Podcast
Plutopia News Network
Hosted by Plutopia News Network · EN
We talk to interesting people via podcast and weekly livestream.
33episodes
Episodes
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Anne Boysen: AI Hype, Agents, and Risk
Mar 2301:00:29Tap to summarizeIn this Plutopia podcast episode, futurist and data analyst Anne Boysen argues that today’s AI systems, especially large language models and emerging AI agents, are being adopted far faster than their reliability, transparency, and testability justify. She contrasts older, more deterministic technologies such as traditional search and rule-based systems with today’s probabilistic models, which generate plausible answers without clear provenance, reproducibility, or dependable truth-testing, making them vulnerable to hallucinations, disinformation, and misuse. Anne warns that handing decisions over to AI agents could amplify these risks, especially when users misunderstand AI as precise or authoritative, while also noting that companies often push AI into products out of hype, monetization pressure, or fear of missing out rather than clear user need. At the same time, she acknowledges that narrower, well-guarded uses of AI, such as media enhancement or limited decision support, can be helpful, and she ultimately advocates for careful testing, human oversight, targeted applications, and simple, thoughtful regulation focused on guardrails and accountability rather than blanket overregulation. Anne Boysen: We’re going to start leaving these decisions to agents. AI agents. So on top of all of this probabilistic hodgepodge of maybe truths, and maybe not reproducible truths on top of that, we’re going to start letting agents make decisions for us. So, you’re basically just going to use this interface that may or may not understand you completely and may come up with their own interpretations, and they’re like, “Oh, I thought you said enter my bank account to buy Bitcoin.” I don’t know, like, “That’s what I thought you wanted to do.” And then that could be the result. So, that’s where we are. Video on YouTube
Transcribe →Marc Abrahams: Improbable Research and Ig Nobel Prizes
Mar 1601:02:49Tap to summarizeIn this Plutopia News Network interview, Marc Abrahams discusses the Ig Nobel Prizes, which he founded in 1991 after becoming editor of the “Journal of Irreproducible Results.” These prizes honor real achievements that make people “laugh and then think,” not work that is simply silly or worthless. He describes how the prizes grew from a quirky MIT event into a long-running international celebration supported largely by ticket sales and volunteers, featuring Nobel laureates, comic stage devices like “Miss Sweetie Poo,” and handmade awards built from cheap materials. Abrahams discusses how winners are chosen from roughly 9,000 nominations a year through argument and debate, why self-conscious attempts to win usually fail, and how the associated “Annals of Improbable Research” highlights unusual but meaningful work ranging from pasta physics to fingernail growth studies and even medical research on colonoscopy explosions. He also reflects on occasional controversy, especially from officials who misunderstood the spirit of the prizes, and notes a newer challenge: some international winners no longer feel comfortable traveling to the United States, prompting a major shift as the 2026 Ig Nobel ceremony moves to Zurich. Marc Abrahams: If you win an Ig Nobel Prize, you’ve done something that will make almost anyone anywhere immediately laugh, and then start thinking. So there’s something about it that, whatever it is, will just instantly make somebody start laughing, and then it’ll stick in their mind, if we’ve chosen well. And for the next week or so, all they want to do is tell their friends about it, talk about it. But it has nothing to do with whether the thing is good or bad, or valuable or worthless, could be all of those or none of those. If you set out to create, devise, invent something that has that effect, You’re almost certainly going to fail. You can do one or the other. You can invent something that makes people laugh, or you can invent something that makes people really start thinking. But to invent something that does both of those, That’s really difficult. Don’t try, really, really. It’s just a side effect. Video on YouTube: Original photo of Marc Abrahams by David Kessler (background enhanced) Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Transcribe →Roy Casagranda on Iran, War, and Global Fallout
