Alive to This: AI & Human Futures

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-GuestsTiberio CaetanoChief Scientist · Professor · OECD AI AdvisorCo-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 RankinPolicy Strategist · Advocate · ArtistA 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 GameauFilm Director · Producer · AuthorAn 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 

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-Guests:Joel PearsonProfessor · Cognitive Neuroscience · AuthorA 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 GouldAssociate Professor · Cybernetics, AI & BioethicsAn 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 BadamiAnthropologist · Army Reserves OfficerAn 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

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 power, wealth and surveillance concentrate into a few hands.Most of this conversation happens behind closed doors, in intelligence briefings and risk taxonomies. What's offered here belongs to all of us: a web of dangers that reinforce each other, and the question of how we hold something too big to take in. The guests zoom out, then pull it back to each of our lives, from the sock lost before the school run to whether we are, collectively, ok.They refuse both despair and easy hope, asking whether we can stay in the discomfort long enough to imagine a future rather than inherit the default, and to build the international coordination that would take.Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.www.alivetothis.com-Guests:Devon WhittleDirector, Global Shield AustraliaDirector of Global Shield Australia, an independent non-profit advancing pragmatic policy to reduce global catastrophic risk, including from advanced AI. He came to the role from a career across the Attorney General’s Department, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and private legal practice, working on international disputes and treaty negotiation.Dr Arnagretta HunterCardiologist and Chair, Global Shield AustraliaA cardiologist and Chair of Global Shield Australia, and the Human Futures Fellow at the ANU from 2020 to 2025. Her work bridges complex systems, medicine, climate and risk, contributing to debate on catastrophic and existential risk, with a particular focus on listening and communication as the pre-requisite for coordination.Greg SadlerCEO, Good AncestorsCEO of Good Ancestors, where he leads AI risk research and regularly briefs parliamentarians and senior public officials on AI and catastrophic risk. With over a decade in the Australian Public Service, including in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Attorney General’s Department, the Department of Home Affairs and Emergency Management Australia, he has also acted as a spokesperson for Australians for AI Safety.Watch the Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlivetoThis

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 people inside them.Together they trace a single arc: systems coming apart, disconnection from each other and from nature as the wound beneath the wound, and what it asks of us to live with open eyes today.Warning: this chapter references suicide. If you or anyone you know needs support, reach out to beyondblue.com.au or lifeline.org.au. Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.alivetothis.com-Guests:Gina ChickWilderness instructor · writer · winner, Alone Australia S1Winner of the inaugural season of SBS’s Alone Australia, Chick is a wilderness instructor, rewilding facilitator and writer who has spent decades teaching primitive skills and grief work. Her 2024 memoir We Are the Stars weaves survival, motherhood and the loss of her daughter into a meditation on being fully alive.Simon LongstaffExecutive Director, The Ethics CentreExecutive Director of The Ethics Centre in Sydney since 1991, Longstaff is one of Australia’s most-quoted public philosophers, advising boards, governments and broadcasters on questions of integrity and applied ethics. He hosts the Centre’s long-running IQ2 debates and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.Sister AnayahSister of Mary · former prison officerA Sister of Mary who once walked the corridors of a maximum-security prison as an officer turned chaplain. Sister Anayah speaks from the place where institutions meet the people they hold. Her practice is one of presence, prayer and quiet defiance.David BeaumontWiradjuri man · advocateA Wiradjuri man whose work sits at the intersection of cultural reclamation, colonial trauma and the slow business of listening. He speaks of the institutions that carry or fail the people inside them, and of what it asks of us to live in this land with open eyes.Watch the Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlivetoThis

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 offered here is something quieter, and harder: that despair, however justified it feels, is not a strategy. That the things our culture once called soft (interiority, attachment, intuition, conscience, the slow work of becoming whole) are in fact the hardest and most important things we carry.What we call AI is, for now, a mirror. A student. A creation that has learned everything it knows from us. And we, flawed, distracted, often failing, are nevertheless the parents in the room.Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.alivetothis.comGuests:Krista TippettHost, On Being · founder, The On Being ProjectPeabody Award-winning host of On Being, Tippett has spent two decades drawing scientists, poets and theologians into long, generous conversations about what it means to be human. A former diplomat in divided Berlin, she founded The On Being Project and the Civil Conversations Project.Berry LibermanCo-founder, Small Giants Academy · publisher, Dumbo FeatherCo-founder and creative director of Small Giants Academy and publisher of Dumbo Feather magazine, Liberman has spent twenty years championing “conversations with extraordinary people” and an Australian ecosystem of regenerative business and impact investing.Watch the Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlivetoThis

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.alivetothis.comAlexander BeinerWriter · essayist · co-founder of Rebel WisdomA 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 WallaceAI ethicist · founder, Responsible Metaverse AllianceAn 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.Watch the Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlivetoThis