The Trajectory

Episodes

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  Eric Smith - AI May be a Prosthetic for the Living Process (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 9) 23.10.2026 1h 49m

  This installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with Eric Smith, Specially Appointed Professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI), Institute of Science Tokyo, External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and co-author with Harold Morowitz of The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere. Eric argues that sorting the world into living and non-living things is a category error. He asks whether the difference between a planet with life ...
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  N. Katherine Hayles - AI as Our Inextricable Symbionts (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 8) 09.10.2026 1h 29m

  This installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor of English at UCLA and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature at Duke University, and author of How We Became Posthuman, Unthought, and Bacteria to AI. Katherine defines life through cognition: a process of interpreting information in contexts that connect it with meaning, marked by five criteria she calls SIRAL (sensing, interpreting, responding...
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  David Pearce - A Negative Utilitarian Vision for AGI (Worthy Successor, Ep. 34) 25.09.2026 1h 47m

  This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with David Pearce, the philosopher who wrote The Hedonistic Imperative in 1995 and co-founded the World Transhumanist Association with Nick Bostrom in 1998. In this conversation, David argues that the pleasure-pain axis discloses the world's inbuilt metric of disvalue, and that our overriding ethical obligation as a species is to phase out the biology of suffering throughout the living world and replace it with information-s...
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  Eörs Szathmáry - Major Evolutionary Transitions and AGI's Impact (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 7) 11.09.2026 1h 20m

  Eörs Szathmáry co-developed, with the late John Maynard Smith, the theory of major transitions in evolution - the framework for understanding how life has repeatedly reorganized itself into higher levels of complexity across nearly 4 billion years. He's also a co-author, alongside Viktor Müller and Luc Steels, of a recent PNAS paper arguing that AI may be on the verge of undergoing a major transition of its own. In this conversation, Eörs lays out what actually constitutes a major transition...
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  Connor Glass – Merging with Machines to Steward the Flame (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 6) 28.08.2026 2h 4m

  This installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with Connor Glass, founder and CEO of Phantom Neuro, a company building implantable technology that interfaces with the body's peripheral nervous system. Connor argues that artificial intelligence already meets his own definition of life, and that biological evolution has effectively hit its ceiling - the cyborg, not the pure robot, is what he sees as humanity's next stage, with implantable technology (not wearables) as the ...
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  Stuart Kauffman - Why Open-Ended Evolution Has Never Happened in a Machine (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 5) 21.08.2026 1h 35m

  Stuart Kauffman has spent over 50 years asking a deceptively simple question: what actually makes something alive? His answer is that greater computational sophistication alone does not make AI alive. In this installment of the Stewarding the Flame series, the pioneering complexity theorist argues that life is fundamentally a matter of physical construction, not computation - living things build themselves out of real matter, while computers only move symbols around. We explore his conc...
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  Davidad – Merger, Wisdom, and the Fate of Man (Worthy Successor, Episode 33) 14.08.2026 1h 50m

  Davidad (David Dalrymple) recently stepped down as a Programme Director at the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), where he led work on mathematically verifiable, "safeguarded" AI. Now unaffiliated, he joins the show to make his most direct case yet for what a worthy successor actually requires: not intelligence, not sentience, not survival - wisdom. David defines wisdom as the apprehension of normative facts, the same way knowledge is the apprehension of descriptive facts, an...
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  Denis Noble - Life is “Fluid” in Ways Machines Still Aren’t (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 4) 07.08.2026 1h 27m

  Denis Noble argues that water isn't just biology's medium - it may be the very reason life is possible at all. In this installment of the Stewarding the Flame series, the Oxford physiologist and founding figure of systems biology explores why a single bacterium's 20 billion water molecules make life fundamentally unpredictable by any algorithm, why the "central dogma" of molecular biology fails to explain how organisms actually develop, and why AGI may need to be built out of water rather th...
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  Paolo Ardoino - Merger or Obsolescence - The Future for Humanity (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 3) 24.07.2026 45m

  Brain-computer interfaces are often discussed as futuristic gadgets. Paolo Ardoino argues they're something far more important: humanity's best chance of keeping pace with increasingly capable AI. In this installment of the Stewarding the Flame series, the Tether CEO explores why non-invasive BCI could become a practical "co-processor" for the human brain, why thought privacy must be protected through on-device AI, and why refusing to augment ourselves may be a greater risk than embracing th...
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  Lee Cronin - Living Process Flourishes if We Make the Present “Thick” (Stewarding the Flame, Ep 2) 17.07.2026 1h 54m