Mar 901:07:37Tap to summarizeIn this Plutopia News Network episode, Jon and Scoop talk with political scholar Dr. Roy Casagranda, joining from Dubai, about Iran’s modern history, the rise of the Islamic Republic, and the rapidly escalating conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the United States. Roy argues that the crisis is rooted in a long history of oil politics, foreign intervention, and colonial power struggles, and he warns that the current war could spiral into a far broader regional and global catastrophe, disrupting trade, driving up oil prices, destabilizing neighboring states, and increasing the risk of mass displacement and wider war. Throughout the conversation, he also critiques the motives and competence of current U.S. and Israeli leadership, questions claims about democracy and security, and frames the conflict as part of a larger pattern of geopolitical chaos with potentially devastating economic and human consequences. Roy Casagranda: I think what they decided was we’re going to keep doing this, we’re going to go all in. And their goal is to break the global economy. Their goal is to make it so that the price of oil goes through the roof, that everybody runs out of oil, that India runs out of oil, that Europe runs out of oil. They want to break the GCC economy. They want to break UAE, they want to break, to hurt everybody who’s ever had anything to do with the United States. They want to destroy Israel if they can. They’re gonna go for broke, and their thinking is that eventually the world will turn on the United States because the world will realize the cost that the United States is inflicting on the global economy isn’t worth whatever goal Israel and the United States have.
Transcribe →Kate Devlin: Robot Love
Mar 201:01:18Tap to summarizeIn this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, we interview AI and society expert Kate Devlin about the rise of AI companions, sex robots, and the evolving relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. Devlin explores why people fall in love with chatbots despite knowing they lack consciousness, tracing the phenomenon back to ancient myths like Pygmalion and forward through science fiction and shows like “Black Mirror.” She discusses the ethics of AI design, the limits of machine “morality,” concerns about exploitation and “ghost work” behind supposedly autonomous systems, and the need for thoughtful regulation that holds tech companies accountable. The conversation also touches on generational shifts in intimacy, online misogyny, AI’s role in education and law, and the persistent moral panics that accompany new technologies, highlighting Devlin’s view that while AI cannot love us back, the feelings people experience are real, complex, and part of a long human history of forming emotional bonds with our creations. So a lot of the science fiction stories feature — usually, if it’s a female robot, they tend to either be incredibly subservient or they tend to break their programming and go rogue, which is sort of a cautionary tale about what happens if feminism gets out of control, and these women break the shackles and rise up against their male owners. There was a “Black Mirror” episode, the “Be Right Back” episode, where the husband dies in a car wreck and she creates or she gets a robot version that she can imprint his leftover messages and videos and everything onto so she can create herself a new version of the husband. But, of course, it’s uncanny — it’s not really him, and it all goes terribly wrong because she doesn’t feel it’s really him. So, lots of good questions there about what we expect, I think, from these artificial alternatives. Video on YouTube:
Transcribe →Gareth Branwyn in Slumberland
Feb 2301:03:33Tap to summarizeThe Plutopia News Network podcast welcomes writer, editor, and media critic Gareth Branwyn to discuss his workshop “Dreaming for Creatives,” which focuses less on dream symbolism or interpretation and more on mining the “dream-time mind” for usable creative material. Gareth and the Plutopians reminisce about early-1990s zine and cyberculture scenes (The WELL, FactSheet 5, bOING bOING, Mondo 2000, “Jargon Watch,” and “Street Tech”), then shift into Branwyn’s lifelong dream practice, including lucid dreaming as a teen and techniques to improve dream recall, especially using a “dream recall tally sheet” and the habit of staying still upon waking to retrieve dream fragments. He describes three liminal sources of creativity: “night thoughts” (hypnagogic scribbles), “night bulbs” (clear middle-of-the-night insights), and dreams themselves. He gives examples of how these have shaped his work and even his name. The conversation also touches on “second sleep,” sleep tracking, recurring flying dreams, sleep paralysis and its eerie “presence” hallucinations, and the idea that paying attention to dreaming, like meditation, can deepen one’s relationship with consciousness — while still warning against turning dream work into an unhealthy obsession. Gareth Branwyn: I’ve only done the workshop once so far, and one thing I wanted to make, clear because when I started talking it up before I did it — people immediately think you’re going to talk about dream interpretation, dream symbolism, which I have basically no interest in, besides the obvious things of that was clearly an anxiety dream, like I lost my wallet, or I lost my phone (I have those a lot) or I got lost at a conference. But I’m not interested in that at all, and so I really needed to make it clear that’s not what this is about. This is really mining your dream time mind for creative material. That’s really what my interest is. Video on YouTube:
