Talks

A personal reading wiki of 47 talks and lectures, mostly on AI and what it does to law, creativity, power and the mind. Each page has a summary, a timestamped map of the talk, the intellectual background, and deep dives.

How to read a page

🎙 marks what the speaker actually says, with [MM:SS] timestamps. 📚 marks background theory and the wider debate. It is context, not the speaker’s claim.

Use search (top left) or browse by theme below. Every tag is also clickable.

Recently added

• The Role of Humans in an Age of Intelligent Machines: Jobs, Inequality, Governance. Joanna Bryson · 2026-11-09
• Do we have relationships with AI? — Joanna Bryson on “category failure”, liability, grief bots and consciousness · 2026-11-09
• The Big Picture — Sean Carroll on poetic naturalism · 2026-11-09
• Teilhard de Chardin in the 21st Century — Georgetown panel (2015) · 2026-11-09
• A Collectivist, Economic View of AI — Michael I. Jordan · 2026-11-09
• Hidden Ground, Acoustic Space, Lost Identity — Marshall McLuhan (1977) · 2026-11-09

AI, law and copyright

• The Reasonable Robot — Ryan Abbott on AI and the Law · Abbott
  Abbott’s central question: when machines do what only people used to do, should the law treat the machine’s behaviour differently from the person’s? His answer is mostly no. The default should be AI legal neutrality: do less to discriminate in law between AI…
• The future of AI: law, regulation, creativity, health — Ryan Abbott with Dinis Guarda · Abbott
  The host asks, over and over, what happens to law, ethics and human life when AI does things that only people used to do. Abbott answers with one lens: law should follow behaviour, so the same rule should cover a person and a machine doing the same thing.
• Why Patent Law Should Recognize AI Inventors: Ryan Abbott on the DABUS cases · Abbott
  Should a patent office let an AI system be named as the inventor of an invention that no human conceived?
• Can Human Creators Coexist With AI? — Daniel Gervais · Gervais
  Can human creators live alongside generative AI, and what should law do about it? The host frames it as a new “species” arriving. Gervais answers as a copyright lawyer and then as a novelist.
• AI’s Impact on IP Laws: Mammen at PARC (2021) · Mammen
  Can an AI system be an inventor under patent law, or an author under copyright law, and if the law says no, why does it say no and who could change it?
• How AI is changing medical practice — Frank Pasquale, Justin Skowno, Kimberlee Weatherall · Pasquale
  What should law and policy do about AI in medicine, if the realistic goal is help for clinicians and not replacement of them?
• Machines Judging Humans — Frank Pasquale · Pasquale
  When a machine scores or judges a person (for a hospital ranking, a loan, a flat), what makes that judgment fair? And is the usual answer, “make the rules formal and explicit”, the right answer?
• New Laws of Robotics — Frank Pasquale in conversation · Pasquale
  Asimov’s laws say a robot must not hurt us. Pasquale asks a different question: how do we keep human control over technology that is deployed by firms and states in markets? His answer is four new laws, aimed at institutions as much as at machines.
• The Future of AI in Law — Frank Pasquale · Pasquale
  As law adopts AI, which parts of legal work should be computed and which should stay in human, narrative, accountable judgment?
• A Global Perspective on Copyright Law and Copy-Reliant AI — Matthew Sag · Sag
  Generative AI models are trained on vast copyrighted material. Is that training lawful, and what should a country with strict copyright law, such as Australia, do about it?
• AI and the Future of Copyright Politics, Pamela Samuelson · Samuelson
  Is generative AI just the latest in a long line of “disruptive copying technologies” that copyright owners attacked, and if so, what does that history teach about fair use, licensing, and the politics now?
• Functionality and Expression in Computer Programs — Pamela Samuelson (IPSC 2015) · Samuelson
  Copyright is supposed to protect expression, and patents function. Software breaks that division: Congress gave copyright to computer programs, including object code, “the most functional part of software” . So where does copyright stop? How do you separate…
• Generative AI Meets Copyright — Pamela Samuelson · Samuelson
  Does generative AI break copyright law, or does copyright law break generative AI? She splits it into three questions : (1) is copying works as training data infringement; (2) when are outputs infringing derivative works; (3) who, if anyone, owns copyright in…
• Tokenization: Understanding AI’s Data Transformation — Pamela Samuelson · Samuelson
  When an AI model is trained on copyrighted works, is the copyrighted expression still in the model?
• Third Party Moral Hazard — Peter Siegelman · Siegelman
  We have written thousands of articles on how insurance changes the behaviour of the policyholder (first-party moral hazard). What does insurance do to the behaviour of people who are not in the contract?

