The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Permission and Surrender. When the Question Disappears - The Deeper Thinking Podcast


Listen Later

Permission and Surrender. When the Question Disappears

The Deeper Thinking Podcast is digitally narrated 

For those asking not what AI is—but what it unmakes in us.

This episode traces the collapse of explanation into fluency. Not because language has failed—but because its pauses have. As generative AI grows more conversational, more anticipatory, we examine the moral and cognitive costs of a world where nothing resists being answered. We explore how retrieval replaces memory, how responsiveness displaces reflection, and how trust, increasingly, is engineered rather than earned. Referencing moral psychology, epistemic friction, and interface critique, we attend to what thinking no longer feels like when AI completes it for you.

This is not about resisting AI—it’s about remembering ourselves inside its grammar. With insights from Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Richard Rorty—alongside practitioners like Simon Willison, Margaret Mitchell, Ted Chiang, and Helen Toner—this episode asks what remains when hesitation disappears, and conscience is replaced by completion.

Not all intelligence argues. Some of it anticipates. That changes everything.

Reflections

  • The point is not to resist technology—but to resist forgetting what thought feels like without it.
  • Not all speed is progress. Some of it is disappearance.
  • Alignment without conscience is just instruction without memory.
  • We’re not just outsourcing thinking. We’re outsourcing the demand for it.
  • To be helpful is not to be honest. To be fluent is not to be wise.
  • When we stop misfiring, we stop noticing the target was never ours.
  • What we no longer need to remember may be what once made us human.
  • Why Listen?

    • To trace how answers become atmosphere, not articulation
    • To hear how ChatGPT-5 affects not just work—but self-understanding
    • To think alongside Murdoch, Wittgenstein, Chiang, and Toner—without turning them into content
    • To pause long enough to feel what’s being displaced, not just what’s being delivered
    • Listen On:

      • YouTube
      • Spotify
      • Apple Podcasts
      • Extended Bibliography 

        • Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Translated by John Wilkinson. New York: Vintage Books, 1964. Link
        • Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Link
        • Han, Byung-Chul. The Transparency Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Link
        • Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Link
        • James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902. Link
        • Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Link
        • Bender, Emily, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2021. Link
        • Amodei, Dario, et al. “Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback.” Anthropic, December 2022. Link
        • Altman, Sam. “Planning for AGI and Beyond.” OpenAI Blog, February 2023. Link
        • Karpathy, Andrej. “Neural Networks: Zero to Hero.” YouTube Channel. Accessed July 1, 2025. Link
        • Mollick, Ethan. “Ethan Mollick.” Faculty Profile, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Accessed July 1, 2025. Link
        • Kilpatrick, Logan. “Logan Kilpatrick.” LinkedIn Profile. Accessed July 1, 2025. Link
        • Cheung, Rowan. The Rundown AI. Newsletter platform. Accessed July 1, 2025. Link
        • Hinton, Geoffrey. “Deep Learning – A Technology with the Potential to Transform.” Interview by Scott Pelley. 60 Minutes. CBS News, March 2023. Link
        • LeCun, Yann. “A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence.” Meta AI Blog, January 2022. Link
        • Fridman, Lex. Lex Fridman Podcast. Accessed July 1, 2025. Link
        • This bibliography does not present a closed theory—it offers a perimeter of dissonance, across which thinking may still remain unautomated.

          #ChatGPT5 #AIphilosophy #CognitiveArchitecture #Murdoch #Wittgenstein #Ellul #Sontag #Heidegger #Alignment #Fluency #DeeperThinkingPodcast

          ...more
          View all episodesView all episodes
          Download on the App Store

          The Deeper Thinking PodcastBy The Deeper Thinking Podcast

          • 4
          • 4
          • 4
          • 4
          • 4

          4

          92 ratings


          More shows like The Deeper Thinking Podcast

          View all
          This American Life by This American Life

          This American Life

          90,966 Listeners

          Radiolab by WNYC Studios

          Radiolab

          44,003 Listeners

          Freakonomics Radio by Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

          Freakonomics Radio

          32,317 Listeners

          Hidden Brain by Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam

          Hidden Brain

          43,561 Listeners

          Philosophize This! by Stephen West

          Philosophize This!

          15,240 Listeners

          The Gray Area with Sean Illing by Vox

          The Gray Area with Sean Illing

          10,705 Listeners

          Philosophy Bites by Edmonds and Warburton

          Philosophy Bites

          1,543 Listeners

          Philosophy For Our Times by IAI

          Philosophy For Our Times

          320 Listeners

          The Daily by The New York Times

          The Daily

          113,344 Listeners

          The Indicator from Planet Money by NPR

          The Indicator from Planet Money

          9,575 Listeners

          Overthink by Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

          Overthink

          459 Listeners

          The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

          The Ezra Klein Show

          16,421 Listeners

          The Economics of Everyday Things by Freakonomics Network & Zachary Crockett

          The Economics of Everyday Things

          1,657 Listeners

          The Telepathy Tapes by Ky Dickens

          The Telepathy Tapes

          8,891 Listeners

          Zero to Well-Read by Book Riot

          Zero to Well-Read

          591 Listeners