AI tutors and grading assistants can personalize learning or hollow it out. This episode explores the fork in the road: augmentation that frees teachers for mentorship, or automation that reduces education to standardized modules. Equity concerns loom—will wealthy schools enrich human teaching with AI while poorer districts replace it? Beyond efficiency, the question is cultural: do we define education as delivering content, or as shaping citizens? AI magnifies whichever answer we choose.

Produced by Selenius Media

Who controls the means of intelligence? This episode examines the AI infrastructure stack—chips, cloud, data, and models—now concentrated in a few corporations and nations. Like oil or steel in earlier eras, AI has become a chokepoint of economic and geopolitical power. Open weights promise freedom but accelerate misuse; secrecy entrenches oligarchy. The debate over ownership is not academic: it determines whether AI becomes a public utility or a rent-extraction machine.

Selenius Media

Algorithms are marketed as neutral, but their outputs mirror the biases of their training data and objectives. This episode investigates risk scores in courts, résumé filters in hiring, and recommendation engines in media—systems that appear objective yet quietly perpetuate inequity. The problem is not intent but opacity. Decisions dressed in statistical rigor command deference, even when wrong. Without transparency, appeal, and accountability, algorithmic judgment becomes a new disguise for old prejudices.

Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory

Throughout history humans have imagined and strived to create artificial beings with intelligence. From ancient legends of mechanical servants to modern deep learning systems, the story of artificial intelligence (AI) spans millennia. This script traces that journey in a series of thematic chapters, each highlighting a phase in the evolution of AI. We begin in the realm of myth and legend, travel through early mechanical inventions and philosophical ideas, and arrive at the cutting-edge AI of today, examining capabilities, limitations, and future implications.

Produced by Selenius Media

Innovation dazzles, but implementation and integration take years. This episode explores the adoption curve—why authoritarian systems accelerate while democracies deliberate. The drivers are greed, control, power, but also curiosity and care. Resistance slows reckless rollouts, yet convenience pulls adoption forward. The key question is purpose: what is AI for, if so much of its use bends toward control?

Selenius Media.

Automation promises efficiency but shrinks the wage base that underpins consumer demand. This episode explores how AI hollows out the labor market, compresses wages, and erodes the social contract. Universal basic income emerges as a stopgap, but it cannot restore meaning to lives defined by work. Without redistributing gains through ownership or co-design, society risks a paradox: abundant output with too few consumers able to afford it, and a populace adrift in purposelessness.

Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory

AI integrated itself into essential services without public debate. Contracts embedded models in schools, hospitals, and city IT systems. The transition was subtle—dashboards, assistants, fraud detection—but irreversible once habits formed. This episode examines how adoption happened through procurement, not referendum, and how institutions traded resilience for optimization. When outages occur, there is no manual fallback. A city that never voted for AI wakes to find its systems cannot run without it.

Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory

This episode traces the quiet entry of artificial intelligence into daily life, from hospitals to city governments. What began as pilots and convenience has become reliance, reshaping decision-making in ways the public never voted on. The story is not about science fiction but about procurement, contracts, and defaults—how institutions hand over control bit by bit, until human oversight becomes ceremonial. The black box is already here, and society is inside it.

Seleniusmedia.com