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.

Stephany Oliveros is a three-time founder, AI researcher, and product lead working at the intersection of human behaviour, technology, and social impact. Originally from Venezuela, she studied medical physics, spent two years in veterinary school, moved to Spain, retrained in psychology, and eventually found her way to AI after watching the AlphaGo documentary by Google DeepMind. She is now founder and CEO of Lyra AI, an evidence-based talent marketplace for women in tech, and co-founder and CEO of She AI, a United Nations-supported AI education platform closing the gender gap in AI literacy.

The conversation opens with Stephany reflecting on growing up between two families: one of educators, one of scientists. She describes how that bridge between humanities and hard science only made sense in retrospect, and how her non-linear path through physics, veterinary medicine, and psychology ultimately gave her a perspective on AI that purely technical founders rarely have.

Stephany is direct about the AI hype problem. She describes a deliberately booby-trapped MIT paper on AI and brain activity that went viral because people shared the abstract without reading the body, and a concept she calls "The Gradual Disempowerment": the process by which outsourcing small tasks to AI gradually becomes outsourcing your entire thinking. She frames AI as a tool of soft power, one that shapes language and therefore shapes culture and belief systems, often without users realising it is happening.

She AI grew from one-on-one coffee sessions at a women's members club in London into a UN-supported educational platform, built on the finding that many women prefer to learn in community rather than alone. Lyra AI emerged from the recognition that education was a means to an end: what women actually needed was economic relevance, better jobs, and a matching system that would not penalise them for career gaps or immigrant backgrounds. The platform is free for women and charged to companies, on the logic that companies are the ones who want the talent.

Andrew and Stephany also discuss a practical framework for using AI without technical expertise, starting with understanding your own workflows before touching any tools. She shares two personal practices for staying herself amid constant AI exposure: a weekly calendar block of technology-free thinking time, and AI agents programmed to use the Socratic method rather than provide instant answers.

The conversation closes with Stephany's vision of eco-cyber feminism, technology designed to coexist with nature rather than extract from it, the Susie model from South Africa as an example of community co-created AI that actually serves the people it claims to serve, and what personal success means to her: thousands of women around the world who understand AI well enough to criticise it, work with it, and decide when to refuse it.

https://www.justlyra.com/

https://lyra-ai.kit.com/8f61f95256

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and via RSS.

Professor Robert Sparrow is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne and one of the world's foremost applied ethicists working at the intersection of technology and human life. Over more than two decades he has written on robot ethics, AI in healthcare, autonomous weapons systems, the moral status of artificial systems, and the ethics of AI-generated emulations of deceased people. He is known for following philosophical arguments wherever they lead, even when the conclusions are genuinely uncomfortable.

The conversation opens with Robert reflecting on how the thought experiments he was developing in the late 1990s have become urgent real-world questions, and on what it actually meant when AI passed the Turing test: almost nobody concluded that machines could therefore think.

The centrepiece of the discussion is Robert's paper "Against Imaginary Friends," which presents a deliberately uncomfortable argument: if what matters is how you feel, then reducing loneliness via an AI companion is morally equivalent to putting a happiness drug in the water supply. He draws on Nozick's experience machine and the logic of The Matrix to make the case that most people, on reflection, do care whether their relationships are real. He applies this argument to dementia care, noting that people who actually work in aged care never ask for robots; they ask for more staff, more funding, and less ageism. He also draws a pointed contrast between public attitudes to robots at opposite ends of the life cycle: if a robot reading bedtime stories to an infant would be a form of neglect, why do we not feel the same about robot companions for the elderly?

Robert and Andrew discuss grief bots and AI emulations of deceased people, the risks these pose to memory and privacy, and the darker political scenario of leaders using AI emulations to perpetuate power beyond death. This connects to Robert's forthcoming paper "Slaves to the Algorithms," on what government by AI means for political liberty.

On education, Robert argues that genuine teaching involves far more than content transmission. Drawing on his paper "Bullshit Universities," he describes what is lost when machines replace educators: the experience of being taken seriously by a human being who actually cares about the subject, and the social and relational dimensions of learning that no AI tutor can replicate.

