Jeff Sebo on AI Welfare Research and Policy | McGill PTP Ep. 5
Maryna Nekrasova speaks with Jeff Sebo (New York University) ahead of his lecture at the Lab.
Sebo argues that whether AI systems could have morally significant interests is not a question only for the distant future: given how much is unsettled about consciousness, sentience, and agency, a near-term possibility can't be ruled out, and that is enough to warrant research and policy now. The conversation covers two routes to moral status, why AI systems should express uncertainty about their own consciousness rather than deny it, and where AI welfare and AI safety pull apart.
Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU, director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection and the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy, and author of The Moral Circle (2025).
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24 May 2026
Indigenizing Technology | McGill PTP Ep. 4
Alex Carty speaks with Robbie Dillon about his essay "Indigenizing Technology."
Indigenous communities face a double bind: adopting modern technology invites charges of inauthenticity, while rejecting it confirms a settler narrative of peoples stranded in the past. Dillon argues that the assumption underlying both charges — that Indigenous peoples are somehow anti-technological — is false. What reads as resistance to technology is instead a different metaphysics of humans and the natural world: relational rather than one of dominion.
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24 May 2026
The Metaphysics of Slowrunning in Video Games | McGill PTP Ep. 3
Rad Ameresekere interviews Alex Carty about his essay "A Theory of Slowrunning."
Speedrunning has drawn philosophical attention; playing to prolong a game rather than finish it has drawn almost none. Extending Daniel Muñoz's treatment of speedrunning — and Bernard Suits's account of games as voluntarily overcoming unnecessary obstacles — Carty argues that slowrunning is a distinct activity played against the same framework, and that it differs from idling, since the slowrunner still engages the game's obstacles. Detours, hesitation, and NPC dialogue that a speedrunner skips become sites of aesthetic value.
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24 May 2026
AI, Data Sovereignty, and Global Power | McGill PTP Ep. 2
Alex Carty speaks with Rad Ameresekere about his essay "When Technology Governs Across Borders Without Law."
Digital technologies are typically regarded as products we can opt into or out of. Ameresekere argues they are better understood as forms of governance: firms set the terms of speech, information, and data storage for whole populations without the authorization states require. Anywhere an institution exercises power over the people it governs, he argues, it owes them a justification — and firms are not currently held to that standard.
A podcast from the McGill Philosophy, Technology & Policy Lab.
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23 May 2026
The Crisis of Human Labor and AI | McGill PTP Ep. 1
Alex Carty speaks with John Bollinger about his essay "The Final Abstraction: Artificial Intelligence and the Crisis of Human Labor."
Husserl's 1935 Crisis lectures diagnosed a science whose abstractions had detached from the ground of lived human meaning. Bollinger argues that AI is the culmination of that process — the final abstraction — and that, as with the atomic bomb, it is being developed without the kind of collective deliberation the stakes would seem to demand. The question that dominates instead is whether rivals will get there first. Bollinger also argues that AI is unlike earlier labour-saving technology, which raised efficiency and displaced workers as a side effect. Instead, AI is built to do the labour itself.
A podcast from the McGill Philosophy, Technology & Policy Lab.
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