Transcribe →Shira Chess: The Unseen Internet
Feb 1600:59:26Tap to summarizeShira Chess joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse, arguing that online culture has always been shaped not just by code and commerce but by myth, ritual, and “enchanted logic.” The conversation traces how early internet and 90s cyberculture overlapped with Technopaganism and other non-mainstream spiritual currents, creating a productive (and sometimes destabilizing) fuzziness between “technology as magic” and “magic as technology,” echoing Arthur C. Clarke’s famous formulation (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”). Chess explores how this occult-inflected sensibility persists today as background “wallpaper” in everything from simulation theory and reality-shifting to conspiracy culture and politicized “meme magic,” while also touching on the loss of open-web imagination among younger users, the fragility and importance of digital archives, and how fragmentation at scale has helped erode consensus reality, leaving us in an internet-shaped world where, as the counterculture mantra goes, “nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Shira Chess: The thing about that Arthur C. Clarke quote that always sort of struck me was that it works in both ways, right? Any significantly advanced society is indistinguishable from magic, or technology is indistinguishable from magic. But any any magic is also indistinguishable from an advanced technology. And I think that slippage helped create a kind of fuzziness, right? Where it can both be magical and not magical at the same time, right? And people could kind of choose how they wanted to look at things. I think that was very much part of the Technopagan ethos. It wasn’t some people absolutely believed in literal magic. Some people just were like — well, the technology that we have is magical enough. Video on YouTube
Transcribe →David Weinberger on AI
Feb 1001:05:39Tap to summarizeDavid Weinberger joins the Plutopia podcast to weigh AI’s real strengths, especially pattern recognition, against its major dangers: hallucinations, bias, corporate power, and energy costs. He’s less focused on sci-fi doom than on how AI reshapes how we think about knowledge and ourselves. We dig into surveillance and facial recognition failures, “human-in-the-loop” debates in medicine and justice, job disruption, and whether copyright is the right tool for regulating training data. David Weinberger: I am less concerned, but I may just be wrong about this — I am less concerned about machine learning AI becoming conscious and consciously hostile to us and subjugating us. I cannot evaluate the risk of it in a non-malignant way, taking over for us. I mean, there’s some popular scenarios from very knowledgeable and responsible people saying, you know, this conceivably could… even if we tell it, do no harm to humans, only do good, do what’s good for humans… that it could come to very bad conclusions about what’s good for humans and get us into a situation that we don’t want to be in. YouTube video version:
Transcribe →Ken MacLeod: Imagined Futures
Feb 301:02:19Tap to summarizeAward-winning Scottish science fiction author Ken MacLeod joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss his work’s political themes: failed modern systems, rising nationalism, and the struggle to find common interest in a fragmented world. He also reflects candidly on the craft of writing as he nears completion of his 21st novel, which he says still hinges on the hardest part: plotting and bringing a story to a satisfying, coherent conclusion. In conversation with hosts Jon, Scoop, and Wendy, Ken explains how he distinguishes science fiction from fantasy (material processes versus mental ones), describes his note-driven worldbuilding process, and weighs the real prospects for human space colonization, skepticism about today’s power-hungry “AI,” and the enduring pull of socialist ideas. By far and away, the hardest thing for me to do is plot. You know, getting a general idea of the story, getting a world, an imaginary world, getting ideas. That’s easy, that’s the first stage. The thing I sweat and swear and stumble over repeatedly is plot. And most of the mental writing goes into that. At the moment I’m writing my, I guess, my 20th novel and it hasn’t got any easier. I’ve got a couple of chapters, maybe two or three chapters left to write. I’ve just re-read everything I wrote so far on the novel. It’s not quite as bad as I thought, you know. You get very critical of your work if you’ve read it several times over. Editor’s note: We realized after the interview that Ken has written 20 novels, and the one in process is his 21st! YouTube video version:
