The Good Robot

In this episode, we talk to Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a Fellow and Vice President at Google research and an authority in computer vision, machine intelligence, and computational photography. In this wide ranging episode, we explore why it is important that the AI industry reconsider what intelligence means and who possesses it, how humans and technology have co-evolved with and through one another, the limits of using evolution as a way of thinking about AI, and why we shouldn’t just be optimising AI for survival. We also chat about Blaise’s research on gender and sexuality, from his huge crowdsourced surveys on how people self-identify through to debunking the idea that you can discern someone’s sexuality from their face using facial recognition technology. 

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Kate Chandler, Assistant Professor at Georgetown and a specialist on drone warfare. We recorded this interview the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, which reminded us of just how urgent a task it is to rethink the relationship between tech innovation and warfare. As Kate explains, drones are more than just tools, they’re also intimately tied to political, economic and social systems. In this episode we discuss the historical development of drones - a history which is both commercial and military - and then explore a better future for these kinds of technologies, one where AI innovation money comes from nonviolent sources, and AI can be used for the prevention of violence.  

In this episode, we chat to Meryl Alper, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. We discuss histories of technological invention by disabled communities, the backlash against poor algorithmically transcribed captions or ‘craptions’, what it actually means for a place or a technology to be accessible to disabled communities with additional socio-economic constraints, and the kinds of assistive augmented communication devices (AAC), like the one used by Stephen Hawking, that are being built by non-speaking people to represent different kinds of voices. 

In this episode, we chat with Professor Wendy Chun, who is Simon Fraser University's Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media. As both an expert in Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, her extraordinary analysis of contemporary digital media bridges the humanities and STEM sciences to think through some of the most pressing technical and conceptual issues in technology today.  Wendy discusses her most recent book, Discriminating Data, where she explains what is actually happening in AI systems that people claim can predict the future, why facebook friendship has forced the idea that friendship is bidirectional, and how technology is being built on the principle of homophily, the idea that similarity breeds connection.  

In this episode, we chat to Dr Leonie Tanczer, a Lecturer in International Security and Emerging Technologies at UCL and Principle Investigator on the Gender and IoT project.  Leonie discusses why online safety and security are not the same when it comes to protection online; how to identify bad actors while protecting people’s privacy; how we can use ‘threat modelling’ to account for and envision harmful unintended uses of technologies, and how to tackle bad behaviour online that is not yet illegal. 

In this episode we chat to Professor Jason Edward Lewis, the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary at Concordia University in Montreal. Jason is Cherokee, Hawaiian and Samoan and an expert in indigenous design in AI. He’s the founder of Obx Labs for Experimental Media and the co-director of a number of research groups such as Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design, and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. In this episode we discuss how indigenous communities think about what it means for humans and AI to co-exist, why we need to rethink what it means to be an intelligent machine, and why mainstream Western modes of building technology might actually land us with Skynet. 

In this episode, we chat to Neema Iyer, a technologist, artist and founder of Pollicy, a civic technology organisation based in Kampala, Uganda. We discuss feminism and building AI for the world's fastest growing population, what feminism means in African contexts, and the challenges of working with different governments and regional bodies like the African Union.

In this episode, we talk to Frances Negron-Mutaner, an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York City. We discuss her Valor y Cambio or Value and Change project that brought a disused ATM to the streets of Puerto Rico filled with special banknotes. On the banknotes were the faces of Black educators, abolitionists and visionaries of a Caribbean Confederacy - people who are meaningful and inspirational to Puerto Ricans today. The machine asked the person retrieving bills what they valued, and in doing so, sparked what Frances calls decolonial joy. Together, we explore the unintended repurposing of technologies for decolonial and anti-capitalist purposes.

In this episode, we chat to Maya Indira Ganesh,the course lead for the University of Cambridge Master of Studies programme in AI Ethics and Society. She transitioned to academia after working as a feminist researcher with international NGOs and cultural organisations on gender justice, technology, and freedom of expression. We discuss the human labour that is obscured when we say a machine is autonomous, the YouTube phenomenon of ‘Unboxing’ Apple products, and why AV ethics isn’t just about trolley problems.  

In this episode, we chat to Jess Smith, a PhD student at the University of Colorado in Information Science and co-host of the Radical AI podcast who specialises in the intersections of artificial intelligence, machine learning and ethics. We discuss the tensions between Silicon Valley’s move fast and break stuff mantra and the slower pace of ethics work. She also tells us how we can be mindful users of technology and how we can develop computer science programs that foster a new generation of ethically-minded technologists.