Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast The Good Robot

In this episode, Amy Gaeta, a researcher at the Centre for Drones and Culture and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, discusses the how drones both uphold and subvert traditional masculine norms and the implications of their use in various contexts, from hobbyist communities to pornography. The conversation explores the complexities of gender dynamics in technology and the potential for systemic change in societal perceptions.

Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo

In this episode, Aisha Sobey, a research fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, explores how anti-fat bias shapes our digital lives. She discusses its effects on health technologies, social media, and generative AI, and explains why anti-fatness must be seen as a systemic issue. The conversation also highlights how ideas from fat liberation can help create more inclusive and fair technological design.

In this episode, we talk to Anne Pasek, the Canada Research Chair in Media Culture and the Environment, and an Associate Professor between the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University. We love Anne for lots of reasons, not least because she has a 50 watt solar panel, a little Raspberry Pi computer, and an acid battery, all in her backyard, hosting a server. Together we discuss pleasurable ways of responding to climate anxiety,  what would happen if the internet wasn't always on, but instead functioned in tandem with the sun, and why addressing climate crisis isn't necessarily about living with less, but learning to live in sync.

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. 

In this episode, we chat to Catherine D’Ignazio, Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and Director of the Data + Feminism Lab, about data feminism, what that means and why feminism matters in data science. We talk applying programming skills to social justice work, the tension between corporate and social good, and how technology can be oriented towards the feminist project of shifting power. D’Ignazio explains what would be needed to reshape the model of accountability in AI and why ‘better’ technology might not be less harmful. She argues that data work can be most effective at producing better outcomes when grounded in feminist scholarship and practice. We hope you enjoy the show.

Content Warning: This episode contains a brief discussion of femicide. 

In this episode, we chat with Priya Goswami, anti-FGC activist, awardwinning filmmaker, and CEO and founder of the AI-driven app Mumkin, about feminist data practices and app design. We discuss designing and building apps that do good, why an app’s “users” are actually “participants”, and why you cannot compromise on the participants’ privacy and safety. Priya explains what it means to design an app as an activist, why feminism should be normalised, and the problem with running activist campaigns on social media.

Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of female genital cutting, or FGC, and gender-based violence. 

In this episode, we chat with The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, President and CEO of the Dalai Lama Centre for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, about how Buddhism can inform AI ethics. We discuss the problem with metrics, how to make meaningful contributions to ethics and avoid virtue signalling, why self-driving cars coming out of Asia and Euro-America prioritise the safety of different road users, and whether we should be trying to make machines intelligent, wise, or empathetic. 

In this episode, we chat with Anita Williams,  online counter-abuse policy and platform protection specialist, about the new challenges arising in the area of online abuse and how abusers exploit platforms and systems. We explore the multiple and intersectional harms that can arise from new technologies, the ethical problems around data collection, the protections required for content moderators, and the need to build women’s experiences into new technologies. 

Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of online sexual abuse, grooming, and child sexual abuse. 

In this episode, we chat with N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA and James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University, about feminism, embodiment, cognition, and human-AI relationships. We explore the role of feminism in science and technology, what productive conversations between engineers and humanities scholars look like, literary depictions of non-human embodiment and cognition, and the distribution of cognition across human-AI systems.   

Welcome to The Good Robot! In this teaser trailer, Eleanor and Kerry briefly chat about who they are, what they do, and why they’re starting The Good Robot podcast. Plus, they give you a sneak peek into the super exciting topics they’ll be exploring in upcoming episodes!

In this episode, we talk to Sarah Ciston, an artist, coder, writer, and critical AI scholar. We asked Sarah to talk about this badass chatbot they created called Ladymouth, which responds to trolls and incels on hate forums. We discussed the difficult labor of content moderation and the long lasting effects of trying to do feminist work online. We also talk about the surprising things that incels and feminists have in common and whether you can use AI to change people's minds and establish common humanity at scale. 

In this episode we talk to two activists, Hat and Nell, from the organisation Stop Oxevision, who are fighting against the rollout of surveillance technologies used on mental health wards in the United Kingdom (UK). We explore how surveillance on mental health wards affects patients who never know exactly when they're being watched, and how surveillance technologies in mental health wards are implemented within a much wider context of unequal power relationships. We also reflect on resistance, solidarity, and friendship as well as the power of activism to share information and combat oppressive technologies. Please note that this episode does contain distressing content, including references to self harm. 

In this episode, we talk to Sebastián Lehuedé, a Lecturer in Ethics, AI, and Society at King's College London. We talk about data activism in Chile, how water-intensive lithium extraction affects people living in the Atacama desert, the importance of reflexive research ethics, and an accidental Sunday afternoon shot of tequila. 

