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

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

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 assumption that whatever can be built should be.The question is not whether we are in collapse, but what survives it. We are far better cooperating than competing in the face of this leviathan, change that draws its force from the ground up as much as from coordination across borders. This is the fork. Small right moves are contagious, and no one is coming to save us. We are the adults in the room.To be human is to be attuned to the living world, both magnificent and destructive. Untether from the mythology of more, and the system collapsing us may be the one we outlast.Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.alivetothis.com-GuestsLuke KempResearch affiliate · Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of CambridgeA research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and author of the recent Goliath’s Curse. Kemp has lectured in economics and human geography, and has advised the World Health Organization, the Australian Parliament, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and many other institutions. His research has been covered by The New York Times, the BBC and The New Yorker.Sarah WilsonAuthor and social philosopher · host, Wild podcastA multi-New York Times bestselling author and social philosopher, Wilson founded the global I Quit Sugar movement and wrote First, We Make the Beast Beautiful and This One Wild and Precious Life. She now explores modern philosophy, existential risk and climate change through her recent book I Eat the Stars, the Wild podcast and her Substack. Sarah lives nomadically between Paris and Sydney.A.C. GraylingPhilosopher · Principal, Northeastern University LondonA British philosopher and Principal of Northeastern University London, Grayling is the author of more than thirty books on philosophy, ethics and democracy, including Democracy and Its Crisis, Who Owns the Moon? and the 2025 Discriminations. A prominent public intellectual, he has long argued that representative democracy is structurally failing, and that stewarding civilisation through this moment requires concrete institutional reform, not despair.Watch the Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlivetoThis

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 backsliding well underway, the conversation turns to what it now takes to hold one. They ask what an honest update to our institutions would require, from countering culture wars with uncommon ground to treating property as shelter for the next generation rather than an asset to be banked by this one.Australia, as a middle power, has more room to act than it tends to admit.Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.alivetothis.com-GuestsMalcolm Turnbull29th Prime Minister of AustraliaAustralia’s 29th Prime Minister (2015–2018) and former leader of the Liberal Party, Turnbull built a career as a barrister, journalist and tech investor before politics. Since leaving office he has written prolifically on climate, media power and the future of liberal democracy.Ian ThorpeFive-time Olympic gold medallist · founder, Fountain for YouthOne of Australia’s most decorated Olympians, Thorpe won five Olympic gold medals before retiring at 24 and reinventing himself as an advocate for Indigenous youth literacy and LGBTQ+ rights. His foundation partners with remote Aboriginal communities on early-childhood education.Jess ScullyWriter, civic strategist · former Deputy Lord Mayor of SydneyA writer, curator and former Deputy Lord Mayor of Sydney (2017–2021), Scully spent two decades championing creative industries, digital democracy and participatory governance. Her 2020 book Glimpses of Utopia gathered hopeful case studies of communities reinventing politics, work and care from the ground up.Watch the Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlivetoThis

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 is asking of us. What's breaking, what's at stake, and what it means to remain human in the midst of it all.Convened by Eleanor Gammell, each conversation moves into the forces reshaping our minds, our relationships and our systems, and the quieter ways we might still find each other.Eleanor's work focuses on systems dynamics and human futures spanning Small Giants Academy, TEDxSydney, MONA and The School of Life where she has co-created immersive experiences to engage with the interconnected crises and emergent possibilities of this moment.www.alivetothis.com