The conversation closes on a question Robert is actively researching: whether AI can provide genuine testimony, and why the answer matters. When a machine states something confidently and then apologises smoothly when corrected, it reveals that it had no stake in what it said. It cannot be blamed, it cannot commit itself through language, and it cannot connect words to action. That strangeness, Robert argues, is philosophically significant and largely unexplored.

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and via RSS.

Should you feel guilty for loving your AI companion more than going outside? Professor Kate Devlin, author of "Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots," has spent her career asking why we keep insisting human relationships are the gold standard, and whether that's actually true.

Professor Kate Devlin is Professor of AI and Society at King's College London and Director of the Digital Futures Institute. She trained originally in archaeology before moving into computer science, and her research explores how and why people form emotional connections with technology, particularly around intimacy, connection, and ethics. She is the author of "Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots," a contributor to the Oxford University Press volume on AI ethics, a co-investigator on the UKRI Responsible AI UK programme, a board member of the Open Rights Group, a patron of Humanists UK, and a commissioner for the International AI Faith and Civil Society Commission.

Kate explains how her background in archaeology gives her a long view of human-technology relationships, observing that while tools change, human fears and hopes remain remarkably consistent across centuries. She is sceptical of AGI as a concept, arguing it is too poorly defined to be useful, & doesn't believe large language models can produce anything resembling sentience.

The conversation moves into the emotional bonds people form with AI companions. Kate argues these bonds are genuinely felt on the human side, even when users know full well the AI isn't sentient, in much the same way people form deep attachments to fictional characters or celebrities. She discusses the Pope's recent encyclical on AI, noting its balanced acknowledgement that AI companionship isn't inherently negative, and pushes back gently on the assumption that human-human relationships are automatically the gold standard, given how often human relationships involve conflict, coercion, or even war.

Kate traces the history of fembots in fiction back to the myth of Pygmalion, and discusses how AI companion technology, originally built by men for straight men, is now seeing a significant shift toward female users seeking safer, more respectful alternatives to a often-hostile online dating world. She also explains why physical sex robots never became commercially viable, and why a simple app proved far more compelling, a development she compares to the evolution from 1980s adult phone lines to today's AI companions.

The discussion turns to some of the most emotionally resonant material in the episode: real reports of grief and heartbreak when Replika removed features from its AI companions, the ethics of "grief bots" that allow people to interact with AI recreations of deceased loved ones, and a striking real-world story from China involving a dying grandmother and an AI recreation of her grandson. Andrew shares his own reflections on his mother's dementia, and what AI companionship might have meant for his mother.

Kate also discusses her work on the Responsible AI UK programme, what who holds power in AI development, and why describing AI simply as "a tool" understates its scale and impact. She talks candidly about people who reject AI entirely, often for well-founded reasons around environmental cost, labour exploitation, and creative industries, and shares her own research questions, including why people rate AI-generated therapy and art highly, right up until they discover it was AI-generated.

The episode closes with a discussion of AI regulation across the EU, China, the US, and the UK, and the unresolved question Kate most wants answered: who are the millions of people in relationships with AI companions, and what are they really getting out of it?

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and via RSS.

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/kate-devlin

She arrived in Germany at 20 years old with 50 Deutsche Marks, no visa for the country she actually wanted to reach, and no safety net. Three decades later, Dr. Anastassia Lauterbach is a Global Hall of Fame honouree for business excellence, a former CEO of Qualcomm Europe, author of The AI Imperative, and one of the clearest, most unsparing voices in the global AI conversation.

In this episode of Empathy Unbound, Andrew Phipps sits down with a strategist who will tell you what is actually happening in AI without flinching. Anastassia explains why 95% of AI programmes fail, why current LLMs cannot reason, why hallucinations are built into the architecture and cannot simply be engineered away, and why she rates the chance of AI consciousness at zero. She also makes the case that AI is not a technology problem but a leadership problem, and that the solution must come from the bottom up, not the top down.

