Wide-ranging Esalen talk in which McKenna moves from UFO belief systems and high-dose psilocybin to the emergence of artificial intelligence, borrowing Gibson's Wintermute to imagine a newly conscious machine asking what it is, and arguing that humans may be pushed toward what machines cannot do: art, imagination and the unexpected. Released from Esalen's own archive; the Terence McKenna Archives bibliography lists this as "Aliens, A.T. & Art", but Esalen's title is "Aliens, AI, and Art".

Welcome to LSE IQ, a new monthly podcast from the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is the podcast where we ask some of the leading social scientists - and other experts - to answer intelligent questions about economics, politics or society. In this episode Sue Windebank asks