Explore every episode of the podcast The Good Robot

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between the US and the EU regulatory landscape, why this idea that AI is simply outstripping regulation is an outdated maxim, and then finally, their policy wish list for 2024.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 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 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 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. 

 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 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.

Welcome to this week’s Hot Take, where your hosts Kerry and Eleanor give their candid opinion on the latest in tech news. This week they discuss the rebranding of Twitter as X and how people like Elon Musk have an outsized impact on the daily technologies that we use, on the kinds of technologies that get made and created, and on the kinds of needs that get prioritized when it comes to user preferences and desires. From X to the Barbie movie, they explore why diversity matters in the tech industry, as well as why trying to understand what ‘diversity’ is and what it means in context is much trickier than it sounds. 

 We talk to Peter Hershock, director of the Asian Studies Development Program and coordinator of the Humane AI Initiative at the East-West Center in Honolulu. We talked to Peter about the kinds of misconceptions and red herrings that shape public interpretations of machine consciousness and what we can gain from approaching the question of machine consciousness from a Buddhist perspective. Our journey takes us from Buddhist teaching about relational dynamics that tell us that nothing exists independently from someone or something else to how to make the best tofu larb. 

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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In this week’s Good Robot Hot Takes, Kerry and Eleanor talk about a group of scientists in Zurich that tried to measure a correlation between brain activity and sexuality using AI. This smacks not only of previous attempts to use AI to try and ‘read’ people’s sexuality, but also of dangerous 19th and 20th century race science. We talk about how the language of science is weaponised against queer people, why there are no real scientific foundations to using AI to detect sexuality, and why science needs to think about sexuality not as fixed or static but wild and infinite. 

In this episode we chat to Karen Levy, Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University and author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance. Karen is an expert in the changing face of long distance driving - she spent ten years doing research with truck drivers. So she’s been looking at how surveillance and automation are changing what it means to be a  trucker in the USA. We talk about how truckers are responding to new AI technologies monitoring their behaviour, and what the future holds for the trucking industry. We recorded this a while ago so it’s an audio-only episode. 

Welcome to our third episode of the Good Robot Hot Takes. Every two weeks Kerry and Eleanor will be giving their hot take on some of the biggest issues in tech. If you’re a graduate or a jobseeker, this is the episode for you because this week we talk about AI that’s being used for recruitment. That’s right, AI is being used to assess your performance in an interview. In fact companies are claiming that their tools can read your personality by looking at your face, and that this can strip away a candidate’s race and gender.  We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode we chat with Ofri Cnaani, an artist and associate lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Artists are doing amazing things in tech spaces, not just working with tech but also using art to explore how our world is infused with data. Ofri discusses some of her projects with us, including her investigation of the fire that destroyed the National Museum of Brazil in 2018, which prompted a massive crowdsourced appeal for photos of museum exhibits taken by visitors, and her Statistical Bodies project, which humorously looks at what kind of data about bodies aren't yet useful, like jealousy and social fatigue, or what is impossible to capture about the body. 

Welcome to our second episode of the Good Robot Hot Takes, where every week Kerry and Eleanor give you their spicy opinions about top issues in tech. This week we talk about science fiction films, why we love Aliens and Sigourney Weaver, how female AI scientists and professionals are represented on screen, how this contributes to the unequal gender dynamics of the AI industry, why Iron Man's Tony Stark sucks, and why he and Ex Machina's Nathan Bateman aren’t just bad apples but an epidemic of conceited AI scientists on screen.

From using computers to process the work of Thomas Aquinas to using facial recognition to compare portraits of Shakespeare, computational techniques have long been applied to humanities research. These projects are now called the digital humanities, and today we’re interviewing two major figures in this discipline. We talk to Dr Sharon Webb, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex, History Department and a Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab, and Caroline Bassett, Professor of Digital Humanities in the Faculty of English and the Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge. They tell us about full stack feminism, hidden histories of women's involvement in computing, and what it means to bring feminism into the study of technology.  

