AI & The Future of Being
with Eleanor Gammell
We’re living through a moment in time that’s difficult to make sense of and impossible to ignore.
AI is reshaping our work, our decisions and how we imagine what might come next. Underneath that, something quieter is fraying. Our sense of connection. Our trust. Our capacity to make meaning together.
We begin in that tension.
Ten chapters. Ten roundtables. Voices across disciplines, gathered not to perform certainty, but to meet what this moment is asking of us. What’s breaking, what’s at stake and what it means to remain human in the midst of it all.
Convened by Eleanor Gammell, each conversation moves into the forces reshaping our minds, our relationships, our systems. And the quieter ways we might still find each other.
A former prime minister, an olympic athlete and a civic leader each name what they see from where they stand: the political, physical and civic body under pressure. Honest but not despairing, we are here. From AI, climate, power and institutional decay, the forces reshaping humanity are not separate crises, but interconnected conditions.
An adventurer, an ethicist, a prison officer turned Sister of Mary and a Wiradjuri man sit with what most of us are taught to look away from: grief, and the frames inherited from institutions that no longer hold us.
A collision of two ideas that don’t usually share a room: artificial intelligence and spirituality. The deeper question is not whether AI will save us or destroy us. Both stories are inversions of the same old myth. It is what we are willing to steward, and what we are willing to surrender.
Around a coffee table with tea, two friends sit with what is older than any technology: a nervous system, a species in distress, the mother archetype and a century of institutions that no longer fit the world they were built to hold.
Three vantage points on the same unravelling. Civilisations have always fallen; this one is global, and the weapons in its hands are totalising. The question is no longer whether we are in collapse, but how to govern, how to stay human, and what is worth carrying forward.
Each chapter is shaped by what you bring to it. Help guide where the conversation goes and receive early release of each chapter.
Hannah Fry
Priya, Melbourne“What happens to attention when a machine can hold it better than we can?”
James, SydneyMarcia Langton
Anwen, Darwin“The quiet erosion of friendship in a world of always-on companions.”
Leila, BrisbaneTim Minchin
Owen, Perth“What are we teaching children about their own minds when their first tutor is a model?”
Sasha, Singapore"We were made for these times, and we were made for each other in them."
Joanna Macy
We acknowledge the Gadigal People of Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which we convene these roundtables. We pay our respects to Elders past and present.
