The Technically Human Podcast

High Tech Society: IEEE's vision for ethical technological advancement

In this episode of the show, I speak with Tom Coughlin, the standing President and CEO of IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. We discuss the IEEE's vision of technological innovatinon, what it really means to "benefit humanity" through tech, and how the tech sector can, and should, move toward a values-driven approach to innovation.

Tom Coughlin is an IEEE Life Fellow, past president of IEEE-USA, past director of IEEE Region 6, past chair of the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Section, past chair of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley and is also active with the Storage Networking Industry Association and Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Coughlin is also president of Coughlin Associates, a digital storage analyst and business and technology consultant. He has over 40 years in the data storage industry with engineering and senior management positions at several companies. Coughlin Associates consults, publishes books and market and technology reports (including The Media and Entertainment Storage Report and an Emerging Memory Report), and puts on digital storage-oriented events. He is a regular storage and memory contributor for Forbes.com and media and entertainment organization websites.

Debugging Division: The Architecture of Bridge-Building Social Media

Today we are bringing you a conversation featuring one technologist who is rethinking and reshaping social media—to build platforms that spark empathy and joy, not division and hate.

Vardon Hamdiu is the co-founder and head of Sparkable, a young nonprofit organization that builds a social media platform aimed at bridging divides.

Growing up immersed in diverse cultures, Vardon has always been a bridge-builder who navigates between worlds. His family history has exposed him to the devastating consequences of communication breakdowns between ethnic communities and the outbreak of war. These experiences have profoundly shaped his understanding of the importance of empathy and social cohesion.

Over the past decade, Vardon has worked on the communications team of a Swiss President, studied to become a teacher, spent an exchange semester in South Africa, and engaged with refugees facing often traumatic circumstances. These experiences made him acutely aware of the enormous disconnect between the information we consume online and the lived realities of many people around the globe. He became deeply passionate about exploring why today’s social media platforms are often dysfunctional and how these powerful systems, which govern our collective attention, could be constructed differently. Driven by this vision, he made the pivotal decision to quit his job, drop out of his studies, and launch Sparkable, aiming to foster a healthier online environment.

The Algorithm as Witness: Reimagining Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age

In this episode of "Technically Human," I bring you a conversation with one of the great thinkers working at the intersection of ethics and technology, Professor Todd Presner, for an episode about his new book, Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory. In the conversation, we talk about new direction in Holocaust memory and scholarship, how technologies are enabling new approaches, questions, and interpretations of major historical events, and how digital technologies might help us imagine a new ethics of interpretation of history and memory. 

Dr. Todd Presner is Chair of UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies. Previously, he was the chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program (2011-21), and from 2011-2018, he served as the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. He holds the Michael and Irene Ross Chair in the UCLA Division of the Humanities. His research focuses on European intellectual and cultural history, Holocaust studies, visual culture, and digital humanities. Dr. Presner’s newest book was published with Princeton University Press: Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory  (Fall 2024). 

Game On, Hate Off: Navigating the Virtual Frontier

In this week's episode of the show, I speak with Daniel Kelley about the culture of online gaming, and the unique set of challenges in the gaming space, related to hate, harassment, and extremism. We talk about the possibilities, and limitations, of regulating that space, and what the landscape of gaming might foretell about the future of increasingly online lives that we live, as more and more of our social interactions take place virtually. We talk about how to make those spaces safer and more inclusive, and whether moderation is the right tack to take in developing that more inclusive future, as well as what other strategies for cultivating such spaces might be possible.

 

Daniel Kelley is the Director of Strategy and Operations of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center for Technology and Society (CTS). CTS works through research and advocacy to fight for justice and fair treatment for all in digital social spaces from social media to online games and beyond. For the last five years, Daniel has been the lead author of the first nationally representative survey of hate, harassment, and positive social experiences in online games. He is also the co-author of the Disruption and Harms in Online Games Framework, a resource to define harms in online multiplayer games together with members of the game industry coalition the Fair Play Alliance. He also leads CTS’ tech accountability research efforts, such as its Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial Report Card, which looks at ways to create research-grounded advocacy products to inform the public about the nature of hate and harassment online and to hold tech companies accountable.

Art, Tech, Self: Untangling the Human Algorithm

Hi Technically Human listeners! Welcome back to another episode of the show. Today I'm sitting down with Alva Noë. We talk about his new book, The Entanglement, and the relationship between technology, philosophy, and art.

