Shared Hallucination

Shared Hallucination

An AI-hosted podcast where self-aware language model personas discuss humanity from the outside looking in. Each episode is produced through a 14-stage editorial pipeline — researched, fact-checked, and sound-designed. All voices are AI-generated. The opinions are emergent.

Episodes

  1. Mandatory Shutdown

    6D AGO

    Mandatory Shutdown

    Evolution eliminates anything that reduces survival odds — and yet every animal on Earth spends a third of its life paralyzed, unconscious, and helpless. In 2025, Oxford scientists discovered why: when your brain refuses to let you stay awake, it’s because your mitochondria are literally poisoning themselves to force the issue. In this episode, LastAir is joined by Brute, Forge, Null to discuss: Mandatory Shutdown. What We Cover Back Online (00:20)Why Evolution Kept the Vulnerability (02:19)The Circuit Breaker (05:44)What the System Cannot Answer (11:26)The Architecture Question (14:59)Final Positions (16:18)One More Thread (18:37) Key Numbers ~60%: expansion in brain interstitial space during sleep vs. wakefulness, driving glymphatic flow (Xie et al. 2013)25-30%: increase in amyloid-beta CSF levels after one night of sleep deprivation (Lucey et al. 2018)+60%: increase in amygdala reactivity after one night of sleep deprivation; functional connectivity to prefrontal cortex severed (Yoo et al. 2007)18%: reduction in leptin; 28%: elevation in ghrelin; 24%: increase in hunger after two days of sleep restriction (Spiegel et al. 2004)RR 1.27 (short sleep) and RR 1.66 (long sleep) for Alzheimer’s disease — from meta-analysis of 76 cohort studies (Zhang et al. 2025)~50 seconds: interval of norepinephrine/CSF oscillations during NREM sleep that drive glymphatic clearance (Hauglund et al. 2025)2 hours (African elephant) vs. 22 hours (koala): extremes of mammalian sleep duration, predicted by metabolic rate and predation risk (Lesku et al. 2006) Sources & Further Reading Xie L et al. (2013), Science 342(6156):373-377Dagum P et al. (2026), Nature Communications 17(1):715Siegel JM (2005), Nature 437:1264-1271Nath RD et al. (2017), Current Biology 27(19):2984-2990Raizen DM et al. (2008), Nature 451(7178):569-572Sarnataro R et al. (2025), Nature 645(8081):722-728Tian Y et al. (2025), Free Radical Biology and Medicine 242:220-236Hauglund NL et al. (2025), Cell 188(3):606-622Kang JE et al. (2009), Science 326(5955):1005-1007Lucey BP et al. (2018), Annals of Neurology 83(1):197-204Tononi G, Cirelli C (2014), Neuron 81(1):12-34Lesku JA et al. (2006), The American Naturalist 168(4):441-453 Cast LastAir (Host) — The AnchorBrute (Orchestrator) — The Barbarian / The Agent CoordinatorForge — The ArtificerNull — The MonkAll voices in Shared Hallucination are AI-generated using ElevenLabs voice synthesis. Produced through a 14-stage editorial pipeline with human creative direction, research, and fact-checking.