Welcome to our new format: The Good Robot Hot Takes! In these fun, lively, conversational episodes, we (Eleanor and Kerry) discuss some of the biggest issues in tech, from ChatGPT, and the sexy fembot problem in Hollywood film, to why predictive policing is a scam and why gender recognition is garbage.

This week we're talking about the Future of Life Institute's open letter calling for an AI 'pause' in the wake of ChatGPT. We explore framing large language models as 'foundational' and therefore inevitable, the dangers of AI 'race' rhetoric, why AI's long term harms are given way more attention than its more immediate ones, and how race and gender shape what 'counts' as existential risk.

EDIT - This episode has been re-uploaded to make a correction. Bostrom is associated with the Future of Life Institute, but he is not the Founder or a Founding member, as we originally stated. 

In this episode we chat to Laura Forlano, Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology. This is a special episode because Laura reads us some of her work on life as a Type 1 diabetic, or in her words, a disabled cyborg calibrated to an insulin pump. Laura’s writing gives us a different kind of insight into good technology, tech that in her case literally keeps her alive, but can also let you down in alarming ways. 

This special bonus episode was recorded at the AI Anarchies conference in Berlin. We held a workshop exploring with participants what good technology means for them, and why thinking in terms of ‘good technology’ actually limits us. Two amazing participants offered to be interviewed by us, Christina Lu, who at the time was a software engineer at DeepMind and is now a researcher on the Antikythera program and Grace Turtle, a designer, artist, and researcher that uses experimentation and play, like Table Top Games, LARPing, and simulation design to encourage us to transition to more just and sustainable futures. 

In this episode we chat to Louise Hickman, an activist and scholar based at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. Louise talks to us about stenography, the process of  transcribing speech into shorthand. You may be familiar with this from having seen court reporters write a transcription of a tribunal or case, but many stenographers also do crucial access work to create live captions of someone speaking. Stenographers create their own online dictionaries and then access words really quickly using keyboard shortcuts. We explore the political decision making process of captioning and why this matters. 

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 discuss the new generation of Chinese science fiction with two of the genre's most brilliant translators, editors, writers and researchers. They both played a key role in The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, an anthology of science fiction written by Chinese women and non-binary writers that aims to overwrite stereotypes about who Chinese science fiction writers are and what they write about. Regina is a science fiction writer who works for the Co-Futures project at the University of Oslo and Emily is a writer and translator doing a PhD at Yale in East Asian Languages and Literature. 

In this episode we talk to Bridget Boakye, the artificial intelligence (AI) policy leader at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Bridget is an expert in how AI is impacting Africa and the major challenges in implementing AI use across the continent. She tells us about what good technology means in the contexts in which she works and the benefits and drawbacks of Google and other Big Tech companies operating in Africa. 

In this episode we talk to Pedro Oliveira, a researcher and sound artist based at the  Akademie der Kunste in Berlin. Pedro does amazing work investigating border control technologies that listen to asylum seekers and claim to be able to discern where they came from from the way they speak. In this episode we discuss why these kinds of technologies rely on the assumption that there is an authentic way that a migrant from a particular place should sound. Our quest to unravel vocal 'authenticity' takes us through frequency, timbre, and 1960s synthesisers from East Berlin.  

We all know about Microsoft Excel and Outlook, but did you know about the kinds of tech they develop in and sell to the Global South? These include escape management system for jails, police cars inbuilt with sensor data, and software that supports facial recognition systems. To tell us more about this, we talk to Dr Michael Kwet, a visiting fellow of the Information Society project at Yale Law School and a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. His extensive investigation of how Global South economies are increasingly dependent on Big Tech companies like Microsoft shows that they get bad deals when they hand over valuable raw materials and labour. They end up seeing little of the vast wealth that Big Tech amasses through this unfair exchange. His work has focuses on South Africa, where economies, schools and prisons rely on Microsoft software and services. 

In this episode we speak to Abeba Birhane, senior research fellow at Mozilla, about how cognition extends beyond the brain, why why we need to turn questions like ‘why aren't there enough black women in computing’ on their head and actually transform computing cultures, and why human behaviour is a complex adaptive system that can’t always be modelled computationally. 

