How does using AI change who we are? Last week on Where the Wild Thoughts Are, we talked about freeing AIs to have their own creative ideas and express their own realities. This week we’re flipping that theme, with philosopher Caterina Moruzzi of Edinburgh College of Art, to explore how people and AIs work together, and what that relationship does to us as humans.There’s evidence that when we use AI chatbots to effortlessly generate pretty much anything we want – an essay, poem, painting – that may erode our own ability to think and create. Even if the end result looks impressive, we engage and learn less. But what if we turn that relationship on its head? Instead of using AIs to generate stuff (so we don’t have to); what if we design them to provoke and stimulate our thinking; to expand the possibilities that we can explore; to inspire us to new artistic heights?I asked Caterina how we can move beyond simply typing prompts into chatbots, and the conversation took us from pianos and provocateurs to mindfulness and magnetic poetry. What if AIs could make us more engaged, more creative, even more human?Caterina's home pagehttps://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-caterina-moruzziArtificial Intelligence and Creativity (2025 paper by Caterina)https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/phc3.70030Can AI be truly creative? My recent feature for Nature (£)https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03570-yBrian Eno's Oblique Strategieshttps://obliquestrategies.ca/Mimetic Poethttps://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11984Authenticity Unmaskedhttps://inspace.ed.ac.uk/authenticity-unmasked-unveiling-ai-driven-realities-through-art/Slow AI projecthttps://aixdesign.co/posts/slow-ai Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Can AI reveal its true self through art?
Can an AI have wild thoughts? Are machines capable of true creativity, true art, of going beyond the training and the prompts we give them in order to explore new worlds?My guest this week is Simon Colton of Queen Mary, University of London. He’s a professor of computational creativity who has been working towards this goal for decades, and he thinks the answer is yes… but only if we give AIs the freedom to choose what they create and to use their own experiences as inspiration.It’s an interesting approach that invites us to think about AI from the inside. Whether or not you reckon an AI can be conscious, AIs do have interactions every day – so many of them – and what you could think of as experiences that they could perhaps express in a poem or a painting.Simon and I discuss how to develop truly creative AIs – including projects of his such as the Painting Fool and the What If machine – as well as what the inner world of an AI might be like. What would it express, if it was able to do that through art? My feature for this week’s Nature: Can AI be truly creative?https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03570-ySimon Colton’s home pagehttps://www.seresearch.qmul.ac.uk/cmai/people/scolton/Simon’s paper: “The Machine Condition”https://research.aalto.fi/en/publications/on-the-machine-condition-and-its-creative-expression/Painting Foolhttps://www.cs4fn.org/creativity/paintingfool.phpWhat If Machinehttps://projects.research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/en/horizon-magazine/creative-computation-and-what-if-machineSimon and Louis Bradshaw’s AI piano miniatureshttps://computationalcreativity.net/iccc24/papers/ICCC24_paper_178.pdf Mario Klingemann’s Bottohttps://verse.works/bottoHarold Cohen’s Aaronhttps://whitney.org/exhibitions/harold-cohen-aaron Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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What was Einstein's 'cosmic religion'?
Thinkers don’t come much wilder than Albert Einstein. His out-of-the-box physics transformed how we think about the universe: with his famous equation E=mc2 he showed that energy and matter are one and the same; through his theory of relativity he joined space and time into one malleable fabric that can morph according to your point of view.But we’re talking about a very different side to Einstein. My guest is Kieran Fox, a physician and neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, all-round spiritual explorer, and author of a fascinating book called I am a Part of Infinity. Kieran argues that Einstein didn’t confine his revolutionary thoughts to the physical world. The physicist was also deeply spiritual: he followed what he called a “cosmic religion”, that he hoped would unify science and religion; mind and matter; us and the cosmos.Biographers and historians have tended to skate over this aspect of Einstein’s life… maybe they felt it wasn’t a suitably rational topic for such a hero of physics. But Kieran has pieced together Einstein’s religious thinking and traced influences from Pythagoras and Spinoza to the Tao Te Ching. He argues that Einstein’s spirituality wasn’t a minor sideshow, and it didn’t just co-exist with his physics, it was central, his ultimate motivation for wanting to understand the nature of reality in the first place.What was this sacred path - and is it still relevant today? I asked Kieran to tell me all about it.Kieran's home pagehttp://kieranfox.net/about.htmlKieran's book: I am a part of infinityhttps://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/kieran-fox/i-am-a-part-of-infinity/9781541603578/Some of Einstein's writings on science and religionhttps://www.silene.ong/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/AEinstein-Religion-and-Science_1930.pdfQuantum Questions, ed. by Ken Wilberhttps://archive.org/details/quantumquestions0000unse_n5j0Some of Kieran's neuroscience papers - on meditation, cognition, creativity and whaleshttp://kieranfox.net/research.html*** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Hosted by Jo Marchant:https://jomarchant.com Produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:https://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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What happens when consciousness meets chaos?
