles is blindsight — the condition where a person insists they can see nothing and then describes the shape on the wall correctly.We opened this episode by saying we can finally see inside ourselves, and that part is true. Nobody in the eight thousand years between the obsidian mirror at Çatalhöyük and this recording could do what these two men can do. And when we asked them what a mind is, neither of them could tell us. That isn’t a failure on their part. It’s the honest edge of what our species currently knows.We are standing in front of the brightest mirror anyone has ever built. It gets clearer every day. So far it has shown us exactly one thing.Through a Glass Darkly is the tenth and eleventh episodes of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something already happening inside us.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Michael Ferguson, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Joel Gold, David Benatar, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Mediahttps://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com - https://neurospirituality.ioHon Weng Chong — CEO and Founder, Cortical Labs — https://corticallabs.comTimothy Morton — Philosopher / Author, Hyperobjects and The Ecological Thought — https://amzn.to/4xPqGa4Dr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UDavid Benatar — Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Cape Town / Author, Better Never to Have Been — https://amzn.to/3TqY1czOther works and things mentioned:Hans Moravec — Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press, 1988) — https://amzn.to/3SCYvw5Moravec’s paradox — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradoxIsaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Moravec’s example for reconstructing the dead) — https://amzn.to/4zlxs9fTimothy Morton — Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World — https://amzn.to/4xPqGa4Timothy Morton — The Ecological Thought (2010) — https://amzn.to/4cQPciTObject-oriented ontology — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontologyAnimism — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnimismPanpsychism — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/Solipsism — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/solipsism/Nine Inch Nails — “Only” (With Teeth, 2005) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_(Nine_Inch_Nails_song)René Descartes and the problem of other minds — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/The Truman Show delusion (see Season 1) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show_delusionIntegrated information theory and Giulio Tononi — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theoryThe 2023 open letter calling IIT pseudoscience — https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02971-1David Chalmers and the “hard problem” of consciousness — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/Steve Wozniak’s “coffee test” for AGI — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligencePantheon (AMC, created by Craig Silverstein, from the short stories of Ken Liu) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)Blindsight — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlindsightThe periaqueductal gray — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periaqueductal_grayThe Anishinaabe Seven Fires Prophecy — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_fires_prophecy 1 Corinthians 13 — “through a glass, darkly” — https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2013&version=KJVÇatalhöyük and the obsidian mirrors — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCkDan Faggella — “The Worthy Successor” (Episode 8) — https://danfaggella.com/successor/Émile Torres on TESCREAL — https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636Cortical Labs and the CL1 — https://corticallabs.comSuspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too.Credits: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul BennettGraphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams, Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Sound and Camera: Adam VeanerSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
