In every age, humans have questioned what separates us from animals, machines, and each other. In this episode, Angus Hervey and Ada Palmer explore our changing ideas of consciousness and intelligence. From Descartes and religion to Astro Boy and the futures we once imagined, this conversation connects our history of consciousness with today's AI debate.

In this conversation:

• What Descartes would make of artificial intelligence?
 • Why Japan gave Astro Boy a birth certificate?
 • What Ada's science fiction epic, Terra Ignota, got right about AI
 • And is consciousness really a yes-or-no question?

 
Timestamps:

00:54 What Descartes would say if you gave him Claude?

04:51 How our theories of consciousness have changed history

09:22 How Astro Boy influenced Silicon Valley

11:16 The history of Manga

19:12 Do you need to be alive to be conscious?

21:50 What Aristotle got right in defining the differences between things

24:37 Appetites. Passions. Reason.

29:32 The religious debate - Body v The Soul

32:10 Dante’s Inferno unlocked

34:24 Our history of monsters

36:49 The Empathy Sphere

41:08 The Power of Science Fiction

42:37 What Ada’s novel 'Terra Ignota' reveals about consciousness, rights and intelligence

45:18 Our desire for First Contact

47:08 How the future failed us in the year 2000

53:09 What Montaigne learned from concussion

01:00:32 Final Thoughts

 
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Production credits:
Hosted by Angus Hervey and Ada Palmer
Produced by Amy Davoren-Rose, Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 In this episode, Angus and Ada explore the first great information revolution - from Machiavelli hiding The Prince and Leonardo da Vinci’s coded notebooks to the printing press, censorship, and Shakespeare’s anxieties about misinformation.

In this episode: 

·      Is fake news really new?

·      What happens when information suddenly becomes available to everyone?

·      Why do new technologies amplify both progress and extremism?

·      Are social media and the internet following a familiar historical pattern?

·      And… what does fruit have to do with democracy?

From Renaissance Florence to modern algorithms, this conversation reveals how societies adapt to upheaval - and why history may offer clues for navigating today’s information chaos. Because the world doesn’t get saved once. It gets saved - again and again.

Timestamps: 

00:50 Why Machiavelli hid The Prince
 03:48 Why Leonardo wasn’t really a scientist
 06:37 The printing press changes everything
 12:48 “Children of gold, parents of iron”
 19:36 What social media has in common with the Renaissance
 23:09 Why censorship rarely works
 30:21 Is change actually accelerating?
 35:15 The case for free speech
 38:27 The strange reason cantaloupe helped spark revolution 

48:51 Democracy, experts & the future

Subscribe & follow:
If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review - it helps more people find these stories.

Production credits:
Hosted by Angus Hervey and Ada Palmer
Produced by Amy Davoren-Rose, Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

Part conversation, part historical deep dive, this series reveals history not as a timeline of collapse, but as a story of human ingenuity, adaptation, and resilience.Because if you read history closely enough, you start to see it differently. 
The world doesn’t just break.
It changes.
It adapts.
It gets saved - again and again.