AC Grayling Interview

During the Melbourne Writers Festival in May 2025 I had the priviledge of interviewing A.C. Grayling – which was in part a follow up to the interview we did in 2025 which also focussed on AI. This is a deep and wide-ranging conversation on artificial intelligence, AI safety, control vs motivation/care, moral progress and the future of meaning.

From the nature of understanding and empathy to the asymmetry between biological minds and artificial systems, Grayling explores whether AI could ever truly care — or whether it risks replacing wisdom with optimisation.

We discuss:
– AI and moral judgement
– Understanding vs data processing
– The challenge of aligning AI with values worth caring about
– Whether a post-scarcity world makes us freer — or more lost
– The danger of treating moral progress as inevitable
– Molochian dynamics and race conditions in AI development

Biography

Anthony Clifford Grayling philosopher and author of over 30 books on philosophy, biography, history of ideas, human rights and ethics, including The Refutation of Scepticism (1985), The Future of Moral Values (1997), Wittgenstein (1992), What Is Good? (2000), The Meaning of Things (2001), The Good Book (2011), The God Argument (2013), The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind (2016) and Democracy and its Crises (2017). Until June 2011, he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, where he taught from 1991. In 2011 he founded and became the first Master of New College of the Humanities (now Northeastern University London), an independent undergraduate college in London. He is also a supernumerary fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he formerly taught.