In this episode, we talked to Jill Walker Rettberg, Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about machine vision's origins in polished volcanic glass, whether or not we'll actually have self-driving cars, and that famous photo-shopped Mother's Day Photo released by Kate Middleton in March, 2024. 

In this episode, we talk to Yasmine Boudiaf, a researcher, artist and creative technologist who uses technology in beautiful and interesting ways to challenge and redefine what we think of as 'good'. We discuss her wide-ranging art projects, from using AI to create a library of Mediterranean hand gestures through to her project Ways of Machine Seeing, which explored how machine vision systems are being taught to 'see'. Throughout the episode, we explore how Yasmine creatively uses technology to challenge the colonial gaze and the predominance of Western European ideas and concepts in ethics. 

Note: this episode was recorded in Summer 2023

In this episode we talk to Elizabeth Wilson, a professor of gender, sexuality and women's studies at Emory University, a leading scholar on the intersections between feminism and biology, and the author of Gut Feminism. We talk about everything from what feminism can learn from biology to TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists), penises, Freud and technology. 

Note: this episode was recorded in Spring 2023. 

In this episode, we speak to Janneke Parrish, who's one of the co founders of Apple Together, a solidarity union at Apple. Apple fired Parrish on the 14th of October 2021.  Since she's written an incredible book, continues to be an advisor to Apple together, and is now studying law.  We talk about how Apple's culture of silence underlies its aim to surprise and delight the customer, how companies should listen to their workers, and how to be diplomatic and dignified in the face of an institution that is trying to crush you at work.

In this episode, we chat about coming back from summer break, and discuss a research paper recently published by Kerry and the AI ethicist and researcher Os Keyes called "The Infopolitics of Feeling: How race and disability are configured in Emotion Recognition Technology". We discuss why AI tools that promise to be able to read our emotions from our faces are scientifically and politically suspect. We then explore the ableist foundations of what used to be the most famous Emotion AI firm in the world: Affectiva. Kerry also explains how the Stop Asian Hate and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 inspired this research project, and why she thinks that emotion recognition technologies have no place in our societies. 

In this episode, we talk to Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West of the AI Now Institute, who are the co directors of this leading policy think tank. In the episode, which is the second installment of our EU AI Act series, Amba and Sarah explore why different tech policy narratives matter, the difference between the US and the EU regulatory landscape, why this idea that AI is simply outstripping regulation is an outdated maxim, and then finally, their policy wish list for 2024.

In this episode, Felienne Hermans, a professor of computer science education, discusses the intersection of feminism and programming. She shares her experiences in designing programming languages, particularly Hedy, which supports 70 languages, including Arabic. The conversation explores the challenges of linguistic diversity in programming and the need for systemic change in the tech community.

In this episode, we talk to Daniel Leufer and Caterina Rodelli from Access Now, a global advocacy organization that focuses on the impact of the digital on human rights. As leaders in this field, they've been working hard to ensure that the European Union's AI Act doesn't undermine human rights or indeed fundamental democratic values. They share with us how the EU AI act was put together, the Act's particular downfalls, and where the opportunities are for us as citizens or as digital rights activists to get involved and make sure that it's upheld by companies across the world. 

Note: this episode was recorded back in February 2024. 

We often think that maths is neutral or can't be harmful, because after all, what could numbers do to hurt us? In this episode, we talk to Dr. Maurice Chiodo, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, who's now based at the Center for Existential Risk. He tells us why maths can actually throw out big ethical issues. Take the atomic bomb or the maths used by Cambridge Analytica to influence the Brexit referendum or the US elections. Together, we explore why it's crucial that we understand the role that maths plays in unethical AI.

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This is a special live episode because Kerry is talking to Professor Helen Hester at the tech transformed conference in London. Helen is a leading thinker of feminism technology and the future of work, and she explores the history of domestic technologies- so technology used around the house. It's really important that we understand that technologies like the washing machine were actually not as liberatory for women as we'd like to think. In fact, they may have actually prevented women from rising up against domestic labor. Helen also talks about how medical care is increasingly being outsourced to home spaces, and why smart home technology is making our lives more convenient, but not necessarily less laborious.

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In this episode, we talk to Heather Zheng, who makes technologies that stop everyday surveillance. This includes bracelets that stopped devices from listening and on you, to more secure biometric technologies that can protect us by identifying us by for example, our dance moves. Most famously, Zheng is one of the computer scientists behind Nightshade, which helps artists protect their work by 'poisoning' AI training data sets.  

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In this episode we talk to Caroline Sinders, the human rights researcher, an artist, and the founder of convocation, design and research. We begin by talking  about Gamergate, when women were harassed for being gamers.  We also talk about what it's like doing high risk research about abusive misogynists online and experiences of doxing. Just to give you a heads up. We do talk about online harassment in today's episode. If you're facing online harassment and you need immediate help Caroline's organization offers pro bono support, so just email, rapid@convocation.design. And they'll get back to you. 