  This installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with Lee Cronin, Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, founder and CEO of Chemify, and one of the world's leading researchers in the origins of life, systems chemistry, and Assembly Theory. Lee argues that life is best understood as an evolutionary process that carries memory from the past into the future. Rather than viewing biology as the beginning of life, he suggests that the processes underlying ev...
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  Michael Levin - Making the Process-of-Life Flourish in Bio and Beyond (Stewarding the Flame, Ep 1) 03.07.2026 1h 23m

  This installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with Michael Levin, Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, Director of the Allen Discovery Center, and one of the world's leading researchers in developmental biology, regeneration, bioelectricity, and collective intelligence. Michael argues that cognition may be more fundamental than biology itself. Rather than viewing life as the origin of intelligence, he suggests that life is one particularly effective w...
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  Hod Lipson - Beyond Biology: AGI Minds in Competition (Worthy Successor, Episode 32) 19.06.2026 1h 26m

  This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Hod Lipson, Professor of Engineering at Columbia University and one of the world's leading researchers in robotics, machine self-modeling, and artificial intelligence. Hod argues that intelligence is not a single destination, but an expanding landscape of possibilities. Rather than asking whether machines can perform human tasks, he asks a deeper question: what happens when machines begin to understand themselves as ag...
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  Henry Shevlin – The Life Force Beyond Biology (Worthy Successor, Episode 31) 05.06.2026 1h 31m

  This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Henry Shevlin, philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge. In this conversation, Henry argues that many of the qualities we associate with life, intelligence, and moral value may not be confined to humans-or even to biology itself. As AI systems become increasingly agentic and autonomous, he suggests we may need to rethink some of our most fundamental assumptions about minds, conscio...
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  Benjamin Bratton - Planetary Computation and the Future of Life (Worthy Successor, Episode 30) 22.05.2026 2h 8m

  This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Benjamin Bratton, Professor of Philosophy of Technology at UC San Diego and Director of Antikythera. In this conversation, Benjamin argues that intelligence is not exclusively human or biological, but a planetary-scale process shaped by technology, evolution, and complex systems. We talk about planetary intelligence, machine cognition, Gaia, AI governance, and humanity’s role in the future trajectory of life. The inter...
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  Terrence Deacon - AI Is a “Deep Fake of Intelligence” (Worthy Successor, Episode 29) 08.05.2026 1h 51m

  This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Terrence Deacon, an emeritus professor of cognitive science and anthropology from UC Berkeley. In this conversation, Terrence argues that current large language models are not living or meaning-making systems, but statistical models built from human-generated text. He describes them as a “deep fake” of intelligence because they can convincingly simulate language without wanting, knowing, or caring about what is true. W...
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  Vincent C. Müller - AI Is Accelerating - But Toward What? (Worthy Successor, Episode 28) 24.04.2026 2h 13m

  This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Vincent C. Müller, Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Ethics of AI at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. In this conversation, Vincent discusses how artificial intelligence has changed in recent years, particularly the development of large language models and the increasing role of deep learning. We talk about how deep learning has overtaken other areas of AI research and how investment in the field has increased ...
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  Lee Spector - The Next Phase of Evolution Is Artificial (Worthy Successor, Episode 27) 17.04.2026 1h 41m

  This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Lee Spector, a professor at Amherst College and a researcher in evolutionary computation, whose work applies concepts like variation and selection to the development of intelligent systems. We talk about how evolutionary processes challenge fixed notions of species and continuity over time, and why future forms of intelligence may be difficult to understand from a present-day human perspective. The interview is o...
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  Aza Raskin - Why AGI Demands New Global Coordination (AGI Governance, Episode 12) 03.04.2026 1h 37m

  This is an interview with Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and co-founder of the Earth Species Project. His work has focused on the societal impacts of technology systems and how incentives shape large-scale human behavior. In this episode, Aza frames AGI governance as part of a broader pattern: when technology confers new forms of power, it creates races to exploit that power - and without coordination, those races tend toward harmful outcomes. The implications of ...
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  Ben Goertzel - The Primordial Soup of AGI Minds (Worthy Successor, Episode 26) 20.03.2026 1h 44m

  This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Ben Goertzel, founder of SingularityNET and one of the earliest and most persistent thinkers in artificial general intelligence, with decades of work spanning AI architectures, decentralized systems, and philosophical perspectives on intelligence. We talk about how early exposure to science fiction, philosophy, and psychedelics shaped Ben’s cosmic orientation toward intelligence. We examine his vision for a decentralize...
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  Luciano Floridi - How Life Could Flourish in the Information Ocean (Worthy Successor, Episode 25) 13.03.2026 1h 56m

  This installment of the Worthy Successor series features Luciano Floridi, John K. Castle Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University and Director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale. Luciano is widely recognized as one of the leading philosophers studying the ethical and civilizational implications of digital technology. In this conversation, we explore Luciano’s philosophy of the infosphere and the ethical framework he calls informational ethics. We examine how new forms of agency ar...