In this episode of “Technically Human,” I sit down with Dr. Eric Daimler. We talk about one of the biggest technology problems facing us today—data deluge—and how new computational models and theories can help solve it and, Dr. Daimler weighs in on the gaps, differences, and possibilities for collaboration between policy, industry, and academia. And we talk about what a vision of “AI for Good” might look like in a world of increasingly infinite data. Dr. Eric Daimler is a leading authority in robotics and artificial intelligence with over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, investor, technologist, and policymaker. He served under the Obama Administration as a Presidential Innovation Fellow for AI and Robotics in the Executive Office of President, as the sole authority driving the agenda for U.S. leadership in research, commercialization, and public adoption of AI & Robotics. Dr. Daimler has incubated, built and led several technology companies recognized as pioneers in their fields ranging from software systems to statistical arbitrage. His newest venture, Conexus, is a groundbreaking solution for what is perhaps today's biggest information technology problem — data deluge. As founder and CEO of Conexus, Dr. Daimler  is leading the development of CQL, a patent-pending platform founded upon category theory — a revolution in mathematics — to help companies manage the overwhelming and rapidly growing challenge of data integration and migration. His academic research has been at the intersection of AI, Computational Linguistics, and Network Science (Graph Theory). His work has expanding to include economics and public policy. He served as Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science where he founded the university's Entrepreneurial Management program and helped to launch Carnegie Mellon's Silicon Valley Campus. He has studied at the University of Washington-Seattle, Stanford University, and Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science. Dr. Daimler’s extensive career spanning business, academics and policy give him a rare perspective on the next generation of AI. Dr. Daimler sees clearly how information technology can dramatically improve our world. However, it demands our engagement. Neither a utopia nor dystopia is inevitable. What matters is how we shape and react to, its development. This episode was produced by Matt Perry. Our head of reseaarch is Sakina Nuruddin. Art by Desi Aleman.

In this episode, I sit down with science fiction writer, essayist, innovator, and cultural icon PJ Manney. We talk about the relationship between literature and empathy, the feedback loops between science fiction imagining and technological production, and how art is, and always has been, a technology.  PJ Manney is the author of the bestselling and Philip K. Dick Award-nominated science fiction technothriller, (R)EVOLUTION (2015), published by 47North in the Phoenix Horizon trilogy with, (ID)ENTITY (2017), and (CON)SCIENCE, (2021). Set as alternate, future American histories, the novels chart the influence of world-changing technologies on power and nations.  A former chairperson of Humanity Plus, she helped rebrand the organization, launch H+ Magazine and organize the first multi-org conference on futurist topics, Convergence ’08. She authored "Yucky Gets Yummy: How Speculative Fiction Creates Society"​ and "Empathy in the Time of Technology: How Storytelling is the Key to Empathy,"​ foundational works on the neuropsychology of empathy and media. Manney presented her ideas to National Geographic, the Producers Guild of America, Directors Guild of America, NASA-JPL, M.I.T., Huffington Post, The H+ Summit, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, She is also a frequent guest on podcasts and webshows, and is widely published in as a public thinker and critic. Manney consults for varied organizations about the future of humanity and technology, including artificial intelligence, robotics, cyborgs, nanotechnology, biotechnology, brain-computer interfaces, space, blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Manney worked for over 25 years in film/TV: motion picture PR at Walt Disney/Touchstone Pictures; story development for independent film production companies; and writing as Patricia Manney for the critically acclaimed hit TV shows Hercules — The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. She also co-founded Uncharted Entertainment, writing and/or creating many pilot scripts for television networks, including CBS, Fox, UPN, Discovery, ABC Family and Comedy Central. This episode was produced by Matt Perry. Our Head of Research is Sakina Nuruddin. Art by Desi Aleman.

