In this Pod, we explore what should guide us when the line between impossible and ordinary keeps moving.

We can rewrite the DNA of an embryo. We can confide in our machines. We can keep a body breathing long after the mind is gone. We can train AI on someone who has died and hear their voice again. 

For a long time, the central question was what humans could do. Now the harder question is what we should do, and who gets to decide.

Humans have always reached beyond limits. Sometimes that reaching heals, frees, protects, and reveals what we could not see before. Sometimes it creates harm no one saw coming, power no one can control, or doors that cannot easily be closed.

Together, we’ll explore the pull between what is possible and what is wise and just. This is not a conversation about stopping progress. It is a conversation about how to choose well in a world where our tools and available options often move faster than our judgment.

Together, we'll explore a deeply human tension: curiosity, invention, and ambition on one side; humility, responsibility, and restraint on the other. The question is not only what future we can build, but whether it is a future we actually want to live in.

Preparation between sessions is designed to take under two hours. 

For this Pod, we will draw our conversation catalysts from the range of sources below, including poems, essays, short stories, memoir excerpts, visual art, and film or television. The final selections may shift slightly in response to the interests, questions, and energy of the group. 

The first session readings will be shared three weeks before the start of the Pod. 

Sources we'll draw from: 

• Aeschylus, excerpt from Prometheus Bound (play excerpt / myth) 

• Ovid, “Daedalus and Icarus,” selected passage from Metamorphoses (epic poem / myth) 

• Hesiod, excerpt from Works and Days on Pandora’s jar (epic poem / myth)

•  “The Golem of Prague” (folktale) 

• Mary Shelley, excerpt from Frankenstein (novel excerpt) 

• Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious” (short story)

• Isaac Asimov, “The Last Question” (short story) 

• Kurt Vonnegut, “Harrison Bergeron” (short story) 

• Ted Chiang, “What’s Expected of Us” (short story) 

• Ken Liu, “The Perfect Match” (short story) 

• William Blake, “The Tyger” (poem) 

• Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (poem) 

• Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Upon this age, that never speaks its mind” (poem) 

• Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (poem) 

• Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” (poem) 

• Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” (essay) 

• Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” (essay)

• Michael Sandel, “The Case Against Perfection” (essay)

• Rachel Carson, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” from Silent Spring (book excerpt) 

• C. S. Lewis, excerpt from The Abolition of Man (essay / book excerpt) 

• Hannah Arendt, prologue from The Human Condition (philosophy / book excerpt) 

• Wendell Berry, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” (essay) 

• Ursula Franklin, excerpt from The Real World of Technology (lecture / essay) 

• Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (essay) 

• Bill McKibben, excerpt from Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (essay / book excerpt) 

• Carl Sagan, “Pale Blue Dot” (essay / short reflection) Dario Amodei, “Machines of Loving Grace” (essay)

• Reporting on He Jiankui and the first gene-edited babies (article / journalism) 

• Human Nature (documentary film)

•  Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (documentary film) 

• The Twilight Zone, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” (television episode) 

• Radiolab, “CRISPR” (podcast episode)