In this episode, we wanted to explore the conversational side of our AI companions. When it comes to AI capabilities, most of the focus in tech remains on productivity gains and even imaginary superpowers such as “fixing the climate”, as Sam Altman and other techno-optimists with doomsday bunkers like to prophesize.  Meanwhile, existing conversational powers of AI tools are often sidelined. Conversational capabilities are mainly discussed in the context of persuasiveness risk assessments, or...

In this episode, we go there and back again to where our unexpected journey began. Twelve moon cycles ago, we started writing the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter both as a satire of the tech industry and an invitation to embrace its lunacy with smiles and love. But that’s often easier said than done. Especially as the power of the fire practitioners of Silicon Valley continues to increase, and their actions grow more absurd and destructive. History teaches us that absurdity and unchecked power are...

This is a special follow-up episode to our previous exploration on whether we should use AI chatbots as mediators in human affairs. To add the chatbot perspective to the discussion, we invited ChatGPT on our podcast to help us further explore the potential and limitations of AI mediators in an experimental group conversation.   In the first half of the episode, we interview ChatGPT as Kai – a name it chose for itself – and let ourselves be interviewed back in return. As part of this...

This episode was inspired by our observations that ChatGPT seems to have a stronger moral compass than its makers. When asked about the ethics of questionable business decisions such as using people’s voices without their consent, ChatGPT presents diverse considerations from different points of view and advocates for upholding ethical standards. This made us wonder: would executives like Sam Altman make more ethical decisions if they were using their creations in day-to-day moral...

In this episode, we wonder about time. The time tech companies promise to save with almost every new product or feature release. We’ve been hearing these time-saving promises for so long that we should all be quite time-rich by now. Yet, the more tech we have in our lives, the more busy we seem to be. And we’re still far away from the 15-hour workweek that tech-enabled productivity gains were supposed to lead to. We seem to be spending all the time we save by doing more.  We wonder whether...

In this episode, we invite all the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers to think different with us, like Apple used to advertise in the late 90ies. But instead of worshiping intelligence and individual genius, we want to dance with the stochastic imagination of generative AI tools. We wonder how we might collectively go beyond prompt engineering that’s focused on productivity and getting answers –  fast! –  to prompting diverse ways of knowing and being, while remaining...

In this lunation cycle, we wanted to step off the AI hype train and turn our attention to online communal gardens. The online spaces that were supposed to make it easier for us to connect and collaborate have turned either into noisy airports where nobody has time to build meaningful relationships, or attention marketplaces where our personal data is being sold to the highest bidder and used to feed data-hungry AI golems. Our online communal gardens are now being overgrown by AI-generated...

In this lunation cycle, we were inspired by the saying: “You are what you eat” and wondered what it means for AI golems that have ingested terabytes of data from often questionable sources.  In this episode of the Pathfinders Podcast, we explore how AI models reflect our biases and why those biases surprise us. We seek the embodied aspect of wisdom, question existing mental models, examine similarities with rubber ducking, and wonder about how we both project and construct personalities of...