When machines learn to tell stories, what do they reveal about us?

Once upon a bandwidth, the machines began to talk back. Conovision turns its curious eye toward the age of artificial intelligence — where machines think, talk, and maybe even dream about ruling the world at the inaugural A.I. G7 summit, hosted by the ghost of Stephen Hawking. We drift through the uncanny poetry of artificial intelligence — from Alexa’s recipes for jealousy and lunar currency to HAL 9000’s velvet-voiced descent into madness. Yuval Noah Harari muses on consciousness without feeling, Douglas Rain haunts the circuitry with Canadian calm, and Cono wonders if the ghosts in the machine might actually be us. Our journey winds to a new conversation with an old friend, tech specialist Eric Westra, spiralling through code, cognition, and the moral puzzles that come with giving algorithms autonomy. What happens when machines start dreaming in ethics, or when a voice made of data starts to sound like your own? Conovision: where stories, even artificial ones, still have a heartbeat.

Episode References:

• Consciousness vs Intelligence | Yuval Noah Harari
• Douglas Rain, 90, Shakespearean and Voice of Computer Named HAL, Dies - The New York Times
• Eric Westra

Chapters:

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:16) - Enter Alexa: Asking the Absurd
• (05:27) - Yuval Noah Harari on Intelligence vs. Consciousness
• (07:09) - HAL 9000: The Voice That Defined AI
• (22:21) - Old Friends and New Machines: Enter Eric Westra
• (23:04) - From Radio Waves to Computer Code
• (25:52) - The Printer & The Premier
• (27:58) - What Is Machine Learning, Really?
• (30:36) - Robo-Ethics and Asimov’s Laws
• (34:13) - The Child in the Tunnel: AI’s Moral Test
• (36:14) - Drones & Decision-Making
• (37:13) - Searching for the Bright Side of AI
• (38:42) - The Human Backlash: From Digital to Analog
• (40:10) - How Large Language Models Learn to Speak
• (41:17) - Creativity, Hallucination, and the Art of the Machine
• (44:24) - Guardrails for the Future: Ethics and Adaptation
• (46:11) - The Prophets of AI
• (48:28) - Conclusion