For the final episode of our 3 part series on democracy and technology, I am bringing you a conversation with Professor Chimène Keitner on cyber interference in democratic elections, and international law. We talk about the challenges and shortcomings of international legal structures in recognizing and responding to cyber interference in democratic processes, we discuss the way that democracies are made vulnerable by digital products, and Chimène explains what happened in the infamous Russian interference into 2016 election--and what might be in store for our democratic process as we approach the deeply consequential 2024 US Presidential election. Professor Chimène Keitner is the Alfred and Hanna Fromm Professor of International Law at UC Hastings, where she teaches courses on International Law; on Democracy, Technology and Security; and on legal approaches to Evidence, among many other topics. She is a leading authority on international law and civil litigation, and served as the 27th Counselor on International Law in the U.S. Department of State. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history and literature with high honors from Harvard, a JD from Yale, where she was a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, and a doctorate in international relations from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She has authored two books and dozens of articles, essays, and book chapters on questions surrounding the relationship among law, communities, and borders, including issues of jurisdiction, extraterritoriality, foreign sovereign and foreign official immunity, and the historical understandings underpinning current practice in these areas. Professor Keitner has served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and as Co-Chair of the ASIL International Law in Domestic Courts Interest Group. She is a member of the American Law Institute and an Adviser on the ALI’s Fourth Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. She is also a founding co-chair of the International Law Association’s Study Group on Individual Responsibility in International Law., and a member of the state department’s advisory committee on international law.   This episode was produced by Matt Perry. Our head of research is Sakina Nuruddin. Art by Desi Aleman.

This week, we are continuing our series on the theme of democracy and technology by bringing you a conversation with Ram Fish, on the impact of social media on democratic institutions and civil discourse. We talk about the existential threat that social media poses to democratic norms, the erosion of civil discourse in the attention economy, and where else in the world we might look for hope in leading us out of democratic decline. And, finally--because we don't like leaving our audience with a doomsday prophecy--Ram proposes policies that might productively change the tide of partisan politics on social media platforms. Ram Fish is the CEO of 19Labs. Throughout his career in Apple, Samsung, Nokia, as well as Co-Founder CEO of three startups, he specializes in leading interdisciplinary special consumer projects, bridging technology, consumer needs, and business & regulatory constraints.  Mr. Fish has an MBA from Yale University as well as Computer Engineering Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Case Western Reserve University, where he is also a lecturer in Technology Management. He has authored many articles on the topic of democracy, ethics, and technology, including, most recently “Twitter fact-checking Trump: Good intentions. Wrong approach. And a proposal for how to do it right,” and "Four proposals to neutralize social media’s threat to democracies," co-authored with Professor Chimène Keitner. This episode was produced by Matt Perry. Art by Desi Aleman.

This week, we are kicking off a special series of “Technically Human” focused on the intersection of democracy and tech. In the first episode in the series, I sit down with Dr. Foaad Khosmood. We talk about the relationship between access to information and functional democracy, and how digital technologies can expand civil discourse. Dr. Foaad Khosmood is the Forbes Professor of Computer Engineering and Associate Professor of Computer Science at California Polytechnic State University.  His research interests include natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence, interactive entertainment, game AI and game jams. At Cal Poly, Professor Khosmood usually teaches AI, Interactive Entertainment, Computational Linguistics, Data Mining and Operating Systems. He serves as the faculty advisor for the Cal Poly Game Development (CPGD), SLO Hacks and Color Coded student clubs. He is the founder of the Digital Democracy Project, a platform that seeks to use digital technologies to Make Government More Transparent one Video at a Time, and the lead researcher on a new project at the Cal Poly Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy to strengthen democracy by developing an artificial intelligence system that will expand and improve state government coverage at local and regional media outlets—an area of journalism that has especially suffered amid the economic slide of the news industry. Dr. Khosmood is the Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Technology & Public Policy. He is also a board member, former CTO and past president of Global Game Jam, Inc. where he helps to organize the world's largest game creation activity (120+ countries). He is also the general chair of the Foundations of Digital Games, a major international "big tent" academic conference dedicated to exploring the latest research in all aspects of digital games, and to increasing diversity and inclusion in the world of computing . This episode was produced by Matt Perry. Art by Desi Aleman.

In this episode, I speak with Dr. John C. Williams about the ethics of automated weapons systems. We talk about the concept of meaningful human control, about the ethics of war, and what it means to engage in the politics of biopower in the age of lethal autonomous weapons. Dr. John C. Williams is a Professor in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University, in the UK. Among the many areas of his research, Dr. Williams is an expert on the ethics of war and challenges presented by changing patterns and technologies of violence and the issue of democratic authority over warfare. His work looks at key technologies including drones and emergent autonomous weapons systems, and considers the ethics of meaningful human control as AI increasingly becomes part of what it means to wage war. He is the author of Ethics, Diversity and World Politics: Saving Pluralism From Itself? (Oxford University Press), and The Ethics of Territorial Borders: Drawing Lines in the Shifting Sand. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, as well as multiple other articles on the ethics of technology at the intersection of war. This episode was produced by Matt Perry. Art by Desi Aleman.

