{"id":228759,"date":"2026-01-10T22:38:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-11T04:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/eve-poole-on-robot-souls-junk-code-and-the-future-of-ai"},"modified":"2026-01-10T22:38:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T04:38:11","slug":"eve-poole-on-robot-souls-junk-code-and-the-future-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/eve-poole-on-robot-souls-junk-code-and-the-future-of-ai","title":{"rendered":"Eve Poole on Robot Souls, Junk Code and the Future of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/eve-poole-on-robot-souls-junk-code-and-the-future-of-ai.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Are we building AI that enhances humanity or a master race of beautifully optimized psychopaths?<\/p>\n<p>My latest Singularity. FM conversation with Dr. Eve Poole goes straight to the nerve:<\/p>\n<p>What makes us human, and what happens when we leave that out of our machines?<\/p>\n<p>Eve argues that the very things Silicon Valley dismisses as \u201cjunk code\u201d\u2014our emotions, intuition, uncertainty, meaning-making, story, conscience, even our mistakes\u2014aren\u2019t flaws in our design. They\u2019re the *reason* our species survived. And we\u2019re coding almost none of it into AI.<\/p>\n<p>The result? Systems with immense intelligence but no soul, no context, no humanity\u2014and therefore, no reason to value us.<\/p>\n<p>In this wide-ranging conversation, we dig into:<\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\udd39 Why the real hallmarks of humanity aren\u2019t IQ but junk code \ud83d\udd39 Consciousness, soul, and the limits of rationalist AI thinking \ud83d\udd39 Theology, capitalism &amp; tech: how we ended up copying the wrong parts of ourselves \ud83d\udd39 Why \u201calignment\u201d is really a parenting challenge, not a control problem \ud83d\udd39 What Tolkien, u-catastrophe, and ancient stories can teach us about surviving the future \ud83d\udd39 Why programming in humanity isn\u2019t for AI\u2019s sake\u2014it\u2019s for ours.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/eve-poole-on-robot-souls-junk-code-and-the-future-of-ai\">Continue reading \u201cEve Poole on Robot Souls, Junk Code and the Future of AI\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Are we building AI that enhances humanity or a master race of beautifully optimized psychopaths? My latest Singularity. FM conversation with Dr. Eve Poole goes straight to the nerve: What makes us human, and what happens when we leave that out of our machines? Eve argues that the very things Silicon Valley dismisses as \u201cjunk [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,6,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-robotics-ai","category-singularity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}