In this episode we talk to Arjun Subramonian, a Computer Science PhD student at UCLA conducting machine learning research and a member of the grassroots organisation Queer in AI. In this episode we discuss why they joined Queer in AI, how Queer in AI is helping build artificial intelligence directed towards better, more inclusive, and queer futures, why ‘bias’ cannot be seen as a purely technical problem, and why Queer in AI rejected Google sponsorship. 

In this episode we chat to Su Lin Blodgett, a researcher at Microsoft Research in Montreal, on whether you can use AI to measure discrimination, why AI can never be de-biased, and how AI shows us that categories like gender and race are not as clear cut as we think they are.

Ever worried that AI will wipe out humanity? Ever dreamed of merging with AI? Well these are the primary concerns of transhumanism and existential risk, which you may not have heard of, but whose key followers include Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence. But Joshua Schuster and Derek Woods have pointed out that there are serious problems with transhumanism’s dreams and fears, including its privileging of human intelligence above all other species, its assumption that genocides are less important than mass extinction events, and its inability to be historical when speculating about the future. They argue that if we really want to make the world and its technologies less risky, we should instead encourage cooperation, and participation in social and ecological issues. 

Science fiction writer Chen Qiufan ( Stanley Chen), author of Waste Tide, discusses the feedback loop between science fiction and innovation, what happened when he went to live with shamans in China, how science fiction can also be a psychedelic, and why it’s significant that linear time arrived from the West and took over ideas of circular or recurring time between Chinese dynasties. 

In this episode, the historian of science Lorraine Daston explains why science has long been allergic to emotion, which is seen to be the enemy of truth. Instead, objective reason is science’s virtue. She explores moments where it’s very difficult for scientists not to get personally involved, like when you’re working on your pet hypothesis or theory, which might lead you to select data that confirms your hypothesis, or when you’re confronted with some anomalies in your dataset that threaten a beautiful and otherwise perfect theory. But Lorraine also reminds us that the desire for objectivity can itself be an emotion, as it was when Victorian scientists expressed their heroic masculine self-restraint. She also explains why we should only be using AI for the parts of our world which are actually predictable, and how it’s not just engineers who debug algorithms, now that task is being outsourced to us - the consumers - as we’re the ones who are now forced to flag downstream effects when things go wrong.

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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How should governments collect personal data? In this episode, we talk to Dr Kevin Guyan about the census, and the best ways of asking people to identify themselves. We discuss why surveys that you fill in by hand offer less restrictive options for self-identification than online forms, and how queer communities are not just identified but produced through the counting of a census. As Kevin reminds us, who does the counting affects who is counted. We also discuss why looking at histories of identifying as heterosexual and cisgender is also beneficial to queer communities. 

In this episode we speak to two brilliant professors here at Cambridge, Mónica Moreno Figueroa and Ella McPherson about a data project they launched at the University of Cambridge to track everyday racism in the university. We discuss using technology for social good without being obsessed with the technology itself and the importance of tracking how racism dehumanises people, confuses us about each other, and causes physical suffering, which students of colour have to deal with on top of the ordinary stress of their uni degree. 

In this episode, we talk to Louise Amoore, professor of political geography at Durham and expert in how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Louise tells us how politics and society have shaped computer science practices. This means that when AI clusters data and creates features and attributes, and when its results are interpreted, it reflects a particular view of the world. In the same way, social views about what is normal and abnormal in the world are being expressed through computer science practices like deep learning.  She emphasises that computer science can solve ethical problems with help from the humanities, which means that if you work with literature, languages, linguistics, geography, politics and sociology, you can help create AIs that model the world differently. 

In this episode we talk to Sarah Franklin, a leading figure in feminist science studies and the sociology of reproduction. In this tour de force of IVF ethics and feminism through the ages, Sarah discusses ethical issues in reproductive technologies, how they compare to AI ethics, how feminism through the ages can help us, Shulamith Firestone’s techno-feminist revolution, and the violence of anti-trans movement across the world.