Tia Miseria

There’s an old folktale about a woman called Tía Miseria — Aunt Misery. When Death comes for her, she asks him for one last favor: climb her pear tree and pick her some fruit for the journey. But the tree is enchanted. Whatever climbs up cannot climb down. And so Death hangs in the branches — for years. At first, no one minds. Then the wounded arrive at her door, begging. The old and the sick plead to be released. Wars are fought and nobody dies. The Earth fills up. The food runs out. The world discovers, one bad year at a time, that it cannot live without death.That’s where we begin — because this is the episode where our story about artificial intelligence becomes a story about mortality.In the eighth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse — the continuation of our journey through TESCREAL, the ideologies driving the race to build god-like AI — we move from philosophy to practice: the people actively trying to overcome death, and what happens when one of them is an ordinary grieving daughter. AI researcher Dan Faggella returns for a full conversation about the Worthy Successor — why he believes humanity is a torch, not the flame, and what he hopes carries on after us. Philosopher Timothy Morton dismantles the master-slave thinking underneath our fears about technology, God, and global warming. And by Rebecca Nolan, a radio producer and folklorist who used four hours of her dying father’s oral history — and the same AI tools available to anyone — to build a “griefbot” of him, then held a two-hour digital seance to try to reach him. What she found, and what it cost her, is the heart of this episode. Also with us: Ian Gold, co-author of Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — the book that inspired this series — on why an uploaded consciousness might be your consciousness, but it wouldn’t be you; with returning perspectives from Emily Ray and Casey Kelly. And Sean has a confession of his own — about the time he told his wife he’d find a way for them to live forever.The myth of Orpheus warned us: you can descend into the underworld to retrieve the one you lost. But the thing you bring back will be an incomplete, scary, broken thing.Tía Miseria is the eighth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us — or something that’s already happening inside us.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comNEW: Our full long-form expert interviews are now available ad-free on Patreon — hear complete conversations with Timothy Morton, Dan Faggella, Joel and Ian Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Mediahttps://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia&nbsp;https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia&nbsp;https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind&nbsp;https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/&nbsp;https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady&nbsp;https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/&nbsp;https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:&nbsp;Rebecca Nolan - Radio producer, sound designer &amp; folklorist / Creator of Digital Ghost (Written in Air) — https://writteninair.substack.com/p/digital-ghostDan Faggella - Founder and Head of Research, Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research / The Trajectory — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-trajectory/id1739255954&nbsp;Timothy Morton - Rice University / Author, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology — https://amzn.to/4dzSRRXIan Gold - Professor of Philosophy &amp; Psychiatry, McGill University / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U&nbsp;Emily Ray - Sonoma State University / Co-author, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States — https://amzn.to/3SzUnwB&nbsp;Casey Kelly - Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture, University of Nebraska / Author, Apocalypse Man — https://amzn.to/43fA8GrDavid Benetar - Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Cape Town / Author, Better to Have Never Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence – https://amzn.to/3TqY1cz<