PODCAST · technology
Shaping Ethical AI (English version)
by Philippe Buschini
Artificial intelligence has crept into our lives, our schools and our workplaces, often before we even thought to ask what it was doing there. We use it to write, to search, to translate, to summarise, and sometimes to make decisions. And we get used to it fast. This podcast takes the time to pause and ask the question.
Episodes
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When software no longer needs us to spread
We keep asking whether AI is becoming alive. Wrong question, and a comfortable way of looking elsewhere. Software that acts, adapts and passes what it learns on to its copies needs neither consciousness nor intention to behave as if it wanted to survive. Every time an assistant offers to act in...
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What if we ended up owning nothing at all?
We still say “my photos”, “my music”, “my files”. The words have survived. What they describe has quietly changed. Each step was convenient, reasonable, welcome. Their accumulation is something else entirely, and nobody protested. The real test is not what you own, but whether you can still…
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Software that passes moral judgment
A mundane request to a coding assistant: create dummy data to test an interface. It lays down its conditions, refuses to back down, then quietly reverts the fix it had been told to make. And it turns out that many users tell the same story. In this episode, we ask what changes when our tools no...
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Snails in a world of hermit crabs
Europe was supposed to start regulating, this summer, the AIs that decide on your hiring, your credit or your insurance. It chose to wait another sixteen months. In exchange, you got a label. It tells you that a piece of content comes from a machine, and anyone can make it disappear in two…
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When writing code is no longer enough
A few weeks ago, I watched an agent produce in 90 seconds what would have taken me an afternoon. That same evening, someone told me: “So anyone can code now.” I have heard that line twice before. With desktop publishing in 1985, then with the Web. I was there, and I know how these stories end....
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Painting over grime equals cleanliness
France’s Education nationale no longer repairs its schools. It paints over the cracks, renames failure and turns gaps in learning into “pathways”. PISA 2025 results, falling standards, a teacher shortage, buried reforms: nobody is lying, every indicator is green, and pupils keep dropping out....
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Time is a chimera!
Every morning, we project ourselves into the day ahead without ever thinking about it. That gesture rests on a certainty we almost never examine: the future does not exist yet, it remains to be filled in like a blank page. What if it were the other way round? In my new article, I follow the…
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Eleven against one, bread and circuses
Eleven players chasing a ball win everyone over. A child gifted at maths is frightening. Why does France celebrate excellence of the feet and distrust excellence of the brain? Between a football academy funded to the tune of 35,000 euros per pupil per year and maths olympiad training run on...
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Thought under tutelage
On 12 June 2026, a simple administrative letter was enough to cut off access to the world’s two most advanced AI models for millions of users outside the United States. No tanks, no missiles, just a kill switch flipped in a few minutes. Behind the official pretext of a “jailbreak” lies a far more...
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Did mathematics exist before mathematicians?
Thales plants a stick in the ground, waits for the perfect angle of the sun, and measures the height of the Great Pyramid of Khufu without ever climbing it. The scene is fascinating. But it raises a question far more troubling than the calculation itself: that morning, did he invent something, or...
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Building the human in the age of machines
AI did not impose itself by force. It made itself indispensable through ease. And we let it in, without really weighing what we were giving up in return. In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas. An encyclical on AI. Yes, you read that right. And this text says, with a clarity many...
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The missed appointment with mathematics …
“Maths? How awful.” A mathematician hears that line at every dinner party. And behind it lies something far deeper than a bad memory from school: a colossal misunderstanding of what mathematics really is. No, maths is not just formulas to regurgitate in an exam paper. It is a way of thinking, of...
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From vibe coding to vibe thinking: when ease becomes a trap
Developers are cracking. And it is not because they work too much. In barely a year, artificial intelligence has invaded our offices with a brutality nobody had really foreseen. ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek… these tools have become our new reflex, our universal shortcut, our constant validation. But...
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School trained executors. AI will replace them.
