In this episode of Age of AI, Jean Garcia Periche of the Center for Public Intelligence joins Medlir to explore how artificial intelligence could fundamentally transform public institutions. We discuss why traditional government structures struggle with today's complex challenges, how AI agents and digital public infrastructure could enable a shift from digital to agentic government, and what technologies like GovOS and Agent ID might mean for public services.

The conversation also tackles the larger questions: Should access to AI-powered intelligence become a social right? How can governments ensure accountability and protect citizens from surveillance? And what does the AI revolution mean for national sovereignty, particularly in the Global South?

Links:

• https://publicintelligence.ai/
• https://publicintelligence.ai/cases-and-research

Who decides how our data is collected and used?

In the first episode of Season 15 of Age of AI, Medlir is joined by Daniel Cochrane to discuss a new proposal from the Institute for Family Studies: “associational data rights.”

The report argues that data is not simply an individual asset. Much of it is created through families, workplaces, churches, schools, communities, and other relationships. Daniel explains how Data Rights Associations (DRAs) could give those communities a collective voice in negotiating with technology companies.

Links:

• Toward Associational Data Rights: A Digital Economy for Families & the Common Good

What if one of the oldest stories in Western literature is also one of the earliest stories about artificial intelligence?

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has brought new attention to Homer's epics — but they're only the beginning of a much longer story about intelligent machines.

In this Season 14 finale, historian of science Professor Elly R. Truitt (University of Pennsylvania) traces that story from Homer's self-navigating ships and golden handmaidens, through the bronze giant Talos of wider Greek myth, to the mechanical courts of Baghdad and Byzantium, medieval Europe, and today's anxieties about AI. Along the way: what these machines reveal about slavery and servitude in the societies that imagined them, and why — as Truitt argues — a technology that further concentrates power in the hands of people who already have it was never actually revolutionary.