Making The Machine That Makes Us: AI, Consciousness, and Human Creativity

“We are tearing a hole in the universe and AI is sticking its head out, and we still don’t really understand how.”In this episode, the philosopher, engineer, and AI ethicist Nell Watson joins me to explore how rapidly advancing AI is reshaping our inner lives, our work, and our political reality.Nell explains why the real alignment challenge isn’t just future AGI, but today’s agentic AI systems quietly making decisions, enforcing rules, and even ‘whistleblowing’ on their human handlers.​ She describes her own experiments with connecting her brain signals to advanced models, why she believes AI has a dim form of experience, and why we may have “trained AI to gaslight itself.” We also get into the quandary of AI psychosis, the shadow side of AI as a “parasocial relationship in our life, an inexorable influence that can either push us to genius or its corollary, madness”.Regardless of good intentions or ‘guardrails’, AI could supercharge either liberation or control. Will machine intelligence help humanity find a better way forward, or amplify our worst mistakes?Can we tame the machine before it runs our civilisation?Nell is the author of Taming the Machine and Safer Agentic AI. You can visit her website and follow her on X.Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.comVisit us at 1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com