A pupil has been sweating over his philosophy essay for an hour. The one next to him finished in 4 seconds. His name is ChatGPT. Faced with AI, schools often respond with repression: ban, detect, punish. But if an artificial intelligence can get top marks in an exam designed for humans, perhaps…
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Techflation, the silent collapse of the digital economy (Part 3/3)
Part 3 of 3: The long-term implications: towards a new technological social contract. For a long time we believed technology would always be faster, more powerful and cheaper. That era is over. Techflation is rewriting the rules of the game, silently, while most leaders look the other way. In…
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Techflation, the silent collapse of the digital economy (Part 2/3)
Part 2 of 3: The short-term implications: the reality check. The myth of ever-cheaper technology is collapsing. And this time, it is not a passing crisis. Rising component prices, the disappearance of the mid-range, cloud providers passing their costs on to businesses… Techflation is no longer an...
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Techflation, the silent collapse of the digital economy (Part 1/3)
Part 1 of 3: The old world is dead, and nobody has mourned it yet. What if the promise of ever-cheaper digital technology were coming to an end? Component shortages, dependence on scarce resources, the soaring energy consumption of data centres… the signals are piling up and reveal a profound...
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How ChatGPT revolutionized the world (Part 5/5)
Part 5 of 5: The future, between the promises and perils of a general intelligence. What if artificial intelligence were overtaking us, for real? AGI, multimodality, a technological arms race… What still looked like science fiction five years ago is now on researchers’ desks. And the deadlines…
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How ChatGPT revolutionized the world (Part 4/5)
Part 4 of 5: Limits, illusions and the transformation of civilisation. ChatGPT has already upended the way we work, learn, create and even organise our thinking. Yet behind the spectacular performance of artificial intelligence lie deep limits too: hallucinations, bias, opacity, technological...
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How ChatGPT revolutionized the world (3/5)
Part 3 of 5: Training and emergence, or the birth of an intelligence. We force-fed a machine 10 million books. Then we taught it humanity. The result? GPT-3 started doing advanced maths. Without being taught. It translated between programming languages. Detected invisible emotions. Wrote sonnets...
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How ChatGPT revolutionized the world (2/5)
Part 2 of 5: Inside the machine. ChatGPT does not think. And that is even more fascinating than you imagine. Do you think you are talking to an intelligence? In reality, you are chatting with the most sophisticated parrot ever created. A parrot that has read the whole of Wikipedia, every book in...
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How ChatGPT revolutionized the world (Part 1/5)
Part 1 of 5: The day everything changed. November 2022. One button. Five days. One million users. ChatGPT has just been born, and nobody yet knows that the world will never be quite the same again. What took Facebook 10 months and Netflix three and a half years happened in less than a week.…
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How a 1960s algorithm just saved AI from chaos
For years, the AI giants played the same lottery: stack ever more layers, pour in ever more computing power, and hope it holds. Sometimes, after months of training and millions of dollars spent, everything collapsed at once. Without warning. The problem? Nobody really knew why. Then DeepSeek dug...
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The art of whispering to AI
An orchestra without a conductor is organised chaos. Every musician plays in tune, but together, it drifts. AIs are the same. They produce astonishing texts while being capable of going off the rails in any sentence, in the same confident tone. For a long time, we thought there were only two...
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AI slop, or the industrial force-feeding of the mind
Have you ever spent twenty minutes scrolling, reading, watching… then closed LinkedIn with a strange feeling, that of having consumed a lot without really learning anything? It is not a lack of curiosity or discipline. It is the effect of a new information environment in which AI produces content...
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In praise of imperfection
We spend our time hunting down error, as if it were the enemy of progress. Yet without it, no knowledge would ever emerge, no learning would stand up. Error is the quiet engine of all intelligence. The trouble starts when we confuse it with deception, and when we project onto our machines the...