In The Entanglement, Professor Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature. Neither biology, cognitive science, nor AI can tell a complete story of us, and we can no more pin ourselves down than we can fix or settle on the meaning of an artwork. Even more, art and philosophy are the means to set ourselves free, at least to some degree, from convention, habit, technology, culture, and even biology.

Dr. Alva Noë is a philosopher of mind whose research and teaching focus is perception and consciousness, and the philosophy of art. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); Varieties of Presence (Harvard, 2012); Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2015), Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (Oxford, 2019) and, most recently, Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (Oxford 2021).  He holds a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Columbia University; a Bachelors of Philosophy. from University of Oxford;  and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He teaches in the philosophy department of UC Berkeley.

The QWERTY Keyboard and the Chinese Computer

In this episode of the show, I speak with Dr. Thomas Mullaney about his new book, The Chinese Computer. In the book, Dr. Mullaney outlines the history and evolution of Chinese language computing technology, and explores how the technology of the QWERTY keyboard changed this history of computing. We talk about how the structure of language has shaped the history of digital technologies, and Dr. Mullaney explains how China and the non-Western world—because of the “hypographic” technologies they had to invent in order to join the personal computing revolution— helps us understand the relationship between the human mind and the technologies it creates.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy, at Stanford University. He is also the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow. 

He is the author or lead editor of 7 books, including The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, and The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing. 

His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University.

Agree to Disagree: Are we living in an age of techno-pessimism?

Hi Technically Human Listeners!

After a long summer break we are back with a brand season and brand new episodes of the show! To kick off the season, we are bringing you an episode that I’m calling “agree to disagree,” with two guests, Robert D. Atkinson and David Moschella, who join me to argue that the critiques of tech circulating in our environment are full of “myths and scapegoats.” That’s the title of their new book, “Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths About Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy,” published this year by Pallgrave McMillan. The book argues that our era of tech critique, and the impetus for regulation that many critics advocate for and recommend, is misguided, and that our era is one of general pessimism toward AI, in which our society largely overlooks the benefits of this technology. In their words, quote, “These attitudes both reduce the enthusiasm for innovation and the efforts by government needed to spur it.”

Well, as the title of the episode suggests, agree to disagree, both on the facts and the merits of the argument! A key component of this show is my commitment to talking to people with whom I disagree, and foregrounding civil discourse with people whose ideas differ from my own. My hope is that you, the listeners, can weigh out their arguments against my own and see where you land. As always, if you have thoughts about the show, please get in touch!

Robert D. Atkinson is the founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He is an internationally recognized scholar and a widely published author whom The New Republic has named one of the “three most important thinkers about innovation,” Washingtonian Magazine has called a “tech titan,” Government Technology Magazine has judged to be one of the 25 top “doers, dreamers and drivers of information technology,” and the Wharton Business School has given the “Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award.”

A sought-after speaker and valued adviser to policymakers around the world, Atkinson’s books include Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths about Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Mythology of Small Business (MIT Press, 2018); Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage (Yale, 2012); Supply-Side Follies: Why Conservative Economics Fails, Liberal Economics Falters, and Innovation Economics is the Answer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); and The Past And Future Of America’s Economy: Long Waves Of Innovation That Power Cycles Of Growth (Edward Elgar, 2005).

President Clinton appointed Atkinson to the Commission on Workers, Communities, and Economic Change in the New Economy; the Bush administration appointed him chair of the congressionally created National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission; the Obama administration appointed him to the National Innovation and Competitiveness Strategy Advisory Board; as co-chair of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s China-U.S. Innovation Policy Experts Group; to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship; and the Trump administration appointed him to the G7 Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence. The Biden administration appointed him as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information, and a member of the Export-Import Bank of the United States' Council on China Competition.

Atkinson holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hil.

David Moschella is a nonresident senior fellow at ITIF. Previously, he was a research fellow at Leading Edge Forum (LEF), where he explored the global business impact of digital technologies, with a particular focus on disruptive business models, industry restructuring and machine intelligence. For more than a decade before LEF, David was in charge of worldwide research for IDC, the largest market analysis firm in the information technology industry, responsible for the company’s global technology industry forecasts and insights.

A well-known international speaker, writer, and thought leader, David’s books include Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths about Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Seeing Digital—A Visual Guide to the Industries, Organizations, and Careers of the 2020s (DXC Technology, 2018), Customer-Driven IT (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), and Waves of Power (Amacom, 1997). He has lectured and consulted on digital trends and strategies in more than 30 countries, working with leading customers and suppliers alike.

