Understanding AI has is a recurrent challenge. Should we be afraid or more sanguine or some combination of the two?

Ben is a good person to talk to as he works in the front line of AI developments and is alert to the wonder and complexity of things. He found the Realisation Festival through the work of figures such as Iain McGilchrist and John Verveake and brings their insights to bear upon his work and sense of things.

In this conversation, he discusses his own story of moving from a mechanistic and reductive worldview towards one aware of phenomena such as emergence. He explores how notions of quality and the sacred have developed his engagement with the movements of affective altruism and transhumanism.

The Realisation Festival is held at St Giles House, Wimborne, the home of the Earls of Shaftesbury. The place is loaded with the history of social reform and philosophical innovation - not least when it comes to ideas that inspire our gathering. In this episode of the podcast, Mark Vernon talks with Esmé Partridge about one figure in particular.

The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, was born in the latter stages of the seventeenth century and seeded in his genius the genius of thinkers as diverse as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Adam Smith. During his own lifetime he was as well known as the British empiricist, who was his tutor.

So what were the ideas Shaftesbury extolled? How did he understand notions like beauty, truth and the good? Why did he reject Locke’s ideas about waste lands and the tabula rasa? And in what ways is Shaftestbury still shaping the political landscape today?

For more on Esmé’s work - https://www.esmelkpartridge.com/

For more on the festival - https://realisationfestival.com/

If politics is broken how might people rediscover agency? If capitalism favours the powerful are there alternative forms of power to be found? If life often feels fragmented how can the fractal become revelatory? And further: how might practises like improvisation and resources like spiritual traditions assist?

Indra Adnan explores these themes and more in conversation with Mark Vernon. Indra is a Co-Initiator and Founder of The Alternative which seeks to surface new ways of coming together. She is a regular contributor to the Realisation Festival and a member of the festival’s advisory committee.

Indra and Pippa Evans, who is one of the festival directors, will be hosting a local Realisation Festival gathering in Edinburgh on 17th May 2025, 3pm-6pm. For further details direct message Indra if you are on the festival group WhatsApp or email her at ia@thealternative.org.uk.

For more on The Alternative see https://thealternative.org.uk/.