In this episode of "Technically Human," I sit down with D.J. MacLennan to talk about the relationship between technological realities and fairy tale mythologies. We talk about what it means to re-write epic and age-old stories about magical worlds and beings in the age of tech, and how technological culture may itself be a form of fairy tale thinking. D.J. MacLennan is a writer of speculative fiction and non-fiction from the Isle of Skye in the Highlands of Scotland. His new book, Future Bright, Future Grimm: Transhumanist Tales for Mother Nature's Offspring reboots the Grimms brothers' fables to imagine how the fairy tales help us imagine the future, and how science fiction blends with fairy tale mythologies,  as technology becomes increasingly embedded in our bodies and our landscapes. This podcast was produced by Matt Perry. Artwork by Desi Aleman.

"Technically Human" is back with a brand new season of the show! In our first episode of the season, I sit down with film director Jake Wachtel to talk about his debut film, "Karmalink," the first science fiction film set in Cambodia. We discuss the connection between digital technologies, reincarnation, and Buddhism, we talk about the state of technological development in Cambodia, and Jake reflects on how Cambodians are imagining the future, in light of Cambodia's past. Jake Wachtel grew up in California, and studied Film and Neuroscience at Stanford University. In 2015, he moved to Cambodia to teach filmmaking to children through Filmmakers Without Borders. His short THE FOREIGNER HERE premiered at the Cambodian International Film Festival alongside the new wave of Cambodian directors. His doc work has been featured on NYTimes.com, Wired, NPR and MSNBC. KARMALINK is his debut feature. This episode was produced by Matt Perry. Art by Desi Aleman. In memory of Leng Heng Prak.    

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Brooke Duffy about the structure of digital labor. We talk about Instagram influencers and the people who love to hate them, the double bind that women online face in presenting themselves as both "authentic" and  "relatable," and the problem with the advice we so often get, to "do what we love." Dr. Brooke Erin Duffy is an Associate Professor at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in the Department of Communication and the Program in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her work spans the topics of social media, gender, identity and inequality, digital labor, and promotional culture. She's the author of two monographs on gender and cultural production, including (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, in 2017), which draws upon research with fashion bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagram influencers to explore the culture and politics of the digital labor. Wired named it one of the "Top Tech Books of 2017." Dr. Duffy's first monograph, Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013), examined the rapidly changing technologies and political economies of media production through an analysis of the magazine industry. Duffy’s third book, Platforms and Cultural Production with Thomas Poell and David Nieborg, is forthcoming with Polity in 2021. She is also the co-editor of Key Readings in Media Today: Mass Communication in Contexts with Joseph Turow (Routledge press, in 2009).  Dr. Duffy’s research has been published in a wide variety of academic journals, and she is also a public scholar, whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Vox, Times Higher Education, Wired, and Quartz. Her commentary has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, Vox, The Washington Post, The USA Today, and Vice, among others. This episode was produced by Matt Perry. Art by Desi Aleman.

In this week’s episode, we bring you a conversation about, well, how we have conversations. Listeners of this podcast, students who have taken my class, and anyone who has heard me talk about ethics and technology in public has heard me talk about the importance of civil discourse. In an age of Twitter feuds, Facebook shouting matches, and an online culture of escalating arguments, learning the skills of talking to one another is more important—and less understood—than ever. That is why, this week, I invited the founder of the Open Dyalog movement, Zahabiya Nuruddin, to join me this week to talk about how, in a time when we interact with one another increasingly online, through our tech, we can practice the ethics of civil discourse. The head of research for the “Technically Human” team, Sakina Nuruddin, co-hosts this week's show. Sakina is the founder of the Cal Poly chapter of Open Dyalog.  Interested in Open Dyalog? Contact Sakina at snuruddi@calpoly.edu.  Thanks for listening! We are off next week for the Thanksgiving break—we’ll return the first week of December for our final episode of the Technically Human season. This episode was produced by Matt Perry. Art by Desi Aleman.