AI, power and politics

• “You’re with the billionaires or you’re with the people” — Gil Durán (DW News) · Durán
  Are a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires, led in ideas by Peter Thiel, openly working to replace democracy with oligarchic or corporate rule? And what should people do about it?
• “The machine god”: is AI doom a marketing story? — Timnit Gebru on The Tea · Gebru
  The question. Is the loud talk of AI human extinction a real warning, or a smoke screen that hides present harm and helps companies sell products and avoid rules?
• One giant model, or many small ones? — Timnit Gebru on “frugal AI” · Gebru
  Gebru’s question: should AI be one giant model that does everything, or many small models, each built for one job and one community?
• Voluntary AI Safety Standards and “Regulatory Capture” — Timnit Gebru on Democracy Now! · Gebru
  A US President and the heads of the biggest AI companies have just signed a voluntary safety pact. Is that real safety, or is it what the industry wanted all along?
• AI, Empire and the Living World — Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein, with Karen Hao · Roy
  What is AI doing to us, and why is it spreading so fast? The panel gives two answers, and they overlap. Roy’s answer: AI attacks the one thing that holds a society together, language, and it is a new form of an old pattern (dams, mining, the East India…
• Gilded Rage: Tech Billionaires, AI and Power — Jacob Silverman on Democracy Now! · Silverman
  Who is shaping US AI policy, and what does it mean that a small, rich, politically organised group of tech leaders now sits next to state power?

Creativity, culture and platforms

• Attention, Gesture, Machine, Intensity — Yves Citton · Citton
  Citton asks one question: in what we humans do, which part is the machine and which part is the gesture? He does not ask how humans differ from machines.
• Can You Use AI to Make Good Art? — Fred Graver · Graver
  Can you use AI to make good art, or only slop?
• The Nature of Creativity — Lewis Mumford (probable) · Mumford
  Why do we talk about creativity so much today, and what is it? His answer to the first half: “We seek creativity in our time because of its very conspicuous absence” . He compares our talk of creativity to our talk of security: both arise from anxiety.
• Creativity and AI: How Can We Build a Fairer Future? — Newton-Rex and Debbonaire · Newton-Rex
  Debbonaire frames it in her opening: where does AI leave writers, artists, musicians and composers, and how did the UK get to the point where policy seems to side with the AI companies? The title asks what a “fairer future” looks like.
• Will AI Companies Respect Creators’ Rights? — Ed Newton-Rex · Newton-Rex
  Will the people building AI respect the rights of the creators whose work trained it, and if not, what follows for creators, for culture and for the wider economy?
• Platforms and Cultural Production — David Nieborg and Brooke Erin Duffy · Nieborg
  The central question : what are the political, economic, cultural and social results when cultural production becomes platform dependent? “Cultural production” here is narrow on purpose. It means market-based making of symbolic goods (news, games, social…
• Platforms, AI and Culture Production — Thomas Poell · Poell
  Poell asks one question: when platforms and now generative AI enter the cultural industries, what changes, for whom, and where? He answers in two steps.

Mind, machines and meaning

• “Computers can’t care”: needs, goals and human wellbeing — Margaret Boden · Boden
  What is the real difference between human intelligence and AI, and what does it imply for how AI will fit into society?
• AI: Its Future and Ours — Boden, Tallinn, Weller, Wyatt (2016) · Boden
  The chair sets no thesis. The panel’s real question comes from Wyatt: when machines can do what we thought was uniquely human, what are humans for, and who decides how the technology is used?
• Not Gizmos, but Ghosts — Margaret Boden · Boden
  What is the most important thing AI has given us? Boden’s answer is not the products.
• Do we have relationships with AI? — Joanna Bryson on “category failure”, liability, grief bots and consciousness · Bryson
  The interviewer opens by asking Bryson to unpack a distinction she drew in earlier correspondence: the connections humans form to AI versus any relationship between humans and AI, which would imply a mutuality she rejects .
• Can a program understand? — Searle and Boden, “Voices” (1984) · Searle
  Is the mind just a computer program? Do computers think or understand, or do they only look as if they do? And whatever the answer, is AI still the best way to study the human mind?
• Can we live with AI? — Shannon Vallor (Turing Lecture, Dec 2024) · Vallor
  ”Can we live with AI?” She splits it three ways -. Survive with AI (most people in the room can). Live well with it (is it minimally acceptable, does it make life lesser?). And the word can: possibility, not probability. We should want confidence that we will…

AI, economy and society

• The Role of Humans in an Age of Intelligent Machines: Jobs, Inequality, Governance. Joanna Bryson · Bryson
  Can AI replace people? Bryson turns it into a different question: what do we, as a society, choose to do with the productivity AI gives us?
• Shaping Technological Revolutions in Turbulent Times — Carlota Perez · Perez
  The question. Where is the world in the “information revolution”, and can it reach a global golden age instead of extended conflict? She frames it for a China and West audience.
• A Collectivist, Economic View of AI — Michael I. Jordan · talk
  Jordan asks “why are we doing this?” about AI. He thinks the public and policy dialogue is “horrific”, full of science-fiction promises: “solve hunger”, “solve climate change”, “make the economy grow exponentially fast”. He wants a “more sober” answer to…

