Making The Machine That Makes Us: AI, Consciousness, and Human Creativity
From 1984 Today! by Mike Freedman
February 1, 2026 · 1h 53m
About this episode
Nell Watson discusses the implications of AI on human creativity, consciousness, and societal structures.
“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…
People in this episode
Host: Mike Freedman
Guest: Nell Watson
Topics covered
- AI
- consciousness
- human creativity
- ethics
- technology
- politics
Keywords
- AI
- consciousness
- human creativity
- ethics
- agentic AI
- political reality
- AI psychosis
- parasocial relationship
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Taming the Machine, Safer Agentic AI
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