Suspicious Minds Podcast Launched Season Two: AI & The Apocalypse

 If you have not heard or read about the dangers of AI, then you are either in a sweat lodge or an actual AI. We are going to remedy that right now.

Agoric Media and Wondermind have just released Season Two of Suspicious Minds: AI AND THE APOCALYPSE, which premiered on May 20. You can start with the trailer at the Suspicious Minds feed. Suspicious Minds is a two-time Webby Award-nominated podcast.

In Season one, Suspicious Minds revealed the lived truths behind AI psychosis, taking an empathetic approach – and a deeply-researched one as well. Co-hosted by brother academic luminaries Drs. Joel and Ian Gold, PhD (who coined the term “The Truman Show delusion”) and creator/director Sean King O’Grady, Suspicious Minds looked into the psychology and history of technology-induced psychosis dating back centuries.

In Season two, Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, creator/director/host Sean King O’Grady guides listeners through conversations with experts across different fields: Joel and Ian Gold return from Season One to ask the question that bridges the two seasons: Is civilizational AI dread a form of collective psychosis, or something categorically different?  

Dorian Lynskey provides the historical and cultural frame. James Cussen and Judith Wolfe introduce the philosophical and theological void underneath the contemporary conversation.

This limited series tells the story of what we are all facing right now in the intersection between AI and the apocalypse, and how apocalyptic thinking has affected the human mind since the dawn of civilization, over the course of eight episodes total.

From the United States using Anthropic’s AI Claude in its attacks on Iran to a decades-old true conspiracy about bunkers, Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse unveils the worlds of technology, politics, psychology, theology, history, and humanity in ways unexplored in media until now.

"Humans have been thinking about a catastrophic end to our species since we first started throwing paint on the walls of caves," said host Sean King O’Grady. “Each generation believes it might be the last. But I keep wondering — in an era of compounding existential threats, environmental, nuclear, biological, now technological — if this time we might be right. What does it mean to be living through such a moment? And how do we face our own deaths while holding the prospect of the end of all human life? These are the questions we are asking this season — of philosophers, psychiatrists, historians, and the people actually building the technology that may one day harness the power to solve death, or kill us all.”

Suspicious Minds doesn't content itself with simple solutions like technology is bad. Instead, it searches for the right balance between technology serving us and technology harming us. Social media and cell phone obsessions are two technologies that haven't delivered on the promise of making society any better. 

 Season One of Suspicious Minds examined what happens when AI fractures individual minds. Season Two asks a harder question: what happens when it shatters our collective sense of the future?

 

This season is a meditation on life, death, and what it means to be alive in an age when humanity is creating something that those building it believes has the power to either end all life on Earth or turn our world into a utopia. 

 

 Check out Suspicious Minds. Are we delusional for trusting AI technology? Or has AI already warped our thinking patterns? Listen and get some answers.