The Good Robot

In this episode, we chat to Anne Anlin Cheng, Professor in the Department of English at Princeton University and author of Ornamentalism. We discuss how Asiatic femininity has historically been associated with ornamental extravagance and objecthood, and why we see so many of these stereotypes in visions of the future, like Ghost in the Shell, Bladerunner and Ex Machina, which are populated with geishas and concubines. [We would like to apologise for the sound quality on this episode, we had technical difficulties]

In this episode, Eleanor chats to Rosi Braidotti, one of the leading philosophers of our time and a Distinguished Professor at Utrecht University. Her pioneering theory of posthumanism is a way of thinking that she believes is key to understanding the posthuman condition within which we all exist. We are releasing this conversation in two parts. In this first part, she explains how to embrace the crises and possibilities of advanced capitalism, what it means for NASA to choose Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man as one of its logos, and why colonising outer space risks repeating the worst features of terrestrial capitalism. Look out for the bonus episode for the second half of this interview, which will be released very soon.

This bonus episode is the second half of our conversation with Rosi Braidotti. In this part, Braidotti discusses the culture wars, genealogies of Black feminisms, the relationship between gender and capitalism, the rise of neoliberal feminism and the effect that has had on solidarities between generations of feminists, and of course, the feminist posthuman project. She takes us from Virginia Woolf to Alice Walker, Paul Preciado to Shulamith Firestone. She explains why Firestone predicted some of reproductive possibilities we now had on offer, but failed to see that capitalism, not revolution, would be the source of these reproductive freedoms. She explains why corporations like IBM that have been thinking about gender as a spectrum, inherit these ideas from John Money and the gender reassignment clinics back in the 60s, and why most good predictions about capitalism can be attributed to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. We hope you enjoy the show. 

In this episode we chat to Jennifer Lee, the technology and liberty project manager at the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU of Washington, a non-profit organisation that fights for racial and gender equality and has been one of the leading voices in opposing facial recognition technology. Jen explains why we need to underscore the power dynamics in any decision to build, design, and use a technology, and why Microsoft’s new $22 billion contract to provide the military with technology affects how the tech industry defines good technology. Whether its the NYPD using automated license plate readers to track Muslim communities, or the 400,000 Michigan residents having their unemployment checks wrongfully withheld due to false fraud determinations, Jen tells us what can be done about the wrongful use of powerful technologies. We hope you enjoy the show. 

In this episode we chat to Cynthia Bennett, one of the leading voices in AI and Accessibility and Disability Studies. She’s currently a researcher at Apple and a postdoctoral scholar at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. We discuss combatting the model of disability as deficit, how feminism and disability approaches can help democratise whose knowledge about AI is taken into consideration when we build technology, and why the people who make technology need to be representative of the people who use it. We also discuss the things that go wrong with AI that helps disabled users navigate their environment, particularly what can go wrong when using images labelled by humans. 

In this episode, we chat to Kanta Dihal, Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence who leads the Decolonising AI project. We discuss the stories that are being told about AI, why these stories need to be decolonised, what that means, and how we should go about it. We discuss the need to examine a plurality of local stories about AI and Kanta recommends us her favourite science fiction narratives from around the globe that are challenging the supremacy of science fiction from the Anglophone West. 

In this episode, we chat to Neda Atanasoski, Professor and Chair of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, about the relationship between technology, racial capitalism, and histories of gendered and racialised labour.  

In this episode, we chat to David Adelani, a computer scientist, PhD candidate at Saarland University in Germany, and active member of Masakhane. Masakhane is a grassroots organisation whose mission is to strengthen and support natural language processing research in African languages. There are over 2000 African languages, so David and the Masakhane team have their work cut out for them. We also discuss how to build technology with few resources and the challenges and joys of participatory research. 

In this episode, we chat to Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, about the relationship between resistance and invention, and why social media is even worse than we already know. He asks: Why does the state need to know your gender? Why are bodies subjected to technological recognition and how can we evade it? How are homophobia and transphobia operating under the banner of “security”, in, for example, AI used in airports? What’s the glitch in Ex Machina? How has the family shifted during lockdown? and much more. Content Warning: This episode contains references to invasive and transphobic practices at the airport. 

In this episode, we chat to Sneha Revanur, who is founder and president of Encode Justice, a global, youth-led coalition working to safeguard civil rights and democracy. Sneha has a fellowship at Civics Unplugged, is a Justice Initiative Committee Member at Harvard Law School, is a Civil Rights Policy Fellow at The Greater Good Initiative, a school program leader at Opportunity X, and a National Issue Advocacy Committee Criminal Justice Lead for the High School Democrats of America group. All this, and she’s still completing high school. We discuss intergenerational communication, what feminism means to young activists, why Gen Z are particularly empathetic and concerned with issues of equality, and why young activists are in an especially good position to deal with ethical problems around technology.