This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Natalie Monbiot, one of the earliest and most thoughtful voices in the world on digital twins, AI avatars and human-centred AI. Natalie joined the podcast from the US.

Natalie left the corporate world in 2019 to join Hour One as one of its earliest team members, and helped turn AI-generated video from a category dominated by deepfake pornography into a legitimate enterprise business, with customers including Johnson & Johnson and Berlitz. She now collaborates with AE Studio on AI alignment and safety, who recently co-published a paper with Anthropic on removing dangerous knowledge at the training stage.

The title of this episode comes from a question Natalie borrows from the Cosmos Institute. When the AI is not in the room, are you smarter and more capable, or are you diminished? If it is the second, something has gone wrong.

Topics covered:

Are you smarter and more capable when AI is not in the room
Why the digital twin is a healthier mental model than the answer engine
The cognitive atrophy risk of outsourcing your thinking to an LLM
The shift from AI as answer engine to AI as action engine
Yoshua Bengio on stripping AI of any intrinsic personality
John Vervaeke's "relevance realisation" as a distinctly human capability
Sovereign personal AI - your data, your model, on your device
The Echo Studio and Anthropic paper on removing dangerous knowledge at training
Family-safe AI as a real consumer category
Natalie's three prescriptions for using AI in a way that makes you stronger