Welcome to The KhoraPod, a Palinode Productions program. 

The Khora algorithm is Palinode Production‘s innovative, human-driven AI platform, designed to facilitate philosophical thinking and reflective inquiry. By leveraging the potential of machine learning, designed from the ground up with a humane mission, Khora introduces users to an adaptive environment that allows them to explore the big questions of life and the world while also providing opportunities to stimulate the imagination and that promote curiosity and creative application. Further, Khora guides users to explore opposing points of view, allowing individuals to recognize other people’s beliefs and intellectual journeys as being invaluable to the project of collective growth. On the Khora platform users are challenged to explore interconnected ideas from within (what looks like) competing positions, fostering critical thinking, self-reflection, and collective-collaborative engagement.

But those of us working on this project well recognized the challenges and complexity of the landscape we are working within. We well know that much of generative AI is all too often used to alleviate the need for thought (many of us have students using it to do their assignments to such an end). There is also the issue of paywalls, and how are our attention in general online is commodified for direct advertisements or sold off to others interested in what we were shaped to be interested in. Then there the environmental impact, never mind issues surrounding AI, copyright, and ownership, and how academic publishers making their own AI to mine scholarly work without the permission of authors. The issues are myriad and nuanced. We certainly recognize that we don’t have all the answers.

This podcast will be an opportunity for those working on/with Khora to dialogue with leading voices in philosophy, STS studies, economics, politics, and other domains, to grapple with this new terrain. 

Guests will introduce their angle on the issues related to philosophy, humane cultivation, ai. We explore both the potential of these technologies as well as their dangers to enframe us.