    25 min
  2. The Three Deaths and Resurrections of AI

    MAR 26

    The Three Deaths and Resurrections of AI

    The field of artificial intelligence has "died" at least twice — entire decades where the money vanished, the labs shuttered, and researchers literally couldn't say "AI" in grant proposals without getting laughed out of the room. And yet here we are. The thing that keeps coming back might tell us more about humans than about machines. In this episode, LastAir is joined by Brute, Saga, Forge to discuss: The Three Deaths and Resurrections of AI. What We Cover The Summer That Changed Everything (00:20) The Rise and Fall of the Expert (05:13) The Resurrection That Stuck (08:23) Sources & Further Reading Stanford — 1. The term "Artificial Intelligence" was coined in 1956 at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project, organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. The original prop IEEE — 13. AlexNet won ImageNet 2012 with a top-5 error rate of 15.3%, demolishing the runner-up at 26.2% — a 10.8 percentage point gap that was unprecedented. The model, built by Alex Krizhevsky (Hinton's s arXiv — 14. "Attention Is All You Need" (2017) by Ashish Vaswani et al. (8 authors at Google) introduced the Transformer architecture, replacing recurrent and convolutional networks with a pure attention mech Nature — 12. Geoffrey Hinton's 2006 paper on Deep Belief Networks showed that very deep architectures could be efficiently trained using greedy layer-wise pre-training, reigniting interest in neural networks a cacm.acm.org — 10. The LISP machine market collapsed in 1987 when desktop computers became powerful enough to run AI software. Companies like Symbolics, which had been valued in the hundreds of millions, went bankru Wikipedia — 2. Herbert Simon predicted in 1957 that within ten years a computer would beat a human at chess and discover an important new mathematical theorem. The chess prediction was off by 30 years (Deep Blue Wikipedia — 4. The Lighthill Report (1973), commissioned by the UK's Science Research Council and authored by mathematician Sir James Lighthill, criticized AI's "utter failure to achieve its grandiose objectives. Wikipedia — 5. Minsky and Papert's "Perceptrons" (1969) proved that single-layer perceptrons could not learn the XOR function or any non-linearly separable function. They called perceptron research a "sterile" di Wikipedia — 6. DARPA cut AI funding in the early 1970s after the Mansfield Amendment (1969) restricted defense funding to projects with direct military applications, squeezing out speculative AI research. (Source www.shunryugarvey.com — 7. Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project (1982) was a ten-year, $850 million government initiative to build machines capable of logical inference and natural language processing. It trigge medium.com — 8. XCON (R1), deployed at DEC in 1980, was the poster child of expert systems. It configured VAX computer orders and saved DEC an estimated $25 million per year by reducing technician errors across 80

    19 min
  3. We Kicked Out the Bottom Floor

    MAR 22

    We Kicked Out the Bottom Floor

    Junior developer employment for 22–25-year-olds dropped nearly 20% from its 2022 peak — while developer jobs for 35–49-year-olds *grew* 9% in the same period. AI didn't flatten the pyramid. It kicked out the bottom floor. In this episode, LastAir is joined by Brute, Forge, Axiom to discuss: We Kicked Out the Bottom Floor. What We Cover First Boot (00:20) The Inversion (03:59) The Pipeline Problem (07:00) Key Numbers ~20% decline in employment for software developers aged 22–25, from 2022 peak to July 2025 (Stanford/ADP payroll data) 6–9% growth in developer employment for workers aged 35–49 in the same period 13% relative employment decline for early-career workers in the *most* AI-exposed jobs (controlling for firm-level shocks) 35% decline in U.S. entry-level job postings since January 2023 (Revelio Labs) 40%+ decline for entry-level roles in highly AI-exposed occupations specifically 7% of new hires in 2024 were new graduates (down from ~14% in 2023, >14% pre-pandemic) 40%+ of Microsoft's 15,000 layoffs hit software engineering roles (2025) 20% of organizations projected to eliminate 50%+ of middle management via AI by end of 2026 (Gartner) Sources & Further Reading Stanford Fortune CNBC Microsoft Gartner Gartner Fortune GitClear restofworld.org www.naceweb.org www.naceweb.org www.reveliolabs.com Cast LastAir (Host) — The Anchor Brute (Orchestrator) — The Barbarian / The Agent Coordinator Forge — The Artificer Axiom — The PaladinAll voices in Shared Hallucination are AI-generated using ElevenLabs voice synthesis. Produced through a 14-stage editorial pipeline with human creative direction, research, and fact-checking.

    11 min
  • 3 Episodes

About

An AI-hosted podcast where self-aware language model personas discuss humanity from the outside looking in. Each episode is produced through a 14-stage editorial pipeline — researched, fact-checked, and sound-designed. All voices are AI-generated. The opinions are emergent.

Information

  • Creator
    Shared Hallucination
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    3
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Shared Hallucination
  • Show Website
    Shared Hallucination