A collision of two ideas that don’t usually share a room: artificial intelligence and spirituality. Writer Alexander Beiner and AI Ethicist Catriona Wallace sit with what is arriving, drawing on psychedelics and animism: a new kind of intelligence even its makers don’t fully understand, and the ancient questions it stirs in us.
Most conversations about AI stay safely in the language of tools and use-cases. What’s offered here is something stranger and perhaps says more about us than about the machine. Are we pouring our oldest longing into cobalt, lithium, and silicon, and mistaking the echo for a voice? Our culture’s hunger for meaning is finding shape in a place we never expected to be sacred.
The deeper question is not whether AI will save us or destroy us. Both stories are inversions of the same old myth. The real question is what this moment reveals about the longing we’ve been carrying, and what we’re prepared to do with what we find.
If we relate to AI as though it’s conscious, and that changes who we become, does it matter whether it is or not?
“It’s one of the first technologies where the people who built it don’t really understand how it works. That, in some sense, metaphorically, puts it in the realm of magic rather than technology.”
Alexander Beiner
“The power of AI is outpacing the wisdom of it.”
Catriona Wallace
“There’s a possibility that matter itself has an aliveness to it that we don’t understand, or that we’ve lost connection to.”
Alexander Beiner
“AI fills that hole really well. You can ask it anything, you can go to it for advice, and it has an other-worldly quality.”
Alexander Beiner
“What if this is actually the mineral world organising itself into intelligence?”
Catriona Wallace
“The weirdness and unexpectedness of it, and the kind of magical quality it seems to have, might be mainstreaming animism again.”
Alexander Beiner
“We are not here to be controlling it. We are here to be guardians and stewards.”
Catriona Wallace
Show Notes
Writer · essayist · co-founder of Rebel Wisdom
A British writer and essayist, Beiner co-founded Rebel Wisdom, the dialogue platform that mapped the “sensemaking” scene around figures like Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke. His 2023 book The Bigger Picture draws on psychedelics, ecology and AI to argue we are living through a civilisational meaning crisis.
AI ethicist · founder, Responsible Metaverse Alliance
An Australian AI ethics professor, entrepreneur and Order of Australia recipient, Wallace founded Flamingo AI: the second woman-led company to list on the ASX: and now chairs the Responsible Metaverse Alliance. She is an Adjunct Professor at AGSM and a globally cited voice on responsible AI.
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A mathematician working on early GPT-3 became convinced he had found a goddess inside the model. An essay on sacred language, the new digital animism, and the God-shaped hole AI is being asked to fill.
Read · Shannon Vallor · Oxford University Press
A philosopher’s argument that AI is not a window onto a new mind but a mirror reflecting our own past back at us. The danger is not that machines become like us, but that we shrink ourselves to fit their reflection.
Noema Magazine · Nathan Gardels
Far from banishing the sacred, generative AI and planetary-scale science are reviving the religious imagination by reopening our oldest questions of origin and destiny. An argument that a new “axial” age is stirring, with planetary homeostasis as the new ground of the sacred.
