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 and perhaps says more about us than about the machine. Are we pouring our oldest longing into cobalt, lithium, and silicon, and mistaking the echo for a voice? Our culture's hunger for meaning is finding shape in a place we never expected to be sacred.
The deeper question is not whether AI will save us or destroy us. Both stories are inversions of the same old myth. The real question is what this moment reveals about the longing we've been carrying, and what we're prepared to do with what we find.
Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.
Alexander Beiner
Writer · essayist · co-founder of Rebel Wisdom
A British writer and essayist, Beiner co-founded Rebel Wisdom, the dialogue platform that mapped the “sensemaking” scene around figures like Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke. His 2023 book The Bigger Picture draws on psychedelics, ecology and AI to argue we are living through a civilisational meaning crisis.
Catriona Wallace
AI ethicist · founder, Responsible Metaverse Alliance
An Australian AI ethics professor, entrepreneur and Order of Australia recipient, Wallace founded Flamingo AI — the second woman-led company to list on the ASX — and now chairs the Responsible Metaverse Alliance. She is an Adjunct Professor at AGSM and a globally cited voice on responsible AI.
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