Hot Take: The Future of Life's Call for a Pause on 'Giant AI' - Doomsday or Distraction?

In this episode, we talk to Sarah Ciston, an artist, coder, writer, and critical AI scholar. We asked Sarah to talk about this badass chatbot they created called Ladymouth, which responds to trolls and incels on hate forums. We discussed the difficult labor of content moderation and the long lasting effects of trying to do feminist work online. We also talk about the surprising things that incels and feminists have in common and whether you can use AI to change people's minds and establish co...

7 Jan 27min

In this episode we talk to two activists, Hat and Nell, from the organisation Stop Oxevision, who are fighting against the rollout of surveillance technologies used on mental health wards in the United Kingdom (UK). We explore how surveillance on mental health wards affects patients who never know exactly when they're being watched, and how surveillance technologies in mental health wards are implemented within a much wider context of unequal power relationships. We also reflect on resistance...

24 Des 202430min

In this episode, we talk to Sebastián Lehuedé, a Lecturer in Ethics, AI, and Society at King's College London. We talk about data activism in Chile, how water-intensive lithium extraction affects people living in the Atacama desert, the importance of reflexive research ethics, and an accidental Sunday afternoon shot of tequila.

10 Des 202431min

In this episode, we talked to Jill Walker Rettberg, Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about machine vision's origins in polished volcanic glass, whether or not we'll actually have self-driving cars, and that famous photo-shopped Mother's Day Photo released by Kate Middleton in March, 2024.

26 Nov 202423min

In this episode, we talk to Yasmine Boudiaf, a researcher, artist and creative technologist who uses technology in beautiful and interesting ways to challenge and redefine what we think of as 'good'. We discuss her wide-ranging art projects, from using AI to create a library of Mediterranean hand gestures through to her project Ways of Machine Seeing, which explored how machine vision systems are being taught to 'see'. Throughout the episode, we explore how Yasmine creatively uses technology ...

12 Nov 202431min

In this episode we talk to Elizabeth Wilson, a professor of gender, sexuality and women's studies at Emory University, a leading scholar on the intersections between feminism and biology, and the author of Gut Feminism. We talk about everything from what feminism can learn from biology to TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists), penises, Freud and technology. Note: this episode was recorded in Spring 2023.

29 Okt 202435min

In this episode, we speak to Janneke Parrish, who's one of the co founders of Apple Together, a solidarity union at Apple. Apple fired Parrish on the 14th of October 2021. Since she's written an incredible book, continues to be an advisor to Apple together, and is now studying law. We talk about how Apple's culture of silence underlies its aim to surprise and delight the customer, how companies should listen to their workers, and how to be diplomatic and dignified in the face of a...

15 Okt 202433min

In this episode, we chat about coming back from summer break, and discuss a research paper recently published by Kerry and the AI ethicist and researcher Os Keyes called "The Infopolitics of Feeling: How race and disability are configured in Emotion Recognition Technology". We discuss why AI tools that promise to be able to read our emotions from our faces are scientifically and politically suspect. We then explore the ableist foundations of what used to be the most famous Emotion AI firm in ...

1 Okt 202425min