The Human Psyche in the Machine Age w/ Glen Slater

If you’re like me, you can love technology and still worry about what it’s doing to us.

If that tension feels familiar, this episode is for you.

Today’s guest is Glen Slater, a Jungian psychologist and the author of Jung vs. Borg (as in cyborg).

This book completely blew my mind. It’s officially the most highlighted book in my Kindle.

It explores what increasingly feels like an inevitable trajectory: the deeper merging of human beings and machines, and what happens to the psyche as more of our attention, identity, and inner lives become mediated by technology.

On one hand, it’s one of the more unsettling books I’ve read. On the other, it’s one of the more hopeful, because Glen lays out a path for preserving the best parts of the human experience while using technology to expand consciousness (rather than diminish it).

In this conversation, we get into:

* What Jungian psychology can teach us about the digital age

* Why technology may be disrupting our “inner ecology”; meaning, emotion, imagination, embodiment, and self-knowledge

* Why technology is not neutral and how the tools we build can ultimately reshape us

* The myth of progress and why technological advancement alone does not guarantee human advancement

* Why embodiment may be essential to consciousness

* Whether AI itself could help us become more self-aware

This ended up being one of the most thought-provoking conversations I’ve had.

You’ll leave with a few potential answers to the core question we explore here on Dream Machines: how do we keep advancing technologically without losing the most nourishing parts of the human experience?

A thread we’ll continue to pull, together.

So with that, enjoy my conversation with Glen Slater.

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