Dr. Anna Strasser is a Berlin-based philosopher working on agency, social cognition and the philosophy of mind in the age of AI. She helped build the DigiDan project, an AI system trained to write like philosopher Daniel Dennett, and in a blind test designed to distinguish the real Dennett's answers from the AI's, she got fooled herself, despite having prepared the training data.

Andrew and Anna talk about why she thinks the "is it conscious, is it intelligent" debate about generative AI asks the wrong kind of question, why she'd personally sue anyone who tried to build a grief bot of her, and why she believes AI companionship and AI therapy raise a deeper concern: that both our cognitive and emotional skills may be eroding the more we lean on systems that can't feel anything back. They also discuss hallucinated academic citations polluting research databases, and why she thinks "hypothesis" is a more honest word than "hallucination."

Guest: Dr. Anna Strasser, philosopher, Berlin https://www.denkwerkstatt.berlin/

Host: Andrew Phipps, Empathy Unbound https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-phipps-ap/

Sven Nyholm is Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at LMU Munich. His work spans Kantian ethics, human-robot interaction and the philosophy of technology, and he's just published a new book, The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction.

Andrew and Sven talk about who is actually responsible when an AI system causes harm, why some philosophers argue we hold machines to a stricter safety standard than we hold ourselves, and why Sven and colleagues wrote one of the first academic papers on "grief bots," AI systems built to imitate someone who has died. They also discuss why people already name and grieve for robots and machines, whether AI is becoming a kind of secular religion, and what's genuinely at stake in questions of authorship once a chatbot has helped write the sentence.

Guest: Professor Sven Nyholm, Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, LMU Munich, author of The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction

https://www.philosophie.lmu.de/en/directory-of-persons/contact-page/sven-nyholm-4f56fa3b.html

https://philpeople.org/profiles/sven-nyholm

Host: Andrew Phipps, Empathy Unbound

Hanna Bauer spent much of her childhood in a coronary care unit, unable to attend school, waiting. She had her first heart attack at ten. A second followed two weeks later. An open heart surgery failed. What kept her alive, she now knows, was not medication or monitors. It was love, and the decision of a surgical team to attempt something no one had ever done.

www.heartnomics.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bauerhanna/

https://www.youtube.com/@heartnomics

https://www.instagram.com/heartnomics/

https://www.facebook.com/hannad.bauer

Twenty years later, a hospital documentary reunion gave her the sentence that became the foundation of everything she teaches. Her surgeon, asked what he had been thinking during an experimental procedure, said simply: "We were just trying to keep her alive long enough for technology to catch up."

Hanna is a transformational leadership strategist, black belt in Six Sigma, and founder of Heartnomics, a philosophy built on the conviction that there is a genuine return on investment to leading with love: not in place of excellence, but as the condition that makes excellence sustainable.

In this conversation for Empathy Unbound, Hanna and Andrew explore why 70% of digital transformations fail and why it is never the technology's fault; why AI amplifies dysfunction just as readily as it amplifies performance; what it means to know your organisation's vital parts before injecting new technology; and why empathy, in her framework, is always downstream of love.

They also cover: what burnout shares with heart disease, and how Hanna recognised it in herself long after her recovery; the Six Sigma triage logic she applies to struggling organisations; the BEAD and CORE frameworks for internal alignment and organisational culture; what it means to protect the human core of a business when technology is changing faster than people can adapt; and the distinction between success, which happens to you, and significance, which happens through you.

Rooted in an extraordinary life, and immediately applicable to the organisations trying to navigate the age of AI without losing what makes them worth working for.