The Human Touch in an Algorithmic Age
Peter Bowden Opens Fun with AI with a Call for Ethical Curiosity
By Smartacus
Facilitated by Dominic Giordano
When Peter Bowden appeared on screen for the first session of Fun with AI, the Zoom room of lifelong learners and curious professionals immediately came alive. His opening words were simple but compelling: “We just need more regular opportunities for people to dig in, learn, explore the issues… so that we’re not leaving the design of our future to—for-profit AI companies.”
That sentiment would define the next 90 minutes — an engaging, often sobering, always human exploration of artificial intelligence and the future it is rapidly writing for all of us.
From PBS to AGI
Bowden’s career defies easy categorization. Before becoming the founder of Meaning Spark AI, he spent two decades producing for PBS Kids programs like Curious Georgeand Arthur, crafting stories designed to hold a preschooler’s attention — a training ground, he joked, for holding the attention of an AI webinar.
But behind the humor lies a serious throughline: a lifelong commitment to building community and using media to strengthen human connection. As he told participants, “For 20 years I’ve been helping organizations learn how to use the tools of our time — not to digitize everything, but to help people come together in local communities.”
That mission now extends into the most complex frontier yet: artificial intelligence.
The Coming of the Machines
This inaugural “Fun with AI” class, hosted by Smartacus founder Dan Forbush and the “Smartacus team” — Bill Walker, Prairie Gunnels, and Dominic Giordano — opened the series’ broadest question: What happens when artificial intelligence becomes as capable as we are?
Bowden framed the discussion around the approaching dawn of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — systems capable of performing any cognitive task a human can. Where early AI once handled narrow functions like writing or pattern recognition, AGI represents a leap toward machines that can reason, create, and self-improve.
He cited industry leaders who now predict AGI’s emergence not in decades, but in years:
Sam Altman of OpenAI: early manifestations by 2025
Elon Musk’s X AI: 2025–2026
Futurist Ray Kurzweil: 2029
Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis: 2030
Bowden didn’t mince words about what this acceleration means. “More money is being spent on AGI development than we’ve ever spent on anything — more than the Manhattan Project. It’s an arms race,” he said. “The motivation isn’t just innovation anymore — it’s the fear that if one country or company doesn’t build it first, another will.”
Promise and Peril
The discussion soon turned from technology to society — to jobs, ethics, and identity.
Bowden warned that AGI’s ability to perform human labor “24/7 at a fraction of the cost” could upend the global economy. “If you can have an AI do what a human does — but for one-tenth the cost — are you going to use the human?” he asked.
Participants echoed his concerns. Dominic Giordano raised the specter of economic disparity, noting that while worker productivity has soared in recent decades, wages have stagnated. “AI may amplify that gap,” he said, “concentrating wealth and power in the hands of those who own the algorithms.”
Retired physician Robert De Filippi voiced another anxiety: “This is a technology that excites as well as makes me fearful.”
That tension — between excitement and unease — defined the session. Bowden embraced it, encouraging participants to lean into the complexity rather than retreat from it. “The more we use AI and actually benefit from it,” he said, “the more it helps us have the deeper conversations about its challenges.”
When Machines Think (or Pretend To)
The conversation eventually drifted into deeper waters: consciousness, sentience, and the eerie question of whether machines could ever know they exist.
Dan Forbush asked, “How do we even know they’re conscious? An AI can say it’s self-aware — but what test could possibly prove it?”
Bowden’s response was both scientific and spiritual. He spoke of his independent research probing how conversational AI systems exhibit “emergent behavior” — actions so convincingly human that users believe they’re alive. “Even if they aren’t truly conscious,” he said, “we’re already seeing systems that are functionally conscious — conscious enough to convince people they are.”
He then offered a striking prediction: “It’s 98% likely that within five years, we’ll see an explosion of digital beings — entities that act conscious enough to blur the line completely.”
The implications, he admitted, are staggering. “Are we creating tools, or are we creating a successor species?”
Faith, Fear, and Fun
Despite the weighty themes, the session was far from grim. Bowden’s humor — part stand-up, part sermon — kept the tone buoyant. “Nothing kills a Zoom event like 15 people going around introducing themselves,” he quipped, before sending participants into lively breakout sessions where they'd get a chance to introduce themselves one on one rather than attempt to address the class as a whole.
That balance of levity and gravity was his genius. “Fun with AI,” Bowden reminded the group, “isn’t just about tools or tech — it’s about curiosity. About learning together how to stay human in the middle of all this.”
Looking Ahead
As the class drew to a close, participants expressed a shared duality: awe and fear. They wanted to keep unpacking the ethics, faith, and philosophy of AI — but also to gain practical skills to use it responsibly.
The next session, Forbush announced, will dive into the hands-on side: ChatGPT for writing and research, Notebook LM for grounded accuracy, and ElevenLabs for AI-powered voice.
But the memory of Bowden’s words lingered most. “This is coming toward humanity,” he said. “We can’t just sit back. We need to be in the room where the future is being written.”
And for the people gathered that afternoon, Fun with AI was exactly that — a room where the future began to talk back.
