Lotus Eaters
6/25/202651 min
In Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus's men ate the lotus flower, they forgot everything — who they were, where they'd come from, why any of it mattered. There was no pain, no urgency, no desire to leave. Just the soft obliteration of the self through ease. Odysseus had to drag them back to the ships by force.
The lotus is no longer a flower. It's in your pocket.
That's where we begin.
In the fourth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we ask the question no one wants to ask: what if the most dangerous thing AI is doing isn't some future robot war — what if it's the quiet, ongoing rot of our attention, our capacity for meaning, and our ability to notice anything at all? The brain rot apocalypse is not coming. It may already be here.
Joined by Nate Sharadin of the Center for AI Safety, who argues AI is poised to create a cognitive "bifurcation" in humanity — leaving many of us enfeebled in WALL-E chairs while a smaller group retains the skills to author their own lives, and Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus, who explains that our attention hasn't simply deteriorated — it's been systematically stolen, by design, by ten thousand engineers paid to undermine our self-control. Also with us: Dr. Amy Levy, chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association's AI commission, who asks whether a more docile, collectively minded humanity might actually be Freud's concept of Eros in action, and Sameer Gupta of EvenPlay, who argues that AI is not being trained on our best intentions — it's being trained on slot machines, gambling, and the shadow self we don't like admitting to.
Lotus Eaters is the fourth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us — or something that's already happening inside us.
We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com
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Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady
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Guests:
- Nate Sharadin - Professor of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong / Research Affiliate, Center for AI Safety - https://sharadin.com/
- Johann Hari - author, Stolen Focus: https://amzn.to/4vAL2mV
- Dr. Amy Levy - Chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s President’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence and Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive - https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5
- Sameer Gupta - Co-Founder, EvenPlay - https://www.evenplay.com/
Other works mentioned in this episode:
Homer’s The Odyssey - https://amzn.to/3StWemv
Max Tegmark - Life 3.0 - https://amzn.to/4uTOI1C
Alan Watts - Eastern Philosophy Lecture Series - https://amzn.to/4g4MJEe
Wall-E - https://amzn.to/4eCl0tr
Elizier Yudkowski - “There is no fire alarm for artificial intelligence” - https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
Oxford Word of the Year - https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/
And here's our own episode where we talk about Freud's Death Drive: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000771138097
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests' books through these links, you're supporting this series too.
This episode was made by:
Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shamammi
Produced by: Jesse Ford
Editor: David Justin Martin
Original Music by: Shane Patrick Ford
Sound Mix: Marc LaRochelle
Graphics: Semi:Formal
Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR
Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma)
Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright
Additional Camera and Audio: Mike Mulliniks, James Goldman
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:01
I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change. Today, we have more incentives for market solutions than ever, and emissions are rising. On this season of Drilled: Carbon Cowboys, the story of three market solutions colliding in one multinational boondoggle.
Amy Levy· Guest0:18
Gotta give Russia the guy's credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a [beep] about any of this stuff.
Speaker 10:23
Listen anywhere you get podcasts.
Sean King O'Grady· Host0:25
[Instrumental music] The apocalypse often conjures images of nuclear fallout, humans fleeing killer machines, or rivers of blood and fire. And sure, maybe that's what awaits. No one knows. And as discussed in our last episode, a lot of very smart people who know a lot about all of these things are terrified. But there's another kind of apocalypse that is just as pernicious, and it operates within us. In some ways, it is us. This is the enfeeblement or deep rotting of our brains. This is the apocalypse of the mind, and maybe it's already happened. The world as we know it, one could argue, is only real insofar as the human mind processes a unique set of coherent images and ideas from an infinite amount of external stimuli. If that processing power is destroyed or even diminished, does the world end? Is it possible that it's ended already?