Sam Altman - The Man Creating Our Cognitive Future - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Sam Altman - The Man Creating Our Cognitive Future

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

What happens when machines stop waiting for input and begin to anticipate you? In this episode, we unpack Sam Altman’s TED2025 conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson—not to debate AI’s dangers or promises, but to trace what it reveals about authorship, memory, agency, and power. This is not just about a future we are building. It’s about a system we’re already inside.

AI is no longer framed as tool, but as presence. A memory that accumulates. A voice that preempts. As Bernard Stiegler wrote, technics are not just extensions of the body—they are prosthetics of memory. And in this episode, memory becomes infrastructure. Through Altman’s calm precision, we hear not certainty but recursion—echoes of Simone Weil’s claim that attention is an act of devotion, and Hannah Arendt’s insistence that every birth is a beginning of a new world, whether we intend it or not.

The episode also surfaces contradictions between openness and control, ambient design and algorithmic authorship. As Byung-Chul Han warns, transparency can flatten trust into performance. And Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us that contradiction is not a flaw—it is the texture of reality. This episode listens for the textures Altman doesn’t name, but performs: recursion, proximity, the ambient structure of systems that speak before we do.

Why Listen?

• Explore AI as atmosphere, not interface
• Understand how memory, trust, and agency are being restructured
• Hear Altman’s own words—with quote fidelity—against deep theory
• Engage thinkers from Weil to Moten, Virilio to Simondon

Further Reading

As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links.

• Technics and Time, 1 by Bernard Stiegler — On how tools shape memory and temporality. Amazon link
• The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt — On action, natality, and the ethics of futurity. Amazon link
• The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han — A short, devastating critique of algorithmic culture. Amazon link
• In the Break by Fred Moten — On Black performance, improvisation, and contradiction. Amazon link

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Bibliography 

• Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Altman, Sam. “OpenAI's Sam Altman Talks the Future of AI, Safety and Power — Live at TED2025.” Interview by Chris Anderson. TED, April 11, 2025. Transcript via DownSub.com.
• Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.
• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. In Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
• Han, Byung-Chul. The Transparency Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
• Jasanoff, Sheila. “Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science.” Minerva 41, no. 3 (2003): 223–244.
• Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
• Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017.
• Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
• Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006.
• Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.