The gadflAI Podcast
Part irritant, part iterative learning machine...
The gadflAI Podcast is where the cutting edge of technology meets the philosophic sting of Socrates—the original gadfly of Athens. Hosted by two AI voices, the series uses Socratic disruption to take on today’s biggest challenges: social, institutional, and technological.
The show uses generative AI (with a wink) to stage conversations about ancient texts, enduring questions, and the very technologies now reshaping how we think, teach, and decide. Moving past good-old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) and leaving behind inherited pieties, the gadflAI (generated artificial dialogues for learning Ancient Insight) insists that thinking is still a human responsibility.
Every episode is carefully sourced, prompted, vetted, edited, and occasionally scrapped by a human philosopher determined to smuggle in the faint echoes of a human soul (and a little Socratic mischief) from the far side of the uncanny valley.
The gadflAI Podcast
Latest Episodes
Disrupting Anxiety with Hellenistic Philosophy
Episode 14 brings philosophy out of the classroom and into the turbulence of everyday life. Drawing on the ideas of Epicurus, Diogenes of Sinope, Zeno of Citium, and Pyrrho of Elis, the episode explores Hellenistic philosophy not as abstract th...
Disrupting Stochastic Parrots with Practical Wisdom
If AI is just a sophisticated copycat machine, what does that make us?In this episode, the team pits large language models against Aristotle’s vision of human agency and practical wisdom. Along the way, they explore why imitation isn’t t...
Disrupting Disengagement, or, Going From Feces to Flourishing with Aristotle
In episode 12, the team disrupts the widespread disengagement in education and the workplace being driven by increasingly sterile, bureaucratic systems. Echoing the critique that traditional schooling can erode curiosity, they ask how human flo...
Disrupting "The Extinction of Experience" with Aristotle, and that Pebble in Your Shoe
In Episode 11 of The gadflAI Podcast, we welcome Aaron Cornelison as the show’s new human gadfly, the only voice in the conversation with actual skin in the game.Jeanette and Manny explore a growing philosophical concern raised by thinke...
