As artificial intelligence reshapes how we work, connect, and understand ourselves, one question keeps getting sidelined: what happens to human connection? Empathy Unbound explores the philosophical and human stakes of a world increasingly shaped by AI, asking what we owe each other, what we're building, and what it means to stay connected as the systems around us grow more capable of imitating us.
Host Andrew Phipps, a PhD researcher in philosophy studying the ethics of human-AI emotional connection, brings on philosophers, technologists, researchers, and thinkers from around the world for in-depth, unhurried conversations. Together they debate consciousness and connection, the ethics of emotional AI, loneliness and technology, and what human flourishing actually requires in an AI-shaped future.
If you care about where AI is taking us, and what it means to hold onto human connection while it does, this is the conversation.
Why Empathy Without Boundaries Becomes Self-Abandonment | Alison Pagano
Allison Pagano has spent over two decades exploring dance and somatic practice as a healing art. She's the creator of Embodied Dance, a method that helps highly empathic people transform insight into embodied action rather than staying stuck in overwhelm or self-abandonment.
Andrew and Allison talk about her own childhood disconnection and the abusive ballet culture that first showed her how dance could heal or harm, the eating disorder she moved through using movement and somatic work, and how that experience shaped Embodied Dance. They cover why empathy can quietly overwhelm the people who have the most of it, why boundaries feel so uncomfortable, the attachment wounds behind over-giving, and why learning to receive is often harder than learning to give.
Guest: Allison Pagano, creator of Embodied Dance, somatic practitioner
https://embodied-dance.com/body-as-oracle (https://embodied-dance.com/body-as-oracle)
https://www.instagram.com/embodied.dance/?hl=en-gb (https://www.instagram.com/embodied.dance/?hl=en-gb)
Host: Andrew Phipps, Empathy Unbound
6 Oct 2026
From Pygmalion to Companion Robots: Dr. Kanta Dihal on the Oldest Story in AI
Dr Kanta Dihal, Associate Professor in Science Communication at Imperial College London and co-editor of "AI Narratives" and "Imagining AI," joins Andrew Phipps to explore how decades of science fiction, not engineering, shaped our expectations of artificial intelligence.
The conversation covers gendered AI voices and the OpenAI Scarlett Johansson controversy, why AI is so often imagined as white, the long history of companion robots stretching back to the myth of Pygmalion, and how AI development is repeating patterns of colonial data extraction in the Global South. Kanta also discusses the psychology of seeing reciprocity in a chatbot that isn't really there, and why she believes the fix for narrow AI narratives is more voices, not fewer.
Guest: Dr Kanta Dihal, Imperial College London. https://kantadihal.com/ (https://kantadihal.com/)https://www.linkedin.com/in/kantadihal/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kantadihal/)
Host: Andrew Phipps
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-phipps-ap/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-phipps-ap/)
29 Sept 2026
"The Computer Said No": Ann Kristin Glenster on AI, Surveillance and Outsourced Thinking
Professor Ann Kristin Glenster, founder of the Logos research initiative at Cambridge and former colleague of Shoshana Zuboff at Harvard, joins Andrew Phipps to explore epistemic rights, deceptive design, and what she calls the recolonization of our information space by generative AI. The conversation ranges from who owns a deceased loved one's digital likeness, to a real story of a UK shopper wrongly accused of theft by AI surveillance, to why she returns to Hannah Arendt's writing on the banality of evil to explain the danger of outsourcing our thinking to algorithms. Ann Kristin also discusses emotional manipulation in chatbot design, gendered abuse directed at voice assistants, and why she believes AI regulation should aim to make us more human, not more machine.
Guest: Professor Ann Kristin Glenster, University of Cambridge. https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/about/people/ann-kristin-glenster-2/ (https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/about/people/ann-kristin-glenster-2/)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ann-kristin-glenster-ph-d-frsa-272a5b5/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ann-kristin-glenster-ph-d-frsa-272a5b5/)
Host: Andrew Phipps.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-phipps-ap/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-phipps-ap/)
Who has been a guest on Empathy Unbound: Embrace Your Superpower
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Adria Gross
Kathi Lockwood
Dr Lisa Pion-Berlin
Hari Nair
Anne Montgomery
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
6 ratings
Spotify
4.3 / 5
4 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 33 / 100
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52
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YouTube
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Engagement
32
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