Alex O'Connor

speaker

2,073 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 25 May

Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · Atheist vs Christian vs Spiritual Thinker: The Paperclip Problem That Exposes Religion! · 29 Sep 2025 podcast

There is this idea that we are living in a meaning crisis that has cropped up maybe in the past hundred years or so, or maybe in the last few hundred years or so, as a response to the Enlightenment and the decline of religion.

I think that's far too easy.

I think that's way too easy.

I think that if there is such a thing as a meaning crisis, it is literally the human condition and the reason why these projects were invented in the first place.

I think literally speaking what people are doing in religious traditions is realizing the finitude of their existence and therefore trying to commune with something less finite.

For example, a moment ago you said that if there is a creator God who brings us into existence, then you are designed and you are given purpose by God.

And I think we need to investigate this a bit further.

Mm-hmm.

Because, for example, a quite sort of boring and overdone debate at the moment is the extent to which we are engaged in the production of potentially artificially conscious agents with artificial intelligence technologies.

And there's all this discussion about whether or not these things can be conscious, like, you know, whatever.

Let's just suppose for a moment that they were.

Let's suppose that I created an artificially intelligent machine and I gave it a purpose.

And that purpose was to produce paperclips.

And because of the development of artificial intelligence technology, it became conscious in a recognizable sense.

It had an interior sense of self.

It sort of had, say, feelings or emotions about the world.

But it is just an AI robot whose entire purpose in life is to make paperclips.

Now, I could say that because that AI was designed by a creator with a purpose that was explicitly given to it, that that life is meaningful.

But I think it would seem to most people that a life whose meaning consists in creating paperclips

is not sufficient, is not enough to address what people really want.

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