"Can does not imply should."

That one line from Dr Simon Longstaff cuts to the heart of everything wrong with how the tech industry is currently building AI. The Executive Director of The Ethics Centre and one of Australia's most respected moral philosophers joins Georgie for a conversation that is equal parts grounding and mind-expanding, and one of the most important episodes the show has produced.

Simon's path to becoming Australia's foremost ethics expert is not what you would expect. He left school at 16, cleaned toilets on a remote island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, drove ambulances, became a paramedic and fire officer, and was eventually adopted by one of the clans of the Anindilyakwa people. It was at the end of a ship loading wharf that an indigenous elder taught him something about seeing patterns in the world, a lesson he has carried through 35 years of philosophical work and only recently realised had shaped everything.

In this episode he unpacks why ethics is not an optional extra bolted onto technology but the foundation it has to be built on, why the pharmaceutical approval model could be the blueprint for governing AI, and why "necessary fictions" mean that CEOs deploying AI are responsible for outcomes they literally cannot understand. He also makes the case that the coming wave of job displacement does not have to be a catastrophe, and explains what ancient Athens and pre-colonial Indigenous life have to do with universal basic income.