Computer Says Maybe

Adele Walton, a British Turkish journalist and online safety advocate, shares her journey from a youth consumed by social media to a campaigner for safer online spaces. She candidly discusses the emotional toll of her sister's loss due to online harms and her motivations for writing *Logging Off*. The conversation delves into the burdens of online perfectionism, the need for trauma-informed design in technology, and the pressing demand for accountability in digital policy, emphasizing the importance of genuine human connections amidst a complex digital landscape.

Sam Altman is doing another big infrastructure push with World (previously Worldcoin) — the universal human verification system.We had journalist Billy Perrigo on to chat what’s what with World. Is Sam Altman just providing a solution to a problem that he himself caused with OpenAI? Do we really need human verification, or is this just a way to side-step the AI content watermarking issue?Further reading & resources:The Orb Will See You Now by Billy PerrigoThe ethical implications of AI agents by DeepMindComputer Says Maybe Shorts bring in experts to give their ten-minute take on recent news. If there’s ever a news story you think we should bring in expertise on for the show, please email pod@saysmaybe.comPerrigo is a correspondent at TIME, based in the London bureau. He covers the tech industry, focusing on the companies reshaping our world in strange and unexpected ways. His investigation ‘Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop’ was a finalist for the 2022 Orwell Prize.

Divya Siddarth, co-founder of the Collective Intelligence Project, and Zarinah Agnew, its Research Director, delve into the complexities of AI and democracy. They discuss transforming public input into meaningful change in the AI landscape. The duo emphasizes community engagement, critiquing superficial corporate democracy and advocating for collective intelligence. They explore the delicate balance between individual privacy and community needs, plus envision a future where technology fosters genuine human connections rather than isolating experiences.

Chris Cameron, a scientist and environmental justice advocate, teams up with Pratham Juneja, a data science PhD candidate, to discuss the global expansion of data centers. They reveal how hidden information often complicates community input and resistance. Their research includes case studies from South Africa and the Netherlands, highlighting environmental concerns and local skepticism about corporate promises. They advocate for transparency and community engagement, aiming to empower vulnerable populations facing corporate encroachment.

Last year, Elon Musk’s xAI built a data centre in Memphis in 19 days — and the local government only found out about it on the 20th day. How?Julie McCarthy and her team at NatureFinance have just released a report about the nature-related impacts of data center development globally. There are some pretty dire statistics in there: 55% of data centers are developed in areas that are already at risk of drought. So why do they get built there?Julie also shares the longer arc of her career, which began in extractive industry transparency, and included time leading the Open Government Partnership, and the Economic Justice Program at Open Society Foundations. She brings all of that experience together for an insightful conversation about what iss happening with tech infrastructure expansion and what we should do about it.Further reading & resources:Kate Raworth’s Doughnut EconomicsNatureFinance websiteNavigating AI’s Thirst in a Water-Scarce World — by NatureFinanceElon Musk building an xAI data centre in 19 days — report by Time MagazineOSF’s Economic Justice ProgrammeThe Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**Julie is NatureFinance’s CEO.  She was founding co-director of the Open Society Foundations’ (OSF) Economic Justice Program, a $100 million per annum global grantmaking and impact investment program focused on issues of fiscal justice, workers’ rights, and corporate power.  Previous roles include serving as the founding director of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), and as a Franklin Fellow and peacebuilding adviser at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, focused on Liberia. Prior to this, McCarthy co-founded the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), serving as its deputy director until 2009. She is a Brookings non-resident fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development, and an Aspen Civil Society Fellow. Julie lives with her three children in Warwick, NY.

This is another Computer Says Maybe short, this time with Marietje Schaake (author of The Tech Coup), to discuss OpenAI’s recent announcement: they want to partner with governments all around the world to build ‘democratic AI rails’ — sounds bad!Computer Says Maybe Shorts bring in experts to give their ten-minute take on recent news. If there’s ever a news story you think we should bring in expertise on for the show, please email pod@saysmaybe.comMarietje Schaake is a non-resident Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for the Financial Times and serves on a number of not-for-profit Boards as well as the UN's High Level Advisory Body on AI. Between 2009-2019 she served as a Member of European Parliament where she worked on trade-, foreign- and tech policy. She is the author of **The Tech Coup.****Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**

Personalised genotyping company 23andMe just went bankrupt — what’s gonna happen to all that genetic data?We brought back genomics professor Jenny Reardon to discuss the crushing void that was 23andMe’s business model — and that many companies like it have failed before.This is a Computer Says Maybe Short, where we bring in an expert to give their take on recent news. If there’s ever a news story you think we should bring in expertise on for the show, please email pod@saysmaybe.comFurther reading & resources:The Postgenomic Condition by Jenny ReardonPower Over Precision — Jenny’s first episode with us**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices.  She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press) and, most recently, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (University of Chicago Press)

