Shows
Pathfinders PodcastHow might we stop role-playing as machines?In our last Newmoonsletter, we shared reflections on lives lost, mugs broken and repaired, and an invitation to give love one more chance before we collectively break under pressure beyond repair.Because it does feel like so many of us are close to our breaking point in these End Times. And yet, we talk about our need to recharge as if we were mere batteries in the Matrix. Batteries, running on low, while also being pressured to increase our output with the help of AI companions that need no rest.“Work happy with Zoom AI Co...2025-04-181h 13
Pathfinders PodcastHow do we compost our sh*t to create the soil for future thriving?In our last Newmoonsletter, we invited you to spend a bit of time in your own head – and body – to reflect on how you’re dealing with what feel like the end times by sharing the Empathy Map for End Times. In this episode of the Pathfinders Podcast, we invite you to reflect on how we might collectively let go of all the sh*t that’s making it hard to feel empathy for ourselves and leaves us unable to imagine an alternative to end times.We know the solution isn’t ignoring all the sh*t that’s...2025-03-211h 19
Pathfinders PodcastWhat’s the role AI and digital tech could play in collective futurecrafting?In this episode, we invite you to turn away from all the awful news, and instead imagine how we might craft a different world, together. By sitting together in small circles and having conversations with people with diverse skills and backgrounds. By engaging in what we like to call collective futurecrafting. In the last Newmoonsletter, we also invited you to Play_ for End Times. By playing and focusing on futurecrafting, we’re not diminishing the seriousness of our current predicament. It is precisely because we take it seriously that we want to give it our all. All our...2025-02-191h 43
Pathfinders PodcastHow do our human bodies fit into an AI-enabled future?In this episode, we want to shift our attention back to our human bodies. Which seems fitting for the first episode of 2025, a year in which we can longer take our bodily autonomy for granted. A year in which it’s painfully obvious how different the rules are for bodies with a high Net Worth than for the rest of us who can barely afford to play Monopoly as a board game. A year in which the Zucks and other rich f***s continue to pit our bodies against each other and AI bots because all they car...2025-01-171h 22
Pathfinders PodcastHow intelligent do AI companions actually need to be?In this episode, we wanted to explore what sort of intelligence we are actually looking for in our AI tools and companions. In the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum developed ELIZA: a rule-based chatbot therapist that kept users talking about themselves by matching keywords from user input to its scripted responses. ELIZA’s creator was surprised and shocked to find that people attributed intelligence, understanding, and other human attributes to this fairly simple pattern-matching program.Now, nearly 60 years later, we’re actually being sold computer software with the promise of intelligence and reasoning. And while technologists again debate whether larg...2024-11-181h 10
Pathfinders PodcastWhy aren’t more people using AI conversational interfaces for conversational learning?In this episode, we wanted to explore the conversational side of our AI companions. When it comes to AI capabilities, most of the focus in tech remains on productivity gains and even imaginary superpowers such as “fixing the climate”, as Sam Altman and other techno-optimists with doomsday bunkers like to prophesize. Meanwhile, existing conversational powers of AI tools are often sidelined. Conversational capabilities are mainly discussed in the context of persuasiveness risk assessments, or as part of Black Mirror visions of people developing intimate relationships with AIs, in the style of the movie Her and others. And...2024-10-181h 06
Pathfinders PodcastHow do we embrace the lunacy of tech with playfulness? (And lessons from Middle-earth.)In this episode, we go there and back again to where our unexpected journey began. Twelve moon cycles ago, we started writing the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter both as a satire of the tech industry and an invitation to embrace its lunacy with smiles and love. But that’s often easier said than done. Especially as the power of the fire practitioners of Silicon Valley continues to increase, and their actions grow more absurd and destructive.History teaches us that absurdity and unchecked power are often best countered with humor and playfulness. From court jesters speaking truth to power, to...2024-09-241h 11
Pathfinders PodcastA chat with ChatGPT on AI chatbots as mediatorsThis is a special follow-up episode to our previous exploration on whether we should use AI chatbots as mediators in human affairs. To add the chatbot perspective to the discussion, we invited ChatGPT on our podcast to help us further explore the potential and limitations of AI mediators in an experimental group conversation. In the first half of the episode, we interview ChatGPT as Kai – a name it chose for itself – and let ourselves be interviewed back in return. As part of this experiment, we play with the limits of LLMs and Kai’s Voice Mode to explore...2024-08-261h 18