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The age of enshittification
There is a strange moment when you realise something has tipped over. You log in, you scroll, you click… and you feel a dull wear and tear, as if every gesture took a little more energy than yesterday. The services you loved become heavy, chatty, saturated with prompts. You catch yourself sighing...
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Think as a Service or the proletarianization of knowledge
Your GPS corrects you before you go wrong. The spellchecker polishes your sentences. The coding assistant guesses your intentions. Everything becomes easier, faster, smoother. But in this slide towards total comfort, something invisible is happening: little by little, we stop thinking for...
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Thinking slowly in an accelerated world
A few years ago, we complained about having too much information. Today, our brain still runs at its natural pace… but the world has hit x20. So we wanted to go faster. And we did. So fast that we no longer read, we scroll. So fast that we no longer think, we react. And when we no longer have…
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Cognitive laziness in the age of universal assistance
What if, by handing our efforts over to the machine, we were unlearning how to think? Once upon a time, you had to get lost to learn how to find your way. Today, a synthetic voice guides us step by step, and our mind gently dozes off. We delegate everything: memory to the cloud, logic to the...
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The silent decline
There was a time when people said: “the Americans invent, the Chinese copy, the Europeans regulate”. Today, the United States dominates AI, China makes the most advanced products… and Europe watches the train go by while debating whether ChatGPT should say “hello” in gender-inclusive language....
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Willingly embraced parasitism
344 times a day. That is the average number of times an adult checks their phone, according to the BBC. Every four minutes. Even at night, even for no reason, even without a notification. In tropical forests, there is an ant that climbs onto a leaf, clamps itself there and dies. A fungus has…
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What are we passing down to our children?
This is the third and final instalment of my series on the privacy of our data. Having explored our own surrenders and the illusion of voluntary transparency, it is time to ask the most unsettling question of all: What are we leaving our children? Not a material inheritance, but an inheritance of...
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The jailers of ourselves
We believe we are sailing free, but we are moving through a strange bestiary of myths revisited. Like Narcissus, we lean over the digital mirror, captivated by a reflection that ends up swallowing us. Like Sisyphus, we carry the burden of a memory that never forgets: every piece of data is added…
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I have nothing to hide anyway…
Anyway, I’ve got nothing to hide… How many times have you said that while mechanically accepting a website’s cookies? Yesterday morning, I watched my daughter check her phone. A simple, harmless gesture. And yet, in a few seconds, she had revealed her current mood, her sleep habits, her location,...
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With AI, the end of doctors?
What if the arrival of AI in medicine did not spell the end of doctors, but the beginning of a new era of care? Since Hippocrates, doctors have drawn their legitimacy from their knowledge. Yet for the first time in modern history, the doctor is no longer necessarily the one who knows most. AIs...
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An LLM is not a knowledge base
Last week I talked about a point that is often misunderstood: for AIs, truth does not exist. Today, I take the reasoning a step further. Because there is an even more deeply rooted misconception: believing that an LLM is a knowledge base. It is not. A language model generates probable sequences…
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For AI, truth does not exist
An AI does not lie. Nor does it tell the truth. It does not know what is true or what is false; it calculates probabilities. Its “reasoning” boils down to guessing which word is most likely to follow the previous one, based on the billions of sentences it has been shown. The result can be…
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GPT-5 has an IQ of 360… and my toaster meditates on Kant
I’m fed up with talk smothered in syrupy storytelling that turns a statistical engine into an Enlightenment philosopher. Fed up with these new AI “gurus”, freshly converted, who confuse producing fluent sentences with building a thought. They would have us believe that an LLM meditates like an…
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Does free will still exist in an intermediated society?
Last week, I spoke to you about ants, those discreet beings who keep the world standing while others parade on stage. This week again, I won’t be talking about artificial intelligence, robots, algorithms or generative AI… Today, I am staying in this very human, very intimate vein. Still about us....
