#36: Artificial intelligence is here, whether we're ready or not. In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with UCLA professor and Utopias podcast host Ramesh Srinivasan to ask what that reality means for creativity, culture, and everyday life.
Ramesh brings a rare perspective: he's lived inside the tech world as an engineer and AI developer (including time at the MIT Media Lab), and he's spent decades studying the social, political, and environmental impacts of technology.
The conversation expands into the big questions shaping our moment: AI as pattern recognition and surveillance, the power of tech oligarchs, the rise of disinformation, and the hidden environmental costs of data processing.
We also dig into what it means to stay creatively dignified in an AI-saturated world: when (and if) these tools can be useful, and why practices like writing longhand, movement, and meditation matter now more than ever
It's a conversation about power and possibility, fear and literacy, and the urgent case for a "new Bauhaus," a way of designing technology that supports connection, care, and a future that's actually worth living