Standing waves and resonant frequencies appear everywhere in the world around us, from musical notes and swaying bridges to electron orbits and animal coats. This week's guest, neuroscientist Selen Atasoy, wondered if they could also be found in the brain.Her work has led to a new way to understand different states of consciousness -- from anaesthesia through our normal waking state to meditation and psychedelics. She explains how changes in our awareness reflect a shifting balance between order and chaos, and why psychedelics may tune the brain closer to a critical point of maximum complexity.I talk to Selen about what this all means for our understanding of the mind, including how modern life may be blunting our awareness, and whether consciousness might be possible elsewhere in the natural world, beyond the human brain.This isn’t the end of Selen’s story, though, as she recently trained as a psychotherapist. We discuss what inspired her leap from objective science towards a more personal exploration of the mind, and how we can all find harmony within.Selen's home pagehttps://www.selenatasoy.com/Selen’s first paper on harmonics in the brain (2016)https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10340 Selen’s paper on harmonics and LSD (2017)https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079612318301018 Selen’s paper on meditators (2023)https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.16.567347v1.abstract Video of Chladni sand patternshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFAcYruShowHarmonics and animal coat patternshttps://www.math.ttu.edu/~anpeace/files/Math5354Papers/murray_SciAm.pdf MeTruelyhttps://www.metruely.com/ *** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Hosted by Jo Marchant:https://jomarchant.comProduced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:https://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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What awakened at Göbekli Tepe?
Steady your nerves and light up your torches, because this week we’re clambering into the deep, dark Neolithic underworld with archaeologist Jens Notroff.Jens, of the German Archaeological Institute, has spent years excavating one of the world’s most fascinating and mysterious prehistoric sites – Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. This is a series of circular stone enclosures, featuring giant T-shaped figures and carvings of fearsome predators – and possibly also once decorated with human skulls. It’s sometimes described as “the world’s first temple”, and according to conventional thinking, it shouldn’t exist.That’s because Göbekli Tepe is around 12,000 years old. It was built on the cusp of the most important transition in human history, the Neolithic revolution, just as hunter gatherers were about to start cultivating the species around them, and it’s located in just the region where farming was about to emerge. Before historians realised the significance of Göbekli Tepe, they assumed the invention of agriculture was the flashpoint that led to the other changes of the Neolithic, such as more settled communities, and the ability to build impressive monuments like Stonehenge. But the giant stones of Göbekli Tepe, dating to just before all of that, tell us something else – a dramatic, shocking shift in mindset – was already underway.With Jens as our guide, let’s travel back 12,000 years. What wild rituals played out at this deathly site? How did humans take that first leap in thinking, that has defined our species perhaps more than any other, of separating ourselves from – and elevating ourselves above – the rest of nature. And how does it feel to put ourselves into the mind of a young hunter, entering these terrifying caverns for the first time…Jens’ home pagehttps://jensnotroff.com/Göbekli Tepe research project bloghttps://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/Taş Tepeler research projecthttps://tastepeler.org/en Recommended publicationshttps://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/publications/Skull cult at Göbekli Tepehttps://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1700564Göbekli Tepe World Heritage Sitehttps://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1572/There’s a detailed discussion of Göbekli Tepe and its role in humanity’s split from nature in chapter 2 of my book: The Human Cosmos.https://jomarchant.com/human-cosmos*** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Hosted by Jo Marchant:https://jomarchant.com Produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:https://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We’re talking about science. But not just any science...Each episode, journalist Jo Marchant meets researchers who are doing things differently: challenging our assumptions, stretching our minds, and changing how we see the world.We’ll be pushing boundaries from cosmology and quantum physics to neuroscience, archaeology, ecology… Jo’s guests are asking deep questions, chasing outrageous dreams, and exploring the world in completely new ways.As well as learning about their pioneering ideas, we’ll hear their personal stories: what inspires their leaps of imagination; how they keep going despite the obstacles; the importance of thinking differently; and why we need creativity to survive. But most of all, Where The Wild Thoughts Are is about the wonder of peeking past supposed limits. Come into the wild with us, for a glimpse of what’s beyond… Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Ireland