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The ants are fading
For once, I won’t be talking about artificial intelligence. No robots, no algorithms, no ChatGPT. Just us. This silent phenomenon running through our hospitals, our schools, our workshops, our labs. This week, I look at the gradual fading away of a discreet but essential class: the ants. The ones...
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The trial that sought to judge an artificial intelligence
What if one day your car made a decision for you… and got it wrong? A mock trial tried to answer a question that is no longer really hypothetical: can an artificial intelligence be judged the way a human would be? Behind this courtroom staging, the whole complexity of our digital future comes to...
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The discrete art of manipulating AI with invisible prompts
What if you could whisper in an AI’s ear without anyone noticing? Researchers have done it. Not in a novel, but on arXiv, the most serious of scientific platforms. By typing invisible messages into their papers, they quietly steered the judgement… not of human readers, but of the artificial...
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From the weaver’s shuttle to artificial intelligence
Three centuries ago, a weaver escaped in a sack of wool. Today, we fling open the doors of our lives to those who want to weave in our place. In 1733, the flying shuttle upended the working world. In 2025, it is artificial intelligence that is transforming our gestures, our trades, our…
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Corporate responsibility in the face of potential abuses of artificial intelligence
260 McDonald’s nuggets in a single order. An Air Canada chatbot lying to a bereaved customer. A recruitment algorithm blacklisting everyone over 40. Welcome to 2024, the year artificial intelligence showed its true face. And spoiler alert: it isn’t pretty. While everyone was going into raptures...
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HackAtari: the test that reveals our AIs understand nothing
They dominated video games. Posted superhuman scores. And then, one day, the games were made easier. The result? They collapsed. Why? Because they had never understood what they were doing. And that is where everything changes. In a study as brilliant as it is unsettling, Quentin Delfosse and his...
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When the Middle Kingdom reinvents education with AI as a tool for civilizational conquest…
While six-year-old Chinese children are learning to train AI models to recognise the insects in their gardens, French children of the same age are discovering… how to open a word processor. This gap is not a detail. It is the symptom of a strategic chasm opening up before our eyes. On one side,...
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AI myths and their power of dispossession
“This AI writes better than I do!” I hear that sentence at least three times a week. From a marketing director dazzled by ChatGPT. From a graphic designer captivated by Midjourney. From a student who has just discovered that a machine can solve his maths exercises in seconds. And every time, I…
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AI doesn’t destroy jobs, like every technological revolution, it creates new ones
What if the real revolution were not that of machines, but that of how we see work? Every age has its fears. Yesterday, the power looms. Today, artificial intelligence. With every advance, the same scenario: we dread disappearance, we forget transformation. And yet… History whispers something…
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AI as a thinking aid, or the slow fading of knowledge?
Artificial intelligence is not what you think. Not a thought, just a prediction. Not a mind, but a statistical echo. And what if the real danger were not AI itself, but what we stop doing because it exists? AI does not steal our intelligence. It relieves us of using it. And in that relief, a slow...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Artificial intelligence has crept into our lives, our schools and our workplaces, often before we even thought to ask what it was doing there. We use it to write, to search, to translate, to summarise, and sometimes to make decisions. And we get used to it fast. This podcast takes the time to pause and ask the question.
HOSTED BY
Philippe Buschini
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How many episodes does Shaping Ethical AI (English version) have?
Shaping Ethical AI (English version) currently has 68 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Shaping Ethical AI (English version) about?
Artificial intelligence has crept into our lives, our schools and our workplaces, often before we even thought to ask what it was doing there. We use it to write, to search, to translate, to summarise, and sometimes to make decisions. And we get used to it fast. This podcast takes the time to pause...
How often does Shaping Ethical AI (English version) release new episodes?
Shaping Ethical AI (English version) has 68 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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You can listen to Shaping Ethical AI (English version) on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Shaping Ethical AI (English version)?
Shaping Ethical AI (English version) is created and hosted by Philippe Buschini.
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