Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, an AI ethicist and the head of Humane Intelligence, is sick of all this complaining. Not because there isn’t plenty to complain about — in this episode we unpack a host of horrors that AI and the companies who make it are foisting on all of us — but because she believes that the fatalism of AI criticism inadvertently empowers powerful corporations. Dr. Chowdhury, who has worked at Accenture, Twitter, and served as a science envoy for the Biden administration, has an unusual background for an AI builder — political science and quantitative social sciences — and her work on the inherent biases within algorithms has led her to believe that the solutions are far more complicated than just switching the whole thing off. Enjoy!

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00:00 Introduction: The Pessimism Around AI

00:36 Meet Dr. Rumman Chowdhury: AI Ethicist

02:00 The Role of Political Science in AI

04:26 Challenges in Creating Ethical AI

06:20 The Myth of Political Neutrality in Algorithms

14:10 From Accenture to Twitter: A Journey in AI

16:17 The Twitter Experience: Ethics and Algorithms

19:07 The Impact of Social Media Algorithms

26:18 The Audacity of Modern AI Developments

33:12 The Podcast’s Initial Concept and NPC Idea

34:23 Nostalgia Culture and the Creative Class

36:09 The Loop: AI and Legal Precedents

36:58 Algorithmic Choice and User Agency

38:59 Right to Repair and Algorithmic Agency

40:23 Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in Tech

45:47 Algorithmic Amplification of Right-Wing Content

01:03:13 The Hero Narrative and Collective Movements

01:05:13 Conclusion and Call to Action

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Is AI Pessimism Feeding the Powerful? (with Rumman Chowdhury)