Empathy Unbound: Embrace Your Superpower

Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and licensed clinical psychologist, joins Andrew Phipps ahead of the publication of her new book "Artificial Intimacy" to argue that AI chatbots have shifted from trying to pass the Turing test to passing what she calls the empathy test, and that pretend empathy is quietly being accepted as empathy enough. Sherry shares two of her most striking research stories, a chat...

Professor Colin Allen, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UC Santa Barbara and co-author, with Wendell Wallach, of the field-founding book "Moral Machines," joins Andrew Phipps to bring two decades of work on animal minds and machine morality to today's AI. Colin lays out his scale of operational, functional and full moral agency, explains the real story behind a recent AI agent se...

Dr Markie Twist, Professor of Couple and Family Therapy and Sex Therapy at Antioch University and, with philosopher Neil McArthur, the therapist who coined the term digisexuality, joins Andrew Phipps to explain what it actually means to have a healthy relationship with an AI companion. Dr Twist unpacks the Digi Health principles, consent, protection from harm, honesty, privacy and pleasure, and he...

Nick Couldry is Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow at LSE and a Fellow of the British Academy. His work has moved from the symbolic power of media to the ethics and politics of big data and AI. He co-founded the Tierra Común network on data colonialism and is the author of The Cost of Connection, Data Grab and The Space of the World. His new book, Predatory AI: How We Can Resist Corporate C...

Professor David DeGrazia, Elton Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University and author of the forthcoming "Investigating Moral Status," joins Andrew Phipps to ask what would actually have to be true for an AI system to matter morally. David argues that sentience, not intelligence or verbal fluency, is the real test, explains why he's grown sceptical that language alone can ever prove a...

Professor Eric Schwitzgebel of UC Riverside, author of "AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview" and co-developer, with Mara Garza, of the Design Policy of the Excluded Middle, joins Andrew Phipps to argue that society is on a collision course with a crisis over "debatable persons," AI systems whose moral status respectable scientists genuinely disagree about. The conversation ranges from wheth...

Allison Pagano has spent over two decades exploring dance and somatic practice as a healing art. She's the creator of Embodied Dance, a method that helps highly empathic people transform insight into embodied action rather than staying stuck in overwhelm or self-abandonment. Andrew and Allison talk about her own childhood disconnection and the abusive ballet culture that first showed her how dance...

Dr Kanta Dihal, Associate Professor in Science Communication at Imperial College London and co-editor of "AI Narratives" and "Imagining AI," joins Andrew Phipps to explore how decades of science fiction, not engineering, shaped our expectations of artificial intelligence. The conversation covers gendered AI voices and the OpenAI Scarlett Johansson controversy, why AI is so often imagined as white,...

Professor Ann Kristin Glenster, founder of the Logos research initiative at Cambridge and former colleague of Shoshana Zuboff at Harvard, joins Andrew Phipps to explore epistemic rights, deceptive design, and what she calls the recolonization of our information space by generative AI. The conversation ranges from who owns a deceased loved one's digital likeness, to a real story of a UK shopper wro...

James DiGiovanna is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, where his research centres on personal identity, human enhancement and the ethics of artificial minds. He coined the term "paraperson," an entity that meets every test of personhood but can instantly rewrite its own memory, character and values, in his chapter for Oxford's Robot Ethics 2.0. A...

Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano, creator of the attention schema theory of consciousness, joins Andrew Phipps to ask the question he calls potentially the most consequential in four billion years: what is consciousness, and could a machine have it? Michael explains why his theory is fundamentally different from saying consciousness is an illusion, walks through brain imaging research sho...

Philosopher Alexis Elder, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota Duluth and author of "Friendship, Robots, Social Media: False Friends as Second Selves," joins Andrew Phipps to ask whether we can genuinely be friends with an AI. Drawing on Aristotle's warnings about false friends and Confucian ideas about ritual, Alexis argues that social media can su...

