In 1726, Jonathan Swift described a wooden machine the size of a small room that would let anyone write books of philosophy, poetry, law, mathematics and theology “without the least assistance from genius or study”. Its inventor wanted funding to build more. Swift meant it as a joke. Three centuries on, it’s a rather uncomfortable one.

Dave and Kelly are joined by Aisling Mooney, founder of the health tech company Fertally, for a conversation that starts with Swift’s satire of the newly founded Royal Society and ends up somewhere very modern: what makes an idea worth pursuing, and how do we decide whether we should?

In this full podcast episode:

• The Scientific Revolution, the birth of the Royal Society in 1660, and a motto that means “take nobody’s word for it”

• Why the early scientists were intelligent generalists (Christopher Wren was an astronomer and an architect), and whether a polymath has the edge today

• Laputa, the flying island, and the “projectors” of the Grand Academy of Lagado, who spend their days trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers

• The Engine itself: why it’s closer to Dadaism and the infinite monkeys than to a computer, and why “Swift invented ChatGPT” doesn’t quite hold up

• John Clark’s Eureka, the real nineteenth-century machine that composed Latin verse, and the schoolboys who would have loved it

• Aisling on turning problems she couldn’t stand into businesses, from plant-based food to fertility

• Is it easier or harder to invent something in 2026, and Jurassic Park’s question: just because we can, should we?

• The Star Trek gadget we want most and the real invention we should all be more grateful for

Inspired by our book, Myth-Made Machines: The Stories Behind Artificial Intelligence by Dave Bradley and Kelly Vero (Bloomsbury, published 3rd September 2026): https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mythmade-machines-9798216370680/

Aisling Mooney is the founder and CEO of Fertally, a platform that helps fertility clinics and patients get to the research that matters. She is based in Ireland.

Next time: a stormy night in Geneva, a young woman, and one of literature’s most famous artificial creatures. Is Frankenstein’s monster an AI?

Not an AI podcast. A podcast about the stories that made AI.

Fourteen hundred years before the Apollo missions, a Greek satirist put humans on the Moon. In Lucian of Samosata's True History, a ship gets caught in a whirlwind, and its crew are swept up into the sky, straight into a war between the Sun and the Moon. Lucian tells his readers, upfront, that every word of it is a lie. It might be the first known work of science fiction. It might be something else entirely.

This is not an AI podcast. It’s a podcast about centuries of stories that taught us what AI might be.

Writers Kelly Vero and Dave Bradley are joined by Tom Hunter, Director of the Arthur C Clarke Award, the UK's most prestigious prize for science fiction, to work out what actually counts as the genre, and whether that question even matters.

In your hour-long podcast episode:

• Would Lucian's True History be eligible for the Clarke Award today?

• Why so much early speculative fiction reaches for somewhere else entirely, the Moon, a parallel world, to talk about life here

• Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century Duchess who wrote The Blazing World while London burned around her, and what changes when new voices start imagining other worlds

• Star Trek, Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale, and the case that genre labels matter less than what a story is actually doing

• Why judging science fiction by what it "predicted" misses the point of most of it

• The technology that exists because someone met it in fiction first

• Tom's rapid-fire verdicts: Clarke vs Asimov, the Moon vs Mars, and the greatest science-fiction novel to never win the Clarke Award...

Tom Hunter has directed the Arthur C Clarke Award since 2006 and is currently steering it through its 40th anniversary year, which drew a record number of submissions. This year’s Arthur C Clarke Award winner was When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift. Tom also runs his own marketing and communications consultancy.

Inspired by their book, Myth-Made Machines: The Stories Behind Artificial Intelligence (Bloomsbury, published September 2026), Kelly and Dave are on a mission to talk about depictions of artificial life and all the stories and philosophies that surround it. Check out the book: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mythmade-machines-9798216370673/

Next time: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, and a 300-year-old fictional machine that already looks uncomfortably like a chatbot.

Cover art is “The Ship Is Caught Up Into The Skies” by Alfred Payne Garnett from the 1899 edition of Lucian's Wonderland (Blackwood and Sons): https://elfinspell.com/ClassicalTexts/Lucian/Wonderland/Bk1Chap2.html

Long before Silicon Valley, the Greeks built a killer robot out of bronze. This episode asks the question that's been quietly running under human culture for 3,000 years: why do we keep trying to build something in our own image?

Dave and Kelly are joined by USA Today bestselling author Natalie G. Owens (Natalie Guillaumier) for a proper nerd-out on Talos, the bronze automaton said to have patrolled the coastline of Crete, and the Golem, the Jewish folklore figure summoned into obedience through words rather than craft. Two very different ideas about creation, control and what happens when the thing you've made follows your instructions in ways you didn't intend.

In this full podcast episode:

- Was Talos actually a robot, or are we retrofitting the word onto mythology?

- Why does a god like Hephaestus need automated servants?

- Talos's spiritual descendants: Terminator, Transformers, the Iron Giant and every oversized videogame boss

- Golems, obedience and the books that introduced a generation to the idea

- Would you rather be protected by Talos or a Golem?

- How Chinese, Islamic and other traditions were building and imagining automata at the same time

- Natalie discusses writing artificial beings in urban fantasy, paranormal romance and beyond

This isn't another AI podcast about ChatGPT and prompt engineering. It's about the myths, stories and cultural instincts that got us thinking about artificial life millennia before we could build it.

Inspired by our book, Myth-Made Machines: The Stories Behind Artificial Intelligence by Dave Bradley and Kelly Vero (Bloomsbury, published 3rd September 2026): https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mythmade-machines-9798216370680/

Cover art is “The Death of Talos depicted on a column krater (Museo Archeologico Nazionale del Sannio Caudino, Montesarchio)” by ArchaiOptix - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93841648