We’re expected to look amazing online, but also natural. We’re fighting against the gender pay gap, but also spend thousands on cosmetics. In this episode, Ellen Atlanta talks us through the paradoxes of feminism and beauty in the digital sphere.

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Isabella Rosner,  a curator at the Royal School of Needlework and a research consultant at Witney Antiques. Isabella tells us about the evolution of embroidery as a technology, and the complex relationship between needlework and feminism. We use this history to shed light on technology and feminism today.

In this episode, we talked to Darren Byler, author of Terror Capitalism and In the Camps, Life in China's High Tech Penal Colony. We discussed his in depth research on Uyghur Muslims in China and the role played by technology in their persecution. If you're just listening to this on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, you can now watch us on YouTube at The Good Robot Podcast.

In this episode we talk to Thuy Linh Thu, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. We talk about how good technology disperses power, while bad technology concentrates power, the racial history of dermatology,  including the connections between the Vietnam War, medical experimentation on incarcerated men in the U. S., and retinol creams,. Please note that this episode contains references to medical experimentation and racial violence.

In this very special Good Robot hot take we talk about our new book, The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism. It's a beautiful new illustrated book where the top scholars, activists, artists, writers, technologists, all come together to respond to the prompt: good technology is... Kerry and Eleanor chat about getting its illustrations as tattoos, and you can vote for which one you think we should get tattooed. And then we have some more serious conversations about why good technology is always complicit, whether that be a blood glucose monitor, the Dyson Air Wrap, a Tangle Teezer, a water purifier or Kerry's option: knitting needles. 

The book has just launched online and in stores. So you can find it at your local bookshop. We know that it stocked in Waterstones, hers. Blackwells, Pages of Hackney... and of course this wouldn't be an episode on the complicities of good technology without saying that you can also find it on Amazon. 

In this episode we talk to Nassim Parvin and Neda Atanasoski, the editors of the book Technocreep. We discuss what makes a technology creepy and the rise of so-called creepy technologies during COVID-19. Neda and Nassim argue that creepiness is associated with surveillance and that privacy is posited as the solution to so-called creepy tech. However, they highlight the way that race and gender have shaped who has the right to privacy and argue that we need to go beyond the privacy/surveillance binary when thinking about creep. Their volume explores instead how feminists are reclaiming the idea of creep, from how the slow growth of creep or creepiness challenges the tech industry's emphasis on radical innovation, to how the idea of creep is used to police what's considered normal or desirable.

In this episode we chat to Shannon Vallor, the Bailey Gifford professor in the ethics and data of AI at the University of Edinburgh and the Director for the Centre for Technomoral Futures. We talk about feminist care ethics; technologies, vices and virtues; why Aristotle believed that the people who make technology should be excluded from citizenship; and why we still don't have the kinds of robots that we imagined that we'd have in the early 2000s. We also discuss Shannon's new book, The AI Mirror, which is now available for pre-order. 

 In this episode, we talk to Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. AI ethics legends and now the co-hosts of the Mystery AI Hype Theatre 3000 podcast which is a new podcast where they dispel the hype storm around AI. Emily is a professor of linguistics at university of Washington and the co-author of that stochastic parrots paper that you may have heard of, because two very important people in the Google AI ethics team allegedly got fired over it, and that's Timnit Gebru and Meg Mitchell. And Alex Hanna is the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute known by its acronym, DAIR, which is now run by Timnit. In this episode, they argue that we should stop using the term AI altogether, and that the world might be better without text to image systems like DALL·E and Midjourney. They tell us how the AI hype agents are getting high on their own supply, and give some advice for young people going into tech careers.

This week we chat to Melissa Heikkilä, a senior tech reporter for MIT Tech review, about ChatGPT, image generation, porn, and the stories we tell about AI. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode, we talked to Rebecca Woods, a Senior Lecturer in Language and Cognition at Newcastle University.  We have an amazing chat about language learning in AI, and she tells us how language is crucial to how ChatGPT functions. She's also an expert in how children learn languages, and she compares this to teaching AI how to process languages. 

Happy holidays from your favourite jingle belles at the Good Robot podcast!  In this episode we celebrate both the holidays and Eleanor's new book, The Planetary Humanism of European Women's Science Fiction: An Experience of the Impossible, which is a history of women's utopian science fiction from 1666 to 2016. We talk about the ways that women have imagined better places and times and worse ones throughout history, as well as what utopia means politically and why we need it, lesbian bacteria, Hitchcock's The Birds, and weird deep sea fish.

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In this episode we talk to British physicist Jess Wade about the 1923 Wikipedia pages (and counting) she’s created and edited in her aim to put more women and more people of colour onto the online encyclopaedia.  

