Machine Ethics Podcast episodes

This time we're chatting with David Gerard about crypto bros, bubble economics and recessions, AI services pricing, who is making all the money, surveillance uses of AI, uses for empty datacenters, the RAM racket, AI as the platform for life, the cult of AI and effective altruism, AI doomers, anthropomorphising AI and more...

This episode we're chatting with Simon Bell about the future of the internet, science fiction, GenAI as research assistant, enshitification, stories of AI fear, emergence, writing the monster AI into being, meditation and more...

This time we're chatting with Lawrence Sheraton about models of economics, will AGI be ethical? moral capabilities of AI, an elusive obvious, how do we know what is right and wrong, “I feel, therefore I know Ethics”, the conditional / contextual nature of ethics, ethical truth, sycophantic and schizophrenic AI, ethical unlearning and more...

This time we're chatting with E.M. about the promise of AI and making human connection easier, speech recognition and supporting linguistic diversity, making useful technologies that have a purpose, Mozilla data collective, under represented cultures in datasets, accidental monocultures with technology, negative uses of datasets, AI literacy, the instability of LLMs and more...

This time we're chatting with Jonathan Strecker on the kinds of intelligences, why AI shouldn’t replace learning wholesale, six levels of wisdom, AI hallucinations and lack of trust, AI use in academia, skills atrophy, the anxious generation, dumbing down the masses, rethinking education and more...

This month we speak with Demetrios for the second time about: what is ML and MLops, narrow Machine Learning being still relevant, vibe coding, working with agents, talking to your computer, unknown productivity gains of LLMs, the chat interface as a bad interface for all knowledge, AIs that know when they’re wrong, the lack of ground truth, and more...

In this episode we chat with Rebecca for the second time about: intelligence isn’t everything, are LLM’s even safe? AI governance and guardrails, moral assurance, under-specification problems, lack of interdisciplinary work in robotics, AI shouldn’t be sold as a solution to everything, sidelining of AI Ethics, what are the actual benefits of AI? will AI progress widen inequality? and more...

This month we're chatting with Dietmar Fischer about what we will mean by saying "AI" in the future? AI in science fiction, the fact that AI’s don’t want for anything, jobs and the political effects of unemployment, post-work society and defining what a good life is, the Chinese AI legislation, protecting young people from AI anthropomorphising, AI literacy, the AI bubble, Human extinction, and more

This month we're chatting with Dr. Ewelina Kurtys on the uses of organoids and energy saving computing, the unknowns in neural science, differences between biological neurons and digital neural networks, how neurons operate and encoding information, the impractical nature of recreating brain structures, the tendency to anthropomorphise, determinism and more...

This episode James and I are trying to stay positive while chatting about: superintelligence, AI basic drives, and the alignment problem; The intelligence explosion, existential risks of AI; profit over responsibility, the super rich; AI regulation and much more

This month we chatted in-person with Jen Semler. We chatted about what is AI? Philosophers and engineer collboartions, businesses working with ethicists, machine ethics and AMAs, what makes a moral agent, how to create a moral agent, types of moral decisions, the point of moral agents, how can we tell if a machine is conscious, tech companies being not democratic organisations and don’t have to adhere to their citizens, and more...

For our 2025 round up episode we're again chatting with Lisa Talia Moretti on the prevalence of AI slop, the end of social media, Grok and explicit content generation, giving legislation more teeth, anthropomorphising reasoning models, AI literacy and safeguarding, fighting data centre construction, importantance of journalism, and AI chatbot bingo...

This month we're chatting with Giulia Trojano about AI as an economic narrative, companion chatbots, deskilling of digital literacy, chatbot parental controls, differences between social AI and general AI services, increasing surveillance in the guise of safety, advertising creeping into GenAI services, ReplikaAI, lack of research in emotional AI, techno-determinism, and more...

This month we're chatting again with Tim El-Sheikh. We discuss podcasting,
history of openAI, London startups, what are the AI use cases, is GenAI even safe? the AI bubble, snake oil salesmen, why do we need all these data centres? replacing human workers, data oligachies, the erosion of trust in AI, AI psychosis and more...

This time we're chatting with Dr Oliver Bridge about machine ethics, superintelligence, virtue ethics, AI alignment, fostering morality in humans and AI, evolutional moral systems, socialising AI, and systems thinking...

This is a bonus episode looking back over answers to our question: What excites you about AI?

This episode Adir and I chat about Autonomy.ai–AI automation for frontend web development, where Human Machine Interface could be going? allowing an LLM to optimism itself, job displacement, vibe coding, Grok's MechaHitler, the ethics and guard rails of LLMs, and go be a plumber!?

In this special live panel episode we recorded at the AI Ethics, Risks and Safety Conference 2025 in Bristol, May 2025. We chat about what is AI, predictions for the next 5 years - good and bad, the incoming wave of fraud, AI education and in education, copyright in the age of LLMs, the uncertainty of AI regulation, responsible AI in organisation, sovereign AI capabilities, the question: are we not being experimented on? Elderly AI, AI's impact on the creative industries and more...

This is our 100th episode! A super special look at AI and the Environment, we interviewed 4 experts for this DeepDive episode. We chatted about water stress, the energy usage of AI systems and data centres, using AI for fossil fuel discovery, the geo-political nature of AI, GenAI vs other ML alogrithms for energy use, demanding transparency on energy usage for training and operating AI, more AI regulation for carbon consumption, things we can change today like picking renewable hosting solutions, publishing your data, when doing "responsible AI" you must include the environment, considering who are the controllers of the technology and what do they want, and more...

This episode we're chat with Pinar Guvenc on “What's Wrong With” podcast, co-design, is AI ready for society and is society ready for AI? What is design? co-creation with AI as a stakeholder, bias in design, small language models, is AI making us lazy? human experience, digital life and our attention, and talking to diverse people...