This is our second Terra Nullius episode. As a reminder this means ‘Nobody’s Land’ — an infamous legal fiction from the age of Empire. In this episode we ask: who owns the skies?We get into it with law professor Julia Powles, who shares her research and perspective on the accelerating prospect of drone delivery companies taking over the skies. What? Yeah we had the same reaction. In the future a drone could deliver your morning coffee to you in minutes, neighbors be damned. As ever, tech bros are solving the serious problems, with obvious consequences of clogged skies, loud drone traffic overhead, and every coffee shop repurposed as a ghost kitchen.What happens when companies get investment to build a product that no one asked for, but burdens everyone? How do you ‘zone’ the vastness of the skies? What are the environmental and public health impacts of yet more just-in-time delivery of things no one needs? And what are the tactics that companies use — e.g. characterising all consumers as insatiable addicts for convenience — to sell their paradigm-shifting technologies?We want to do a third episode for Terra Nullius series on the sea. If you have anyone to recommend (perhaps yourself!) who knows anything about the world of subsea cables please email pod@saysmaybe.comFurther reading & resources:When it Comes to Delivery Drones, the Government is Selling us a Pipe Dream — from The ConversationResisting technological inevitability: Google Wing’s delivery drones and the fight for our skies — by Anna Zenz and Julia Powles**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**

This is our first in a series called Terra Nullius. Huh? It’s Latin for ‘Nobody’s Land’. We will be exploring how rules are made for contested territory. If a land belongs to no one, does that mean it’s just up for grabs?This week we’re starting with outer space, speaking with an expert in space law, Heather Allansdottir. But why should we care about space when the planet we are standing on is falling to shreds?Currently, outer space belongs to no one. We have an Outer Space Treaty which was developed during the Cold War. But the treaty isn’t durable enough for a second generation of space exploration which includes private actors, not just nation states. Powerful companies, countries and individuals are in a desperate scramble to make it theirs. According Heather, we have about a two-year window to enshrine outer space as a commons, otherwise it will fall to chaos actors and tech billionaires.In our next Terra Nullius episode, we’ll be talking about governing the skies and the companies that think you want drone-delivered coffee to your backyard.Further reading & resources:Astrodottir — Heather’s space law consultancy**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**Dr Heather Allansdottir is an academic of international law, focused on space law. She is the founder and director of the space sustainability consultancy Astrodottir, and the co-author of the forthcoming book New Perspectives in Outer Space Law (Springer 2025). She is deputy director of LLB at Birkbeck University's Faculty of Law and a former Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge.

Child safety is a fuzzy catch-all concept for our broader social anxieties that seems to be everywhere in our conversations about the internet. But child safety isn’t a new concept, and the way our politics focuses on the spectacle isn’t new either.To help us unpack this is Kate Sim, who has over a decade of experience in sexual violence prevention and response and is currently the Director of the Children’s Online Safety and Privacy Research (COSPR) program at the University of Western Australia’s Tech & Policy Lab. We discuss the growth of ‘child safety’ regulation around the world, and how it often conflates multiple topics: age-gating adult content, explicit attempts to harm children, national security, and even ‘family values’.Further reading & resources:On COSPRs forthcoming paper on the CSAM detection ecosystem. Here is a fact sheet with ecosystem map based on it: https://bit.ly/cospr-collateralOn CSAM bottleneck problem: https://doi.org/10.25740/pr592kc5483IBCK episode on the Anxious Generation: https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/47a8aa95c83be96b044dcb3f4e43d158Child psychology expert Candace Odgers debunking Jonathan Haidt’s claims in real-time here: https://tyde.virginia.edu/event/haidt-odgers/)A primer on client-side scanning and CSAM from Mitali Thakor: https://mit-serc.pubpub.org/pub/701yvdbh/release/2On effective CSA prevention and scalability: https://www.prevention.global/resources/read-full-scalability-report**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**Dr. Kate Sim is the Director of the COSPR Program. She has over 14 years of experience in sexual violence prevention and response, having worked across community organizing, frontline support, government, academia, and industry in the US, UK, and South Korea. Her current research interests are: Big Tech accountability, sexual violence, and children’s liberation. Most recently, she worked at Google where she shaped product policy on a range of children's safety issues, including non-consensual intimate imagery, financial sextortion, grooming, and help-seeking journeys for people impacted by harmful sexual behaviors. Kate holds a PhD and MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute and a BA in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Harvard University.