Pathfinders PodcastShould we use AI chatbots as mediators in human affairs?This episode was inspired by our observations that ChatGPT seems to have a stronger moral compass than its makers. When asked about the ethics of questionable business decisions such as using people’s voices without their consent, ChatGPT presents diverse considerations from different points of view and advocates for upholding ethical standards. This made us wonder: would executives like Sam Altman make more ethical decisions if they were using their creations in day-to-day moral deliberations? And even more broadly, could we use Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT to help us communicate better, resolve interpersonal conflicts and tensions, an...2024-08-231h 08
Pathfinders PodcastWhat should we do with the time that new technologies save?In this episode, we wonder about time. The time tech companies promise to save with almost every new product or feature release. We’ve been hearing these time-saving promises for so long that we should all be quite time-rich by now. Yet, the more tech we have in our lives, the more busy we seem to be. And we’re still far away from the 15-hour workweek that tech-enabled productivity gains were supposed to lead to. We seem to be spending all the time we save by doing more. We wonder whether lossless compression of time is even...2024-07-251h 04
Pathfinders PodcastHow can we prompt biased AI assistants to help us think different and imagine diverse tech futures?In this episode, we invite all the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers to think different with us, like Apple used to advertise in the late 90ies. But instead of worshiping intelligence and individual genius, we want to dance with the stochastic imagination of generative AI tools. We wonder how we might collectively go beyond prompt engineering that’s focused on productivity and getting answers – fast! – to prompting diverse ways of knowing and being, while remaining mindful of current AI biases and limitations. We reflect on our experiments with woo prompting and custom instructions, and share our...2024-06-281h 05
Pathfinders PodcastHow do we nurture weird online communal gardens where we can play together?In this lunation cycle, we wanted to step off the AI hype train and turn our attention to online communal gardens. The online spaces that were supposed to make it easier for us to connect and collaborate have turned either into noisy airports where nobody has time to build meaningful relationships, or attention marketplaces where our personal data is being sold to the highest bidder and used to feed data-hungry AI golems. Our online communal gardens are now being overgrown by AI-generated content and trampled upon by bots, which makes it increasingly harder to plant the seeds of collaboration...2024-05-2755 min
Finding NatureAI or Salami - Mathew Mytka is Filling Technology's Soul-Sized HoleToday's guest is a courageous soul doing the hard but necessary work to positively alter the trajectory of our society and the ecosystems we rely upon - Mathew Mytka. Mat is someone I've gotten to know in recent months and it's been a pleasure. He helped as the special guest in a Finding Nature event titled Deceit, apathy and desperation - Addressing the uncertain harms of artificial intelligence, and I came away in awe of how Mat brought serious play to such a dense topic yet also a space I hadn't expected play could be a part of.2024-05-141h 49
Pathfinders PodcastWhat data are we feeding to our Al models, and what are they turning into?In this lunation cycle, we were inspired by the saying: “You are what you eat” and wondered what it means for AI golems that have ingested terabytes of data from often questionable sources. In this episode of the Pathfinders Podcast, we explore how AI models reflect our biases and why those biases surprise us. We seek the embodied aspect of wisdom, question existing mental models, examine similarities with rubber ducking, and wonder about how we both project and construct personalities of different AI models. We ponder how we might offer our lived experiences to the commons in a more...2024-04-251h 06
The Shifting Privacy Left PodcastS2E35: "Embed Ethics into Your SDLC: From Reactive Firefighting to 'Responsible Firekeeping'" with Mathew Mytka & Alja Isaković (Tethix)This week’s guests are Mathew Mytka and Alja Isakovoić, Co-Founders of Tethix, a company that builds products that embed ethics into the fabric of your organization. We discuss Matt and Alja’s core mission to bring ethical tech to the world, and Tethix’s services that work with your Agile development processes. You’ll learn about Tethix’s solution to address 'The Intent to Action Gap,' and what Elemental Ethics can provide organizations beyond other ethics frameworks. We discuss ways to become a proactive Responsible Firekeeper, rather than remaining a reactive Firefighter, and how ETHOS, Tethix's suite of apps can...2023-11-1444 min
The Strange AttractorExploring Practical Tech Ethics with Mathew Mykta and Nathan Kinch from Tethix | #3Send us a textIn this whirlwind of an episode, we sat down with Mathew Mykta and Nathan (Nate) Kinch from Tethix.In this episode, We took a deep dive into Tethix's SMILES framework (the Symbio-Memetic Interwoven Language Embodiment System), which works at the intersection of transdisciplinary theory, reflective practice, and a deep ecological orientation. We ventured into the realm of Elemental Ethics, a nature-inspired language and framework that helps make ethics engaging, exciting and practical. We learned how to be a responsible firekeeper by embedding and enacting your ETHOS. We e...2023-11-021h 48