Nick Couldry is Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow at LSE and a Fellow of the British Academy. His work has moved from the symbolic power of media to the ethics and politics of big data and AI. He co-founded the Tierra Común network on data colonialism and is the author of The Cost of Connection, Data Grab and The Space of the World. His new book, Predatory AI: How We Can Resist Corporate Capture of the Human Mind, is published on 13 November. Available here: Order Now

Andrew and Nick talk about why Nick believes we made a "category error" with social media by delegating the design of social space to profit-driven business, and why he thinks we are repeating a more complicated version of that mistake with AI. They cover the philosophical dispute between Descartes and Spinoza over embodied intelligence, data colonialism and the idea of "coloniality," Anthropic's claims about AI welfare and consciousness, and what Nick calls substitutive AI, where a predictive model quietly replaces something that should stay human.

Guest: Professor Nick Couldry, Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow at LSE, Fellow of the British Academy

https://www.lse.ac.uk/people/nick-couldry

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-couldry-1b22b1354/

Host: Andrew Phipps, Empathy Unbound

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-phipps-ap

Professor David DeGrazia, Elton Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University and author of the forthcoming "Investigating Moral Status," joins Andrew Phipps to ask what would actually have to be true for an AI system to matter morally. David argues that sentience, not intelligence or verbal fluency, is the real test, explains why he's grown sceptical that language alone can ever prove an AI is conscious, and unpacks his distinction between numerical and narrative identity to explain what people really mean when they say they have a "relationship" with a chatbot. The conversation also covers AI existential risk and the danger of instructions that leave out obvious human assumptions, the ethics of grief bots, and why he believes we should be treating animals better regardless of how the AI question resolves. Rigorous, wide ranging and genuinely thought provoking.

Guest: Professor David DeGrazia, George Washington University.

https://philosophy.columbian.gwu.edu/david-degrazia

Host: Andrew Phipps.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-phipps-ap/

Allison Pagano has spent over two decades exploring dance and somatic practice as a healing art. She's the creator of Embodied Dance, a method that helps highly empathic people transform insight into embodied action rather than staying stuck in overwhelm or self-abandonment.

Andrew and Allison talk about her own childhood disconnection and the abusive ballet culture that first showed her how dance could heal or harm, the eating disorder she moved through using movement and somatic work, and how that experience shaped Embodied Dance. They cover why empathy can quietly overwhelm the people who have the most of it, why boundaries feel so uncomfortable, the attachment wounds behind over-giving, and why learning to receive is often harder than learning to give.

Guest: Allison Pagano, creator of Embodied Dance, somatic practitioner

https://embodied-dance.com/body-as-oracle

https://www.instagram.com/embodied.dance/?hl=en-gb

Host: Andrew Phipps, Empathy Unbound