S6.1 - ‘The People are the Superintelligence’: How AI affects political deliberation and democracy

This episode offers essential insights on the EU AI Act and what it means for the future of trustworthy AI. Our guests unpack the benefits and challenges of risk-based regulation, ethical guidelines, legal uncertainties and the dynamic relationship between innovation, regulation and human rights protection.

This episode takes listeners inside today’s AI-shaped university world. As our host and guest explore AI’s growing presence in teaching, learning and academic life, they open up crucial questions about creativity, writing, cognitive agency, digital competence and the future of our shared intellectual commons.

The opening episode features Audrey Tang in an inspiring conversation on how digital technology can empower people, bridge divides and renew democracy. Moving from fragmentation to common ground, it invites us to imagine AI as a tool for strengthening civic knowledge and collective wisdom. 

The series concludes with a timely episode on the vital role of young people in AI governance. Joined by two guests representing youth initiatives from Pakistan and the USA, we explore lived experiences, bold ideas and practical approaches for making AI a force for opportunity, inclusion and human dignity.

The series continues with a powerful conversation on AI, access and global inequality. Focused on the so-called digital divide and responses emerging across the Global Majority world, this episode asks how AI can help create a more inclusive, participatory future aimed at reducing inequalities rather than deepening them. 

We conclude the series with a powerful episode on memorialization in Bosnia and Herzegovina.The conversation explores how memorialization itself becomes a form of justice — preserving victims’ humanity, amplifying survivors’ voices, resisting genocide denial, and sustaining collective memory when legal justice remains incomplete.It reflects on how remembrance can serve as both healing and resistance, ensuring that truth endures even where accountability falls short.🎧 A closing reflection on memory, dignity, and the enduring pursuit of justice.

This episode explores how survivors and activists in Ireland are confronting institutional abuse through memorialization, legal action, education, and movement lawyering.By preserving truth, demanding accountability, and challenging state denial of human rights violations, survivors are transforming remembrance into resistance and advocacy into lasting change.The conversation highlights the power of collective action in the ongoing strugglefor justice, recognition, and human dignity.A compelling discussion on memory, accountability, and the fight against silence.

This episode highlights how the Mukwege Foundation and its survivor-led Red Lineinitiative are advancing a holistic, rights-based response to conflict-relatedsexual violence.By combining legal accountability, prevention, and survivor-centered support, theinitiative works to restore dignity, empower survivors, and strengthen pathwaysto justice that go beyond the courtroom.The conversation explores how survivor leadership is reshaping advocacy,challenging impunity, and building more inclusive systems of care and justice.A powerful discussion on dignity, resilience, and survivor-led change.

The series continues with a powerful episode exploring the Quipu Project and its workamplifying the voices of Peruvian women affected by forced sterilizations.Through storytelling and listening, personal testimonies become acts of resistance — transforming individual experiences into collective memory, recognition, and a wider struggle for justice and dignity beyond victimhood.This episode reflects on the power of survivors reclaiming their narratives and challenging silence through community, memory, and advocacy.A moving conversation on voice, memory, and the fight for justice.

What happens when surviving enforced disappearance becomes the spark for a global fight for justice?In the first episode of this series, Thomas Unger sits down with Ram Bhandari to explore how Ram’s experience of enforced disappearance in Nepal transformed into a lifelong commitment to human rights activism.From survivor-led solidarity networks to the growing crisis of impunity and shrinking civic space worldwide, this conversation shines a light on the urgent need for collective, victim-centered pathways to justice — and the work of Inovas in making them possible.A powerful conversation on resilience, solidarity, and the fight for accountability.