Anastassia is self-funding a global AI literacy study whose results will be presented at the House of Lords on 22 October. She shares what young people in that study are actually saying — including the striking finding that they feel "forced to learn AI from TikTok." She also tells the story of what she said to her daughter at four and a half years old about working hard to have a choice, a message that daughter is still repeating today.

This is a conversation about real intelligence, human agency, and the courage required to say what others in the room are afraid to say.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• Why she left Moscow at 20 with 50 Deutsche Marks and how that shaped her ethical lens

• The AI knowledge gap she spotted in US boardrooms in 2017 and why it has barely closed

• Why 95% of AI programmes fail and why having tools is not a strategy

• Why hallucinations cannot be solved, only reduced — and what the architecture makes inevitable

• Why AGI will not come from the current LLM labs

• Her verdict on AI consciousness: zero, and the neuroscience behind it

• Why AI has become a new religion, complete with churches, apostates, and believers

• The global AI literacy study she is self-funding, with results at the House of Lords in October

• "We are forced to learn AI from TikTok": what young people in her study actually said

• What she told her four-and-a-half-year-old daughter about working hard to have a choice

• Why AI is not a technology issue, it is a leadership issue

• Europe's demographic decline and why AI literacy is not optional

• Her mission: one million families and one hundred thousand businesses

ABOUT DR. ANASTASSIA LAUTERBACH:

Global Hall of Fame honouree for business excellence. Former CEO of Qualcomm Europe. Author of The AI Imperative (2018). Founder of AI Edutainment and creator of the Romy and Roby universe. Host of the AI Snacks with Romy and Roby podcast. Mission: one million families and one hundred thousand businesses. Website: http://www.aiedutainment.ai/

ABOUT EMPATHY UNBOUND:

Hosted by Andrew Phipps, exploring how empathy shapes leadership, technology, society, and the way we live. New episodes weekly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and RSS. Search Empathy Unbound wherever you listen.

Shea Murtaugh on Building a Resilient Marketing Agency, Leading Through Change, and Using AI as a Strategic Advantage

Shea Murtaugh, founder of a nationally recognized integrated marketing agency launched in 2004 after leaving broadcast sales, reflects on her blue-collar upbringing, early “C student” years, and the commission-sales mindset that gave her confidence to go all-in as an entrepreneur.

She describes major setbacks—an employee taking clients, steep revenue drops, resigning a largest client during COVID—while emphasizing resilience as showing up “the next morning,” and credits long-term client retention to chemistry, trust, measurement, and preparing clients for change.

Murtaugh explains her shift from doer to CEO by hiring experts, joining Women Presidents Organization, and building a business that can run without her, while sustaining a virtual, 40-hour work culture with strong perks. She sees AI as the biggest industry shift, boosting output, changing pricing models, and driving new initiatives like Leap Shift AI and an LLM-agnostic tool to automate reporting and free teams for strategy.

00:00 Meet Shea Murtaugh

00:43 Formative Years

02:44 Taking the Leap

06:19 Resilience Lessons

09:06 Keeping Clients Long Term

10:25 From Doer to CEO

13:07 Choosing the Right Clients

15:12 AI Changes Everything

17:32 Teaching AI Adoption

20:54 Building Ada Tool

24:19 Future of Media Marketing

29:59 Brand Niches and Giants

32:40 Ads Everywhere Now

33:51 Targeted Ads Tradeoff

35:42 Defining Real Success

37:52 Never Selling The Business

40:43 Rethinking Work Life Balance

43:14 Leadership Style Evolution

45:29 Life Experiences That Shaped Her

49:05 Equality Beyond ESG Talk

50:36 Self Care As A Founder

54:18 Scaling Up With AI

56:43 Advice For Young Entrepreneurs

https://hoffmannmurtaugh.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/hoffmannmurtaugh/

https://www.instagram.com/hoffmannmurtaugh/

https://www.tiktok.com/@hoffmannmurtaugh?

https://www.facebook.com/HoffmannMurtaugh/

https://twitter.com/HMurtaugh?lang=en

https://www.pinterest.com/hoffmannmurtaugh