The Good Robot and the Good Technology

In this episode, we talk to Louise Amoore, professor of political geography at Durham and expert in how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Louise tells us how politics and society have shaped computer science practices. This means that when AI clusters data and creates features and attributes, and when its results are interpreted, it reflects a particular view of the world. In the same way, social views about what is normal and abnormal in the world are being expressed through computer science practices like deep learning.  She emphasises that computer science can solve ethical problems with help from the humanities, which means that if you work with literature, languages, linguistics, geography, politics and sociology, you can help create AIs that model the world differently.