Sep 14, 2026 · 8 min · 6 segments
What are we unwilling to automate away? In this wrap episode of Oxford+, host Susannah de Jager returns to the ten conversations that made up the Ethics and Innovation miniseries and draws out the…
Susannah de JagerHostAudrey Tang showed us how technology and innovation can strengthen democracy and collective intelligence rather than concentrate power.
I think people were collectively tired of the peak slump.
So across the world, we're seeing people's time, uh, engagement with their screen are, are all going down.
And so in this climate, it is perhaps not the best idea [laughs] to continue with this engagement baiting, rage baiting algorithm, because people are already being turned off by it.
Raphael Millot and Edward Harcourt asked deeper questions about intelligence, language, agency, and the human values we may fail to notice until technology begins to challenge them.
You can see infants, for example, babies trying to grab their feet and figuring out what's part of me, what's part of the external world.
All of this is happening before infants can speak.
So for a baby, it's only later in life that you start speaking and you start externalizing your feelings and your thoughts in language.
And for AI systems as we have them today, they start with the language.
My gut feeling is that we do need human contact.
That is something that we thrive on.
The co-presence of another human is special to us, and we're hardwired to see things that way.
Audrey Tang showed us how technology and innovation can strengthen democracy and collective intelligence rather than concentrate power.
I think people were collectively tired of the peak slump.
So across the world, we're seeing people's time, uh, engagement with their screen are, are all going down.
And so in this climate, it is perhaps not the best idea [laughs] to continue with this engagement baiting, rage baiting algorithm, because people are already being turned off by it.
Raphael Millot and Edward Harcourt asked deeper questions about intelligence, language, agency, and the human values we may fail to notice until technology begins to challenge them.
You can see infants, for example, babies trying to grab their feet and figuring out what's part of me, what's part of the external world.
All of this is happening before infants can speak.
So for a baby, it's only later in life that you start speaking and you start externalizing your feelings and your thoughts in language.
And for AI systems as we have them today, they start with the language.
My gut feeling is that we do need human contact.
That is something that we thrive on.
The co-presence of another human is special to us, and we're hardwired to see things that way.
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