The Good Robot

In this episode, we chat to Neda Atanasoski, Professor and Chair of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, about the relationship between technology, racial capitalism, and histories of gendered and racialised labour.

27 Heinä 202127min

In this episode, we chat to David Adelani, a computer scientist, PhD candidate at Saarland University in Germany, and active member of Masakhane. Masakhane is a grassroots organisation whose mission is to strengthen and support natural language processing research in African languages. There are over 2000 African languages, so David and the Masakhane team have their work cut out for them. We also discuss how to build technology with few resources and the challenges and joys of participatory r...

13 Heinä 202119min

In this episode, we chat to Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, about the relationship between resistance and invention, and why social media is even worse than we already know. He asks: Why does the state need to know your gender? Why are bodies subjected to technological recognition and how can we evade it? How are homophobia and transphobia operating under the banner of “security”, in, for example, AI used in airports? What’s the glitch in Ex Ma...

18 Kesä 202155min

In this episode, we chat to Sneha Revanur, who is founder and president of Encode Justice, a global, youth-led coalition working to safeguard civil rights and democracy. Sneha has a fellowship at Civics Unplugged, is a Justice Initiative Committee Member at Harvard Law School, is a Civil Rights Policy Fellow at The Greater Good Initiative, a school program leader at Opportunity X, and a National Issue Advocacy Committee Criminal Justice Lead for the High School Democrats of America group. All...

14 Kesä 202126min

In this episode, we chat to Catherine D’Ignazio, Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and Director of the Data + Feminism Lab, about data feminism, what that means and why feminism matters in data science. We talk applying programming skills to social justice work, the tension between corporate and social good, and how technology can be oriented towards the feminist project of shifting power. D’Ignazio explains what would be ...

7 Kesä 202140min

In this episode, we chat with N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA and James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University, about feminism, embodiment, cognition, and human-AI relationships. We explore the role of feminism in science and technology, what productive conversations between engineers and humanities scholars look like, literary depictions of non-human embodiment and cognition, and the distribution of cognition across human-AI systems. ...

1 Kesä 202129min

In this episode, we chat with Anita Williams, online counter-abuse policy and platform protection specialist, about the new challenges arising in the area of online abuse and how abusers exploit platforms and systems. We explore the multiple and intersectional harms that can arise from new technologies, the ethical problems around data collection, the protections required for content moderators, and the need to build women’s experiences into new technologies. Content Warning: This...

1 Kesä 202128min

In this episode, we chat with The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, President and CEO of the Dalai Lama Centre for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, about how Buddhism can inform AI ethics. We discuss the problem with metrics, how to make meaningful contributions to ethics and avoid virtue signalling, why self-driving cars coming out of Asia and Euro-America prioritise the safety of different road users, and whether we should be trying to make machines intelligent, wise, or empathetic.&nbs...

1 Kesä 202124min