Episodes

  • Sarah Murray, "Powered by Smart: A Prehistory of Everyday AI" (NYU Press, 2026)

    Sarah Murray, "Powered by Smart: A Prehistory of Everyday AI" (NYU Press, 2026)
    Apr 22 2026
    Powered by Smart traces the techno-cultural evolutions that made artificial intelligence feel more familiar than futuristic. From wearables and streaming platforms to home voice assistants and AI toasters, smart is an inescapable feature of postdigital life. Today, thousands of products and platforms define smart as routine automation and friendly digital kinship. Yet smartness was not always so digital. Sarah Murray uncovers the century-long process through which smart became synonymous with seamless interaction between bodies and machines, showing how this intimate interfacing helped to normalize today’s algorithmic world.Offering a critical, feminist prehistory of everyday AI, Powered by Smart reveals how the pursuit of convenience, comfort, and efficiency has long been a gendered campaign. Smartness has often been associated with women — from early switchboard operators and industrial designer Lillian Gilbreth’s test kitchens to Jane Fonda’s Jazzercise empire and Disney’s computer-housewife PAT in Smart House. These moments illuminate how machine intelligence has already been made ordinary, and how the smart ideal was built over time through domesticity, discipline, and desirability.Moving across factory floors, suburban kitchens, exercise trends, and digital homes, Murray shows how twentieth-century innovations in wearability, solutionism, and recognition laid the groundwork for our contemporary tolerance of — and attachment to — AI. Far from a sudden technological revolution, everyday AI emerged through decades of cultural conditioning of smart life as a caring, attentive endeavor that cast human–machine harmony as both natural and necessary. Powered by Smart reframes artificial intelligence not as the next frontier of progress, but as the logical extension of a much older dream of efficiency made ordinary and personal.
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    2 mins
  • Adrian Woolfson, "On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence" (MIT Press, 2026)

    Adrian Woolfson, "On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence" (MIT Press, 2026)
    Apr 20 2026
    Imagine a future where we grow houses rather than build them. Where smartphones are alive, clothing has opinions and all human knowledge fits into a speck of DNA. A world where disease is a thing of the past and the human lifespan is dramatically extended.To achieve this, says Adrian Woolfson, founder of the genome writing company Genyro, we must transform biology into a predictive, programmable engineering material. That means decoding the generative grammar of DNA: the language of life itself. We will then be able to author genomes—and, if we choose, even rewrite our own.In On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence (MIT Press, 2026), Woolfson describes how we are at the cusp of a technological revolution, driven by the convergence of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. Currently at the scribbling phase—writing the genomes of viruses, bacteria and yeast—we will eventually author the genomes of extinct and never-before-realized species. Life will become computable, detached from its past and no longer bound by Darwinian evolution.While offering extraordinary opportunities, this power also carries great risk, and it is vital for everyone to understand what the future might hold. In this groundbreaking work, Woolfson provides a guide to this bold new world, offering a moral compass to help us do so safely, wisely and ethically. Adrian Woolfson is the cofounder of Genyro, a California-based biotechnology company specializing in synthetic genome design and construction. He studied medicine at Balliol College, Oxford, and was formerly the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge, working at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Greg is the Executive Director and Founder of the World War II Discussion Forum (wwiidf.org). He also has a strong interest in literature, culture, religion, science and philosophy (translation: he's an eclectic reader who is constantly missing deadlines for book reviews).
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    4 mins
  • Sam Illingworth and Rachel Forsyth, "GenAI in Higher Education: Redefining Teaching and Learning" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

    Sam Illingworth and Rachel Forsyth, "GenAI in Higher Education: Redefining Teaching and Learning" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
    Mar 17 2026
    GenAI in Higher Education: Redefining Teaching and Learning (Bloomsbury, 2026) provides practical guidance for higher education professionals looking to use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies. Blending theoretical grounding with real-world examples and case studies, it gives step-by-step guidance on how to evaluate, select, and implement GenAI technologies in teaching, learning, assessment, and student support. It covers topics including automating administrative processes, adapting learning resources, and critiquing outputs. Each chapter includes reflective exercises and further reading lists and shows how AI can enhance accessibility, efficiency, and creativity in higher education. Alongside this, the many challenges and ethical considerations of using AI are introduced, including issues around plagiarism, quality control, and the need to establish governance protocols. Dr. Tiatemsu Longkumer, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan, researches indigenous religion and Christianity among the Nagas, Buddhism in Bhutan, and Generative AI in education.
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    3 mins
  • Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland, "The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines" (Basic Books, 2025)

    Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland, "The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines" (Basic Books, 2025)
    Oct 29 2025
    When we are trying to solve a problem, what happens? We find ourselves weighing arguments, or relying on intuition, then reaching a conscious decision about what to do. What is going on behind the scenes? In The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines (Basic Books, 2025), Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland show that our experience is the tip of an iceberg of brain activity that can be captured in an artificial neural network. Such networks--initially developed as models of ourselves--have become the engines of artificial neural intelligence. Suri and McClelland aren't reducing mankind to mere machines. Rather, they are showing how a data-driven neural network can create thoughts, emotions, and ideas--a mind--whether in humans or computers. The Emergent Mind provides a fascinating account of how we reach decisions, why we change our minds, and how we are affected by context and experience. Ultimately, the book gives a new answer to one of our oldest questions: Not just how do minds work, but what does it mean to be a mind at all?
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    6 mins
  • David Eliot, "Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI" (Aevo UTP, 2025)