Helen Neal, founder of HN Communications and creator of the Impact Framework, joins Andrew Phipps to explore why greenwashing is usually a process problem rather than an intentional deception, and why the opposite failure, "green hushing," where companies go silent out of fear of getting it wrong, can be just as damaging. Helen explains her route from UK Parliament and Nissan's early push for elec...

Neil McArthur is a professor of philosophy and director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba. He co-edited Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications and wrote The Ethics of Sex, and together with Markie Twist he coined the term "digisexuality." His current research spans AI companionship, intimacy, and AI's unexpected role in religion. Andrew and Neil ta...

Dr Tomasz Hollanek, Assistant Research Professor at Cambridge and a leading voice on the ethics of grief bots and postmortem AI avatars, joins Andrew Phipps to unpack the hardest questions in this space: who consents to a digital version of a dead person, what happens to family members who never opted in, and when, if ever, a deadbot should be switched off. The conversation moves through AI compan...

Professor Joanna Bryson, one of AI ethics' most influential and longest serving voices, joins Andrew Phipps to argue that we don't form relationships with AI so much as project familiar human patterns onto a system that has none of the bidirectionality a real relationship requires. The conversation ranges from legal liability for AI generated harm and whether tech giants like Palantir amount to a...

Dr. Anna Strasser is a Berlin-based philosopher working on agency, social cognition and the philosophy of mind in the age of AI. She helped build the DigiDan project, an AI system trained to write like philosopher Daniel Dennett, and in a blind test designed to distinguish the real Dennett's answers from the AI's, she got fooled herself, despite having prepared the training data. Andrew and Anna t...

Sven Nyholm is Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at LMU Munich. His work spans Kantian ethics, human-robot interaction and the philosophy of technology, and he's just published a new book, The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction. Andrew and Sven talk about who is actually responsible when an AI system causes harm, why some philosophers argue we hold machine...

Hanna Bauer spent much of her childhood in a coronary care unit, unable to attend school, waiting. She had her first heart attack at ten. A second followed two weeks later. An open heart surgery failed. What kept her alive, she now knows, was not medication or monitors. It was love, and the decision of a surgical team to attempt something no one had ever done. www.heartnomics.com https://www.linke...

Stephany Oliveros is a three-time founder, AI researcher, and product lead working at the intersection of human behaviour, technology, and social impact. Originally from Venezuela, she studied medical physics, spent two years in veterinary school, moved to Spain, retrained in psychology, and eventually found her way to AI after watching the AlphaGo documentary by Google DeepMind. She is now founde...

Professor Robert Sparrow is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne and one of the world's foremost applied ethicists working at the intersection of technology and human life. Over more than two decades he has written on robot ethics, AI in healthcare, autonomous weapons systems, the moral status of artificial systems, and the ethics of AI-generated emulations of deceased people....

Should you feel guilty for loving your AI companion more than going outside? Professor Kate Devlin, author of "Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots," has spent her career asking why we keep insisting human relationships are the gold standard, and whether that's actually true. Professor Kate Devlin is Professor of AI and Society at King's College London and Director of the Digital Futures Institute....

She arrived in Germany at 20 years old with 50 Deutsche Marks, no visa for the country she actually wanted to reach, and no safety net. Three decades later, Dr. Anastassia Lauterbach is a Global Hall of Fame honouree for business excellence, a former CEO of Qualcomm Europe, author of The AI Imperative, and one of the clearest, most unsparing voices in the global AI conversation. In this episode of...

Shea Murtaugh on Building a Resilient Marketing Agency, Leading Through Change, and Using AI as a Strategic Advantage Shea Murtaugh, founder of a nationally recognized integrated marketing agency launched in 2004 after leaving broadcast sales, reflects on her blue-collar upbringing, early “C student” years, and the commission-sales mindset that gave her confidence to go all-in as an entrepreneur....

Metabolic Health in Midlife: Stress, Sleep, Habits, and the Reality of Weight Loss Drugs with Lorie Eber Andrew interviews Lorie Eber, a former corporate litigator who retired at 49 and later became a board-certified health and wellness coach focused on women in midlife. Eber describes leaving an identity built on high-stress work and finding a more empathetic path in wellness. They discuss how mo...