Computer Says Maybe

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.

This week Alix interviewed David Seligman, Executive Director of Towards Justice, to tell us more about how big tech companies act brazenly as legal bullies to extract wealth and power from the working class in the US. He makes a compelling case for the urgent need to re-orient our thinking about political power and organise against it.We talk about legal devices like forced arbitration and monopolistic practices like algorithmic price fixing and wage suppression. And we dig into the existential issue of tech companies asserting more and more control over markets and people without taking any responsibility for the dominating role they play.Further reading & resourcesTowards Justice California drivers suitEichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banal State of Evil by Hannah ArendtThe Dual State by Ernst FraenkelProhibiting Surveillance Prices and Wages by Towards JusticeGill VS Uber — class action led by Towards Justice**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!**

Last week Alix was in London to talk UK politics and broligarchy with four amazing guests:Martha Dark from Foxglove gave us the history and implications of the NHS/Palantir partnership of horrorMatt Mahmoudi outlined the UK’s push to amp up facial recognition surveillance and to outlaw protests (seems good)Seyi Akiwowo shared a retrospective of the development of the Online Safety Act — the UK’s online speech regulation meant to protect kidsTanya O’Carroll did a victory lap, sharing details of her case against Facebook’s intrusive ad-targeting business model**Subscribe to our newsletter for up-to-the-month opportunities to get involved!**

Amidst the scrambling of geopolitics, there is increasing conversation and momentum for the concept of tech sovereignty. It basically means that countries should build their own technology rather than rely on Silicon Valley. India Stack! Euro Stack! Everyone wants a stack.In this episode we explore India’s work over the last 20 years to build ‘digital public infrastructure’ or DPI. They went YOLO on a digital ID system in a country of 1 billion people — with very mixed results. Did this ‘public infrastructure’ lead to a locally-owned marketplaces? Nope! Has the fact that their PM is a Hindu nationalist limited India’s ability to tout this work on the global stage? Also nope! It’s actually allowed the government to techwash its authoritarianism.Lots to unpack here, and fortunately, we’re joined by Divij Joshi, a researcher focused on the political economy of ‘digital public infrastructure’ or DPI, to explore India’s attempts at digital ID and government-as-a-platform.Further reading & resources:Government as a Platform by Tim O’ReillyThe Global DPI AgendaRecovering the ‘Public’ in India’s Digital Public Infrastructure Strategy by IT for ChangeAadhaar’s mixing of public risk and private profit by Aria ThakerInterrogating India’s quest for data sovereignty by Divij Joshi**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!**Divij is a Research Fellow at ODI Global and a Doctoral Researcher at UCL, where his research and advocacy focuses on understanding the political economy and governance of emerging technologies to articulate a vision for a fair and just information society. His thesis examines how the emergence of 'Digital Public Infrastructures', as platform and data-based information systems are shaping notions of economic development and political subjectivity in India and globally.

Two years ago, we were told that ‘prompt engineer’ would be a real job — well, it’s not. Is generative AI actually going to replace and transform human labour, or is this just another shallow marketing narrative?This week Alix speaks with Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra Mateescu, who recently authored Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work. They discuss how automation is now being used as a threat against workers, and how certain types of labour are being devalued by AI — especially (shocking) traditionally feminised work, such as caregiving.Further reading:Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work by Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra MateescuBlood in the Machine by Brain MerchantSubscribe 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!*Aiha Nguyen is the Program Director for the Labor Futures Initiative at Data & Society where she guides research and engagement. She brings a practitioner's perspective to this role having worked for over a decade in community and worker advocacy and organizing. Her research interests lie at the intersection of labor, technology, and urban studies. She is author of The Constant Boss: Work Under Digital Surveillance and co-author of ‘At the Digital Doorstep: How Customers Use Doorbell Cameras to Manage Delivery Workers’, and ‘Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype and Value at Work’.**Alexandra Mateescu is a researcher on the Labor Futures team at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she investigates the impacts of digital surveillance, AI, and algorithmic power within the workplace. As an ethnographer, her past work has led her to explore the role of worker data and its commodification, the intersections of care labor and digital platforms, automation within service industries, and generative AI in creative industries. She is also a 2024-2025 Fellow at the Siegel Family Endowment.*