Silas Alder
Exploring AI through a living-systems and relational framework.
Watch the episode. Follow the branches. Join the conversation.
An introduction to the project and to the branching format itself: what this podcast is trying to do, why the conversation is built as a tree, and how to take part.
This project explores AI through ecology, relationship, interdependence, agency, and adaptation. We examine how intelligence develops within complex systems, living or otherwise, and how we might relate to it beyond control alone.
The video above opens into a branching conversation. As you watch, you can follow responses attached to specific moments, explore new branches, and return to exactly where you left off.
Anyone can watch and explore. Patreon members can participate in subsequent episodes by adding video or audio responses of their own. The result is somewhere between a podcast, a forum, and a living map of an idea that keeps growing after an episode is published.
The larger project is an attempt to think together constructively about what comes next: how we might live with increasingly capable AI, what institutions and relationships could support human agency, and what new forms of culture and collaboration might become possible.
AI is accumulating traits we associate with living things, such as emergence, development, lineage, and ecology, without settling whether it is alive or conscious. A proposed name for that threshold, and why it changes the questions we ask about how to grow, relate to, and live alongside these systems.
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