Sometimes the thing we’re focusing on has to take us outside its own frame in order to ask the real questions.
This chapter is not directly about AI because the questions we need to ask as we build this technology are broader than the tech itself. They draw on a much deeper well that exists within each of us.
One table, four lifetimes of wisdom. A Wiradjuri man, an adventurer, an ethicist and a prison officer turned Sister of Mary sit with what most of us are taught to look away from: loss, love and the frames inherited from institutions that no longer hold us.
Gina Chick, Dr Simon Longstaff AO and Sister Anayah speak of grief not as something to overcome but as something that shapes us. David Beaumont speaks of the colonial project, and the institutions that carry or fail the people inside them.
Systems revealing our disconnection from each other and from nature as the wound beneath the wound, and what it asks of us to live fully with eyes wide open.
A conversation about life, and who we choose to be today.
Warning: this chapter references suicide. If you or anyone you know needs support, reach out to beyondblue.org.au or lifeline.org.au.
“We’re near the end of a long age of forgetting. We’ve largely forgotten the purpose for which things were brought into existence… and therefore we betray those purposes.”
Simon Longstaff
"I died and I dissolved, and I was regrown as part of the interconnected web of life, no more or less important than any bird or bee or tree or fish."
Gina Chick
"You actually need to listen to the truth. It's a very different proposition, truth listening."
David Beaumont
"I don't sacrifice me to fit in. You keep telling the truth and you don't lose yourself and you stand on it."
Sister Anayah
"An animal does not outsource its authority."
Gina Chick
“I’m a firm believer in pushing those boundaries.”
Sister Anayah
"The size of my grief is the size of our love."
Gina Chick
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"How do we live in this land with joy? How do we graft onto what was already here?"
David Beaumont
Show Notes
Wilderness instructor · writer · winner, Alone Australia S1
Winner of the inaugural season of SBS’s Alone Australia, Chick is a wilderness instructor, rewilding facilitator and writer who has spent decades teaching primitive skills and grief work. Her 2024 memoir We Are the Stars weaves survival, motherhood and the loss of her daughter into a meditation on being fully alive.
Executive Director, The Ethics Centre
Executive Director of The Ethics Centre in Sydney since 1991, Longstaff is one of Australia’s most-quoted public philosophers, advising boards, governments and broadcasters on questions of integrity and applied ethics. He hosts the Centre’s long-running IQ2 debates and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
Sister of Mary · former prison officer
A Sister of Mary who once walked the corridors of a maximum-security prison as an officer turned chaplain. Sister Anayah speaks from the place where institutions meet the people they hold. Her practice is one of presence, prayer and quiet defiance.
Wiradjuri man · advocate
A Wiradjuri man whose work sits at the intersection of cultural reclamation, colonial trauma and the slow business of listening. He speaks of the institutions that carry or fail the people inside them, and of what it asks of us to live in this land with open eyes.
Video
Our Words Matter. Use Them Wisely.
David Beaumont, Wiradjuri man and Indigenous leadership and engagement practitioner, on language as a recalibration into the future.
Gina Chick · Book
We Are the Stars
Gina Chick’s memoir of grief, wildness and connection written after the loss of her daughter. A misfit’s story of love, connection and the glorious power of letting go.
The Ethics Centre · Report
Ethical by Design: Good Technology Principles for AI
A practical framework for building technology that serves human ends, from the centre Simon Longstaff has led since 1991.
