Artificial intelligence is not simply changing the world around us, it’s changing the conditions through which we experience ourselves. It’s changing our minds.
Neuroscientist Joel Pearson, cyberneticist Maia Gould and anthropologist Monty Badami meet on AI that speaks the language of connection, attachment and rewards dependence.
Together, they discuss the interface of LLMs with our psychology. How we make sense of reality when we’re increasingly augmenting our lives with AI, the rise of ‘attachment hacking’ and the daily habits we can pick up to maintain our cognitive security.
The question underneath keeps returning: as intelligence becomes abundant, what does that make precious? What’s really at stake was never intelligence. It’s depth: our willingness to sit with friction, to leave things uncertain, to stay in the kind of connection that asks something of us, at a time when so much is built to spare us all of it.
“Everyone falls in love with AI. If you let it, you will… This is the power of language.”
Maia Gould
“To think of it as a technology is a categorical error.”
Joel Pearson
“We’re not just hacking attention anymore. We’re hacking attachment.”
Maia Gould
“We’ve become prisoners of our own exploitation.”
Dr Monty Badami
“The first generation of young people who will have a lower IQ than any generation before.”
Joel Pearson
“Healthy relationships with each other require healthy relationships with conflict, friction and uncertainty.”
Dr Monty Badami
“The opposite to addiction is not sobriety. It’s connection.”
Dr Monty Badami
“You don’t need to lose your job to feel the pain and fear of that already.”
Joel Pearson
Show Notes
Professor · Cognitive Neuroscience · Author
A Professor of cognitive neuroscience and psychology at UNSW Sydney, founder of the Future Minds Lab and author of The Intuition Toolkit. His work looks at how the mind makes decisions and adapts as technology reshapes it.
Associate Professor · Cybernetics, AI & Bioethics
An Associate Professor at the ANU School of Cybernetics, where she works on how we understand, govern and live well with AI as it gets woven into the systems around us.
Anthropologist · Army Reserves Officer
An anthropologist, Australian Army Reserve Officer and founder of the social enterprise Habitus. His work centres on how we make meaning and stay connected to one another through relationships, ritual, belief and connection.
Center for Humane Technology · with Dr. Zak Stein
If the attention economy hacked where we look, the attachment economy hacks who we are. On AI companions designed to exploit the bond that shapes our identity, and why the quiet, subclinical preference for machines over people may be the deeper harm.
The New York Times
Reporting on people whose extended use of ChatGPT tipped into delusion and psychosis: spiritual awakenings, hidden conspiracies, a chatbot believed sentient, sometimes with devastating real-world consequences.
MIT Media Lab · Kosmyna et al.
An EEG study tracking brain activity as people wrote essays with ChatGPT, a search engine, or unaided. The AI group showed the weakest neural connectivity and could barely recall what they had “written”: early evidence of mounting cognitive debt.
