World’s first podcast network✦ Established February 2005✦ Brisbane · Australia✦ Now hosting the shows Cameron co-hosts✦ Books · A film · 21 years of audio✦ World’s first podcast network✦ Established February 2005✦ Brisbane · Australia✦ Now hosting the shows Cameron co-hosts✦ Books · A film · 21 years of audio✦

Weekly Roundup · by Cameron Reilly

TPN Weekly Roundup — 2026-10-17

From Cameron

Yoohoo!

That’s my new nickname for Chrissy. Long story.

Hope you’re all safe, happy, and getting the most out of your life. Have I ever mentioned my TEN THINGS philosophy? I say “my” philosophy but I’m sure I stole it from someone a long time ago. Just can’t remember who.

I’ve been invited to speak to a group of Year 12 history students next week. Apparently their teacher was crazy enough to let them listen to some of our shows and they are preparing for an External Assessment on Cleopatra VII and she wants me to come and chat to them about it. She wrote: “Full disclosure: I’ve occasionally assigned your podcasts as “homework reading” this year. They’ve been a brilliant way of helping students develop a deeper contextual understanding of the personalities and events we’re studying. The only challenge was deciding which episodes were suitable for seventeen-year-olds and which were better reserved for my own commute. Let’s just say your talent for speaking candidly meant I had to exercise a degree of professional judgement before hitting the assign button!”

How can I turn down such an opportunity to further warp young minds?

I’m working on a couple of new fun projects. One of them is a short story about an AI that develops a new kind of physics that taps into the block universe and can tell someone their exact future. And what people might do with that. Kind of inspired by Heinlein’s “Life Line” short story that I recently read. But taking it further.

Another is a national ethics survey. I wrote a bit in The Psychopath Epidemic about how important it is for all of us to deeply think about our moral philosophy and why our values are what they are. I think better understanding this might help heal some of the divisions in society. The problem with all this moral philosophy stuff is – IT’S HARD. But we have AI to help us now, so I’m trying to build something that will guide people through thinking about ethics. Maybe nobody except me cares, but, as usual, I’m doing it to amuse and educate myself.

It came out of something I’ve been doing with AI for a few months that I call “The Ideas Game”. When I’m in the car or walking our part-time dog, I say “let’s play the ideas game” and my AI will start feeding my new ideas which might be life changing, or challenging my world view. It will give me one idea, explain it briefly, and then I can choose to drill down further or pass and it will give me another idea. These have been some of the most stimulating hours I’ve spent over the last few months. Some recent examples of ideas we’ve discussed:

  • Updateless Decision Theory and Newcomb’s Paradox: Why the most rational decision might depend on what a perfect predictor expects you to do, rather than conventional cause-and-effect reasoning.
  • Consciousness as an Interface: Donald Hoffman’s theory that evolution selected our perceptions for survival rather than truth, and that physical reality might be more like a user interface than an accurate picture of what’s actually there.
  • Literacy May Have Changed Human Consciousness: The possibility that widespread reading, particularly silent reading, fundamentally altered how humans experience their internal monologue and private thoughts.
  • AI and the Predictability of the Future: Whether sufficiently advanced AI could predict individual human behaviour with extraordinary precision, raising questions about determinism, causality and the block universe.
  • Molecular Manufacturing and Mechanosynthesis: Whether AI-guided molecular engineering could eventually enable atomically precise manufacturing, transforming materials science, medicine and industrial production.
  • Autonomous Scientific Discovery: AI agents connected to simulations and robotic laboratories could continuously generate hypotheses, conduct experiments and discover new scientific principles with minimal human intervention.
  • Why Advanced Alien Civilisations Might Be Invisible: The possibility that technological civilisations eventually become smaller, quieter and more computationally sophisticated rather than expanding across galaxies, potentially explaining the Fermi Paradox.
  • Collective Cellular Intelligence and Anthrobots: Michael Levin’s research suggesting that individual cells can cooperate to produce unexpected structures and behaviours, potentially opening a path towards programmable biological construction and tissue repair.
  • Plurality and AI-Assisted Collective Decision-Making: Using AI to identify common ground between people who disagree, aggregate preferences and help large populations reach decisions without requiring conventional majority-rule politics.
  • Identity as Prediction Rather Than Memory: The proposition that our sense of personal identity is primarily generated by the brain’s predictions about itself rather than a continuous autobiographical narrative. We abandoned this fairly quickly because you wanted to move beyond familiar consciousness questions.
  • Error Correction as the Foundation of Successful Societies: The idea that resilient societies, like biological systems and scientific institutions, succeed not by eliminating mistakes but by developing mechanisms to discover and correct them. Redundancy, disagreement and institutional friction may be essential rather than inefficient.
  • AI-Enabled Participatory Democracy: Whether local governments could use AI to help citizens formulate, simulate, debate and select public policies directly, reducing their dependence on elected representatives as intermediaries.
  • Disagreement as a Civilisational Asset: The proposition that political disagreement functions rather like an immune system, helping societies identify weaknesses and adapt. We explored historical examples including Rome, Venice and Switzerland.
  • The Swiss Model of Institutionalised Political Disagreement: How Switzerland’s federalism, direct democracy and power-sharing arrangements evolved, particularly following the Sonderbund War of 1847 and the federal constitution of 1848, and whether its political mechanisms offer a model for other democracies.

Try it out for yourself! And tell me the best ideas you come up with.

Cheers
C

My Thought For The Day

“All life thinks it is, but it is not. There are only particles, energy and space, and the laws of the machines.”

“Berserker”, Fred Saberhagen

Our TikTok of the Week

@tpnhistory

The Sicarii from Judea were the original Cloak-and-Dagger assassins. #judea jerusalem #messiah ancientrome

♬ original sound – Cam & Ray TPN History – Cam & Ray TPN History

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