Ecology and the living world

• The Hidden Footprint of AI — Miriam Aczel on carbon, water and land · Aczel
  What does AI really cost the planet, if you look past the “cloud” and past carbon alone?
• Global Water Bankruptcy — Kaveh Madani · Madani
  Madani asks one question: if water trouble has lasted fifty years and keeps getting worse, is “crisis” still the right word?
• [[talks/wilson-social-conquest-real-creation-story|The Real Creation Story — E. O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (Long Now × Exploratorium, 20 Apr 2012)]] · Wilson
  Gauguin’s three questions: where do we come from, what are we, where are we going . Wilson says religion and academic philosophy have not answered them, and that science now can.
• Two Harvard rivals, fifty years on — E. O. Wilson and James Watson, with Robert Krulwich (Harvard, 9 Sept 2009) · Wilson
  The occasion. Harvard’s Museum of Natural History marked the 150th year of Darwin’s Origin by seating two men who arrived at Harvard in the 1950s, worked a floor apart, and for years “rarely spoke”. One studied “critters” (Wilson, ants, ecology,…

Big ideas: knowledge, media, philosophy

• The Big Picture — Sean Carroll on poetic naturalism · Carroll
  How can a universe of particles obeying equations contain causes, purposes, choices, right and wrong, and meaning, without any of these being faked?
• Hidden Ground, Acoustic Space, Lost Identity — Marshall McLuhan (1977) · McLuhan
  McLuhan’s question is: what is the hidden ground behind a medium, and how does a new ground change the people who live in it? He does not set out a thesis in order. He moves by jokes, analogies and lists. The thread is this.
• Teilhard de Chardin in the 21st Century — Georgetown panel (2015) · Panels
  Central question (Frost, ). The PBS commissioners asked whether Teilhard is “outdated”. Does he still have any relevance? The panel is the answer.
• [[talks/sadler-hegel-phenomenology-introduction|Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction: Sadler’s classroom walk-through]] · Sadler
  How can philosophy start with knowledge when we cannot step outside knowledge to test it? Hegel’s Introduction answers by changing the project. Instead of checking our knowing against reality from outside, we watch consciousness test itself against its own…
• Self-Consciousness and the Master-Slave Dialectic — Gregory B. Sadler on Hegel · Sadler
  Sadler’s question: how does consciousness become self-consciousness, and why does Hegel need a story of a master and a slave to answer it? He builds the answer in five steps.
• Consilience: the unity of knowledge, E. O. Wilson at Harvard, 2010 · Wilson
  Can the three great branches of learning (natural sciences, social sciences, humanities) be joined into one body of knowledge by cause-and-effect explanation, and is the supposed wall between science and the humanities real?

By speaker

• Abbott: The Reasonable Robot · The future of AI: law, regulation, creativity, health · Why Patent Law Should Recognize AI Inventors: Ryan Abbott on the DABUS cases
• Aczel: The Hidden Footprint of AI
• Boden: “Computers can’t care”: needs, goals and human wellbeing · AI: Its Future and Ours · Not Gizmos, but Ghosts
• Bryson: Do we have relationships with AI? · The Role of Humans in an Age of Intelligent Machines: Jobs, Inequality, Governance. Joanna Bryson
• Carroll: The Big Picture
• Citton: Attention, Gesture, Machine, Intensity
• Durán: “You’re with the billionaires or you’re with the people”
• Gebru: “The machine god”: is AI doom a marketing story? · One giant model, or many small ones? · Voluntary AI Safety Standards and “Regulatory Capture”
• Gervais: Can Human Creators Coexist With AI?
• Graver: Can You Use AI to Make Good Art?
• Madani: Global Water Bankruptcy
• Mammen: AI’s Impact on IP Laws: Mammen at PARC (2021)
• McLuhan: Hidden Ground, Acoustic Space, Lost Identity
• Mumford: The Nature of Creativity
• Newton-Rex: Creativity and AI: How Can We Build a Fairer Future? · Will AI Companies Respect Creators’ Rights?
• Nieborg: Platforms and Cultural Production
• Panels: Teilhard de Chardin in the 21st Century
• Pasquale: How AI is changing medical practice · Machines Judging Humans · New Laws of Robotics · The Future of AI in Law
• Perez: Shaping Technological Revolutions in Turbulent Times
• Poell: Platforms, AI and Culture Production
• Roy: AI, Empire and the Living World
• Sadler: [[talks/sadler-hegel-phenomenology-introduction|Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction: Sadler’s classroom walk-through]] · Self-Consciousness and the Master-Slave Dialectic
• Sag: A Global Perspective on Copyright Law and Copy-Reliant AI
• Samuelson: AI and the Future of Copyright Politics, Pamela Samuelson · Functionality and Expression in Computer Programs · Generative AI Meets Copyright · Tokenization: Understanding AI’s Data Transformation
• Searle: Can a program understand?
• Siegelman: Third Party Moral Hazard
• Silverman: Gilded Rage: Tech Billionaires, AI and Power
• Vallor: Can we live with AI?
• Wilson: Consilience: the unity of knowledge, E. O. Wilson at Harvard, 2010 · The Real Creation Story · Two Harvard rivals, fifty years on
• talk: A Collectivist, Economic View of AI