Rewriting Wikipedia with Jess Wade
In this episode we talk to British physicist Jess Wade about the 1923 Wikipedia pages (and counting) she’s created and edited in her aim to put more women and more people of colour onto the online encyclopaedia.
12 Dec 202335min
Hot Take: Can you own your data?
In this episode we welcome Eleanor back from Slovenia, where she was speaking at a conference on digital sovereignty. But what is digital sovereignty, and what does it mean for you and your data?
4 Dec 202338min
Digital Authoritarianism and Press Freedom with Arzu Geybulla
In this episode, we talked to Azerbaijani journalist Arzu Geybulla, a specialist on digital authoritarianism and its implications on human rights and press freedoms in Azerbaijan. She now lives in self-imposed exile in Istanbul. Aside from writing for big publications like Al Jazeera, Eurasianet, Foreign Policy Democracy Lab, she also founded Azerbaijan Internet Watch and is writing a political memoir about a lost generation of civil society artists in Azerbaijan. We chat to Arzu about ...
28 Nov 202336min
Technology, psychedelics and healing with K Allado-McDowell
In this episode, we speak to K Allado-McDowell a writer, speaker, and musician. They've written three books and an opera libretto, and they've established the artists and machine intelligence program at Google AI. We talk about good technology as healing, the relationship between psychedelics and technology, utopianism and the counter-cultural movements in the Bay Area, and the economics of Silicon Valley.
14 Nov 202336min
Good corporations, AI ethics and value pluralism with Giada Pistilli
In this episode, we talk to Giada Pistilli, Principal Ethicist at Hugging Face, which is the company that Meg Mitchell joined, following her departure from Google. Giada is also completing her PhD in philosophy and ethics of applied conversational AI at Sorbonne University. We talk about value pluralism and AI, which means building AI according to the values of different groups of people. We also explore what it means for an AI company to actually take AI ethics really seriously as well as th...
31 Okt 202336min
Facial Recognition and Surveillance in Palestine with Matt Mahmoudi
In this episode, we talk to Dr. Matt Mahmoudi, a researcher and advisor on artificial intelligence and human rights at Amnesty International, and an affiliated lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. We discuss how AI is being used to survey Palestinians in Hebron and East Jerusalem, both in their bedrooms and in their streets, which Dutch and Chinese companies are supporting this surveillance, and how Israeli security forces have been pivotal to the training o...
17 Okt 202338min
Hot Take: Fighting Fears and Fantasies of East Asia (and AI)
In this episode, we hear all about Kerry’s trip to Japan (spoiler alert: she loved it) and explore her work on anti-Asian racism and AI. Kerry explains what the very long word ‘techno-Orientalism’ means and how fears and fantasies of East Asia or the so-called ‘Orient’ shape Western approaches to technology and AI. We chat about how US sci-fi genres like cyberpunk use imagery from East and South East Asia to connote scary, dystopian futures where the ‘human’ is indistinguishable from the ‘mac...
4 Okt 202331min
Generative AI, Creativity, and what AI means for the Music Industry with Hayleigh Bosher
In this episode, we talk to Dr. Hayleigh Bosher, Associate Dean and Reader in intellectual property law at Brunel University and host of the podcast Whose Song is it Anyway?, a podcast on the intersections of IP [intellectual property] and the music industry. Hayleigh gives us some great insight into tomorrow's legal disputes over AI and music copyright. She tells us why AI can never create an original song, what it takes to sue a generative AI company for creating music in the style of someo...
26 Sep 202340min
