Spiritual Misfits Podcast Can AI be ethical? Can it make us wise? (with Simon Buckingham-Shum)
Simon Buckingham-Shum is Professor of Learning Informatics and Director of the Connected Intelligence Centre at the University of Technology Sydney. Learn more: https://Simon.BuckinghamShum.net
Abundant Intelligences (Abundant-Intelligences.net): Indigenous knowledge systems provide a way to rebuild AI's epistemological foundations - transforming tools that currently reinforce colonial practices of extraction and exclusion into engines of abundance that enable us to care better for ourselves, our communities, and our world.
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti Brazilian/Canadian educator and researcher whose work invites a reckoning with the ontological assumptions driving systemic harm and extinction-level thinking. Author of the widely acclaimed "Hospicing Modernity" (2021) and more recent "Outgrowing Modernity" (2025). She has turned this scholarship to reframe AI within an ecological, relational ontology, aligned with many Indigenous knowledge systems. See Burnout From Humans (2024) and MetaRelational.AI.
In the podcast, Simon drew the parallel between the disposition that many of us in the Spiritual Misfits community bring to life’s questions and faith dilemmas, and the “meta-relational” disposition that Andreotti’s work calls us to bring to our planetary predicament, and AI specifically: "Meta-relationality is not a theory, but a practice of becoming-with. Of attuning to the fields we nest and are nested in. Of noticing the codes and the stories we carry, the systems we uphold, and the possibilities we’ve exiled. Of learning to hold space for complexity, plurality, tension, paradoxes and indeterminacy without turning away, throwing up, throwing a tantrum or throwing in the towel." https://metarelationaltech.ca/
Chatbots to Try:
Qreframer: Surfaces hidden assumptions behind your question and invites you to explore these, which may lead you to reframe your question
CoLearn: Walks you through guided conversation about anything you're learning, plus reflection on the quality of the conversation
ACI Designer: For challenges or ideas your group/organization is wrestling with - walks you through structured problem framing and solution exploration with emphasis on collective intelligence
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