A collision of two ideas that don’t usually share a room: artificial intelligence and spirituality. Alexander Beiner and Catriona Wallace sit with what is arriving, a new kind of intelligence even its makers don’t fully understand, and the older question it stirs in us.
There’s a temptation to treat AI as just a tool. What’s offered here is something stranger: the proposition that the mineral world of cobalt, lithium, and silicon may be being organised by a force outside our reasoning, and that 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. It is what we are willing to steward, and what we are willing to surrender.
“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.