In the Driver's Seat: My Relationship with AI After Season One
S2 E1, a solo episode with host Mercy. Aug 23, 12 min.
Mercy opens with an idea from Season One guest Louise Humpington: AI as a mycelium network, a hidden, pervasive system connecting everyone, whether they realize it or not.
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About this episode
Before Season Two begins, she wanted to sit in that seat alone for a minute, as one node, and reflect. She traces her own relationship with AI from early curiosity, sparked by a coworker's AI-written poem, through a period of feeling overwhelmed, to something she now describes as cautiously optimistic, still curious, still paying attention to her own impact.
She also looks back across all eight Season One guests, each with a genuinely different relationship to the same technology, and previews the bigger, systemic questions Season Two will take on: data centers and the electric grid, who owns what AI helps create, who's accountable when AI causes harm, and what growing up with AI means for kids developing skills earlier generations built without it.
In her words
I would describe my relationship with AI as maybe me being in the driver's seat of a car.
Mercy
Key moments
- Louise's mycelium network idea, and why it inspired this solo reflection
- Mercy's own relationship with AI: curious, then overwhelmed, then cautiously optimistic
- A one-line look back at all eight Season One guests
- The bigger questions Season Two is set up to tackle
Resources mentioned
- BookUnmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini
A book on AI bias, particularly its impact on women with darker skin tones, that shaped Mercy's own thinking.
- DocumentaryThe AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
A 2026 documentary directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell that Mercy watched, giving her real pause on AI's broader societal impact.