In this episode we welcome Eleanor back from Slovenia, where she was speaking at a conference on digital sovereignty. But what is digital sovereignty, and what does it mean for you and your data? 

 In this episode, we talked to Azerbaijani journalist Arzu Geybulla, a specialist on digital authoritarianism and its implications on human rights and press freedoms in Azerbaijan. She now lives in self-imposed exile in Istanbul. Aside from writing for big publications like Al Jazeera, Eurasianet, Foreign Policy Democracy Lab, she also founded Azerbaijan Internet Watch and is writing a political memoir about a lost generation of civil society artists in Azerbaijan. We chat to Arzu about Azerbaijan's use of technology to go after diasporic community members or people who've been exiled from the country, how women are more often targeted than men, subliminal propaganda, misinformation and censorship in the recent Turkish elections, and the importance of tracking and mapping internet censorship and surveillance in authoritarian states.

 In this episode, we speak to K Allado-McDowell a writer, speaker, and musician. They've written three books and an opera libretto, and they've established the artists and machine intelligence program at Google AI. We talk about good technology as healing, the relationship between psychedelics and technology, utopianism and the counter-cultural movements in the Bay Area, and the economics of Silicon Valley. 

In this episode, we talk to Giada Pistilli, Principal Ethicist at Hugging Face, which is the company that Meg Mitchell joined, following her departure from Google. Giada is also completing her PhD in philosophy and ethics of applied conversational AI at Sorbonne University. We talk about value pluralism and AI, which means building AI according to the values of different groups of people. We also explore what it means for an AI company to actually take AI ethics really seriously as well as the state of feminism in France right now

In this episode, we talk to N. Katherine Hayles who's the distinguished research professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. Her prolific research focuses on the relationship between science, literature and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. We explore her newest book, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts, and discuss how the biological concept of symbiosis can inform the relationships we have with AI; how a neural network experiences the world; and whether ChatGPT can be conscious.

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Matt Mahmoudi, a researcher and advisor on artificial intelligence and human rights at Amnesty International, and an affiliated lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. We discuss how AI is being used to survey Palestinians in Hebron and East Jerusalem, both in their bedrooms and in their streets, which Dutch and Chinese companies are supporting this surveillance, and how Israeli security forces have been pivotal to the training of US police. We also think about creative resistance projects like plastering stickers on cameras to notify passes by that they're being watched.

In this episode, we hear all about Kerry’s trip to Japan (spoiler alert: she loved it) and explore her work on anti-Asian racism and AI. Kerry explains what the very long word ‘techno-Orientalism’ means and how fears and fantasies of East Asia or the so-called ‘Orient’ shape Western approaches to technology and AI. We chat about how US sci-fi genres like cyberpunk use imagery from East and South East Asia to connote scary, dystopian futures where the ‘human’ is indistinguishable from the ‘machine’, and how this mimics old stereotypes about East Asian people as ‘mechanical’ or ‘machinic’. 

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Hayleigh Bosher, Associate Dean and Reader in intellectual property law at Brunel University and host of the podcast Whose Song is it Anyway?, a podcast on the intersections of IP [intellectual property] and the music industry. Hayleigh gives us some great insight into tomorrow's legal disputes over AI and music copyright. She tells us why AI can never create an original song, what it takes to sue a generative AI company for creating music in the style of someone, and why generative AI risks missing the point about what creativity is.

In this episode we talk to Meredith Broussard,  data journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Institute at New York University. She's also the author of Artificial Unintelligence, which made waves following its release in 2018 by claiming that AI was nothing more than really fancy math. We talk about why we need to bring a little bit more friction back into technology and her latest book More Than a Glitch, which argues that AI that's not designed to be accessible is bad for everyone, in the same way that raised curbs between the pavement and the street that you have to go down to cross the road makes urban outings difficult for lots of people, not just wheelchair users.

In this episode we chat to Grace DiIlon, Professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Department at Portland State University. Grace, an Anishinaabe cultural critic and a phenomenal storyteller in her own right, gives an overview of the fiction and science books by indigenous writers doing very cool things. We talk about apocalypse and healing, ceremonial science, and the genre of native slipstream. 

In this episode, we talk to Mar Hicks, an Associate Professor of Data Science at the University of Virginia and author of Programmed Inequality: How Britain discarded Women Technologists and Lost its Edge in computing. Hicks talks to us about the lessons that the tech industry can learn from histories of computing, for example: how sexism is an integral feature of technological systems and not just a bug that can be extracted from them; how techno-utopianism can stop us from building better technologies; when looking to the past is useful and when it's not helpful; the dangers of the 'move fast and break things' approach where you just build technology just to see what happens; and whether regulatory sandboxes are sufficient in making sure that tech isn't deployed unsafely on an unsuspecting public.