Transcribe →Adam Roberts: Fantasy
Jan 2601:01:58Tap to summarizeOn this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, Jon, Scoop and Wendy welcome award-winning British science fiction novelist and literature professor Adam Roberts to discuss his new critical book Fantasy: A Short History and what it means to “suspend disbelief” in fantasy and science fiction. Adam explores how science fiction can be seen as a subset of fantasy rooted in modern scientific thinking, while fantasy is humanity’s default storytelling mode, stretching from ancient epics to Tolkien and beyond. He traces how genre fantasy crystallized as a recognizable category in the late 1960s and 1970s with Tolkien’s paperback boom and publishing lines like Ballantine Books. The conversation ranges across the Avatar films blending of sci-fi spectacle and mythic enchantment, the commercial and cultural drive toward endless sequels and mega-series (from Victorian triple-deckers to Star Wars), and the idea of fantasy as “re-enchantment” in a disenchanted modern world. The conversation is tempered by questions about grimdark violence, romantic fantasy trends, fascism and authoritarianism in fantasy settings, and how technology, the internet, and AI may reshape imagination, community, and the ways people escape into (or build) alternate worlds through books, film, cosplay, and video games. Adam Roberts: But I think it may be that cinema is becoming more like video games. And it’s more about particular special effects, spectacular. That’s diminishing, I think, for the art form, because video games are necessarily structured by the obstacles that you put in the way of the player. The player overcomes the obstacles and gets to the end of the stage and beats the big boss. And that’s a rather kind of denuded way of thinking about the possibilities of storytelling. But then I also think that in a game like Skyrim you can do anything at all. You can fight dragons and you can go on adventures and quests, or you can just live in a village and explore what the possibilities of that are. And that’s rare. It’s rare certainly in cinema, but even in book form, where there usually is a more linear conflict that has to be overcome. Video on YouTube:
Transcribe →Dave Evans: Does It Square?
Jan 1901:00:23Tap to summarizeIn this Plutopia News Network podcast, author and social media expert Dave Evans discusses the nature and spread of online misinformation and introduces Does It Square?, an AI-assisted fact-checking tool designed to help users pause, evaluate claims, and ground conversations in shared facts. Evans explains that misinformation is often “half true,” built on a factual core but extended with unsupported interpretations that exploit emotion, division, and engagement-driven social media algorithms. Drawing on his long experience with social media’s evolution, he argues that ad-driven platforms amplify outrage and reinforce echo chambers, while bots and click farms further accelerate false narratives for profit. Rather than declaring content simply true or false, Does It Square focuses on linguistic analysis — identifying emotionally charged, authoritarian, or intuition-based language — to encourage media literacy, reflection, and more constructive dialogue in a polarized information environment. Dave Evans: One of the more interesting facts about misinformation is that it’s generally about half-true. In developing Does It Square?, one of the first scales that I implemented was how true, how false is this? And what I found was everything was basically 50% right, because really good information starts with some kind of fact that everyone agrees, “this is a fact .” But then it extends that in a way that either the data or the methodology doesn’t support. It makes some kind of unfounded claim. It makes no references to anything that supports those extensions or those interpretations or anything like that. So you’re left with — okay, if this underlying fact is true and here’s the interpretation of it, wow, I mean, I guess that’s, you know, true. Well, not really. Link to DoesItSquare.com
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