    David Eliot, "Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI" (Aevo UTP, 2025)
    Oct 14 2025
    The story of AI isn't finished yet. The question is: how will you be part of it? With the unprecedented adoption of artificial intelligence and its far-reaching implications, people everywhere are witnessing the world change around them. Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI (Aevo UTP, 2025) answers today's most pressing questions about AI - from the fundamental to the futuristic - offering readers a new, informed worldview. In an age of unparalleled innovation and change, artificial intelligence has become the heart of our fears, discussions, and debates. Thus, AI researcher and award-winner David Eliot takes readers on a journey through the key moments and decisions that have shaped its creation and our world. A socially driven history, the book explores its technical breakthroughs and the social forces that made them possible.But this book isn't just about the past - it's about you. Artificially Intelligent invites readers to find their place in the story of AI, to understand its impact on their lives, and to decide what kind of future they want to help create.Artificially Intelligent tells the story of the technology the way it was meant to be told: not as an exhaustive retelling of history, nor as a prophecy of doom and gloom, but as a human story that is not yet complete.
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    4 mins
  • Cass R. Sunstein, "Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and Cannot Do" (APS Press, 2025)

    Cass R. Sunstein, "Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and Cannot Do" (APS Press, 2025)
    Sep 29 2025
    Imperfect Oracle is about the promise and limits of artificial intelligence. The promise is that in important ways AI is better than we are at making judgments. Its limits are evidenced by the fact that AI cannot always make accurate predictions--not today, not tomorrow, and not the day after, either. Natural intelligence is a marvel, but human beings blunder because we are biased. We are biased in the sense that our judgments tend to go systematically wrong in predictable ways, like a scale that always shows people as heavier than they are, or like an archer who always misses the target to the right. Biases can lead us to buy products that do us no good or to make foolish investments. They can lead us to run unreasonable risks, and to refuse to run reasonable risks. They can shorten our lives. They can make us miserable. Biases present one kind of problem; noise is another. People are noisy not in the sense that we are loud, though we might be, but in the sense that our judgments show unwanted variability. On Monday, we might make a very different judgment from the judgment we make on Friday. When we are sad, we might make a different judgment from the one we would make when we are happy. Bias and noise can produce exceedingly serious mistakes. AI promises to avoid both bias and noise. For institutions that want to avoid mistakes it is now a great boon. AI will also help investors who want to make money and consumers who don't want to buy products that they will end up hating. Still, the world is full of surprises, and AI cannot spoil those surprises because some of the most important forms of knowledge involve an appreciation of what we cannot know and why we cannot know it. Written in clear, jargon-free English and grounded in deep understanding, Imperfect Oracle provides a distinctly useful perspective on this complex debate.
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    35 mins
  • Gary Rivlin, "AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence" (Harper Collins, 2025)

    Gary Rivlin, "AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence" (Harper Collins, 2025)
    Aug 20 2025
    A veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist shadows the top thinkers in the field of Artificial Intelligence, introducing the breakthroughs and developments that will change the way we live and work. Artificial Intelligence has been “just around the corner” for decades, continually disappointing those who long believed in its potential. But now, with the emergence and growing use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and a rapidly multiplying number of other AI tools, many are wondering: Has AI’s moment finally arrived? In AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence (Harper Collins, 2025), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Rivlin brings us deep into the world of AI development in Silicon Valley. Over the course of more than a year, Rivlin closely follows founders and venture capitalists trying to capitalize on this AI moment. That includes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the legendary investor whom the Wall Street Journal once called, “the most connected person in Silicon Valley.” Through Hoffman, Rivlin is granted access to a number of companies on the cutting-edge of AI research, such as Inflection AI, the company Hoffman cofounded in 2022, and OpenAI, the San Francisco-based startup that sparked it all with its release at the end of that year of ChatGPT. In addition to Hoffman, Rivlin introduces us to other AI experts, including OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman and Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, an early AI startup that Google bought for $650 million in 2014. Rivlin also brings readers inside Microsoft, Meta, Google and other tech giants scrambling to keep pace. On this vast frontier, no one knows which of these companies will hit it big–or which will flame out spectacularly. In this riveting narrative marbled with familiar names such as Musk, Zuckerberg, and Gates, Rivlin chronicles breakthroughs as they happen, giving us a deep understanding of what’s around the corner in AI development. An adventure story full of drama and unforgettable personalities, AI Valley promises to be the definitive story for anyone seeking to understand the latest phase of world-changing discoveries and the minds behind them.
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    4 mins
  • Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis eds., "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025)

    Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis eds., "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025)
    Aug 19 2025
    Autonomous weapons exist in a strange territory between Pentagon procurement contracts and Hollywood blockbusters, between actual military systems and speculative futures. For this week's Liminal Library, I spoke with Jascha Bareis, co-editor of The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025), about how these dual existences shape international relations and cultural imagination. The collection examines autonomous weapons not just as military hardware but as psychological tools that reshape power dynamics through their mere possibility. These systems epitomize what the editors call "the fluidity of violence"—warfare that dissolves traditional boundaries between human decision and machine action, between targeted strikes and algorithmic inevitability. Bareis and his contributors trace fascinating connections between fictional representations and military doctrine—how Terminator narratives influence Pentagon planning while actual weapons development feeds back into artistic imagination. The book wrestles with maintaining "meaningful human control" over systems designed to operate faster than human thought, a challenge that grows more urgent as militaries worldwide race toward greater autonomy. Each chapter reveals how thoroughly we need to rethink human-machine relationships in warfare, from the gendered coding of robot soldiers in film to the way AI imaginaries differ between Silicon Valley and New Delhi. Autonomous weapons force us to confront uncomfortable realities about agency, violence, and the increasingly blurred line between human judgment and algorithmic certainty. Links: A Clean Kill? the role of Patriot in the Gulf War Statement delivered by Germany on Working Definition of LAWS / “Definition of Systems under Consideration” The Silicon Valley venture capitalists who want to ‘move fast and break things’ in the defence industry Hype Studies 'The Gatekeepers' documentary
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    4 mins