How should we talk about AI — and what gets lost when we focus too much on consciousness and existential risk?

In this episode, Dr Peter Dean and Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska reflect on recent media discussions of artificial intelligence, including the BBC Radio 4 Today programme and coverage in The Guardian. They question why debates about AI safety so often slide into speculation about sentience, while more immediate concerns — power, regulation, labour, energy use, and environmental impact — receive far less attention.

Combining philosophical scepticism with psychoanalytic insight, the conversation explores denial, fear, and responsibility in contemporary AI discourse, and asks what it might mean to think more seriously about how humans and AI systems already relate to one another.