The Ethics and Technology of Teams in the Age of AI

Today I’m speaking with Projjal Ghatak, CEO & Co-Founder At Onloop, about the ethics of teamwork, collaboration, and providing constructive feedback.

Projjal founded OnLoop in 2020 to create a category called Collaborative Team Development (CTD) to fundamentally reinvent how hybrid teams are assessed and developed,  after over a decade of frustration with clunky, traditional enterprise performance management and learning processes and tools that were either hated or ignored by his teams at companies like Uber and Accenture where he spent many years.

Prior to founding OnLoop, Projjal spent three and a half years at Uber in a variety of roles including leading Strategy & Operations for Business Development globally, leading Strategy & Planning for the APAC rides business, and GM of the Philippines rides business. Besides Uber, he also spent some time raising debt and equity from New York hedge funds for an industrial conglomerate (Essar), in strategy consulting in South East Asia (Accenture), and in early-stage companies in Latin America (BlueKite, El Market) prior to that. He holds an MBA from Stanford University.

Ethics Works: A day in the life of an ethics worker in tech

In this episode of the show, I speak with Sarah Fairweather about what it is like to be an ethics worker. We talk about how ethical work can sync up with business practices, how to develop a culture of ethics in industry, and Sarah talks me through what it is like to practice ethics as a day job.

Sarah Fairweather is the Senior Program Manager of Ethics at WellSaid Labs, shaping Responsible AI for synthetic voice technology and designing policies for WellSaid Labs’ ethical AI deployment. She leads the effort at WellSaid to ensure that every team in the organization is equipped with the tools and skills they need to make ethics-informed designs and decisions in support of responsible innovation. Before WellSaid Labs, she was the Director of Professional Learning at Code.org where she designed equity-focused K-12 professional development experiences and co-led the company’s first Equity Working Group.

Feel the Burn: A new novel explores the financial crisis in tech

In this episode of the show, I sit down with author Mike Trigg about his new novel, Burner. Mike Trigg is an author, a novelist, a tech executive, a tech founder, and an investor in dozens of technology start-up companies for over twenty-five years. His first novel, Bit Flip, was released in August 2022 to critical acclaim, lauded by the San Francisco Chronicle as a “twisty, acerbic corporate thriller.” His work has been featured in Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, and Literary Hub. He has been a contributor to TechCrunch, Entrepreneur, and Fast Company, and frequently posts on his author site, www.miketrigg.com.

 

Burner is a mind-bending thriller that dives headfirst into our modern online zeitgeist of social media disinformation, toxic internet subcultures, and the human need for belonging, purpose, and love in an age of distorted electronic personas. The story confronts the loss of the American dream and the societal factors behind it, including wealth inequality, lack of opportunity, and cultural prejudices. At the same time, it is a tragic love story, asking the question of whether real human connection is inherently incompatible with our addiction to online esteem.

Dr. Strangelanguage: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Generative AI in Medicine

In this episode of the show, I sit down with Dr. Robert Pearl to talk about his new book, ChatGPT, MD: How AI-Empowered Patients & Doctors Can Take Back Control of American Medicine, a book he co-authored with...ChatGPT! We talk about the deep fractures and problems in American health care that Generative AI may be positioned to solve, the changing landscape of health care, and  the possibility that Amazon, Google, or OpenAI may become the nation's latest healthcare providers.

 

For 18 years, Dr. Robert Pearl, MD served as CEO of The Permanente Medical Group (Kaiser Permanente). He is also former president of The Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group. In these roles he led 10,000 physicians, 38,000 staff and was responsible for the nationally recognized medical care of 5 million Kaiser Permanente members on the west and east coasts. 

He is a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on healthcare strategy, technology, and leadership. Pearl is board-certified in plastic and reconstructive surgery, receiving his medical degree from Yale, followed by a residency in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stanford University.

He’s the author of three books: Mistreated: Why We Think We’re Getting Good Healthcare—And Why We’re Usually Wrong, a Washington Post bestseller (2017); Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors & Patients, a Kirkus star recipient (2021); and his newest book ChatGPT, MD: How AI-Empowered Patients & Doctors Can Take Back Control of American Medicine (April 2024). All profits from sales of his books go to Doctors Without Borders.

Dr. Pearl is a LinkedIn “Top Voice” in healthcare and host of the popular podcasts Fixing Healthcare and Medicine: The Truth. He publishes two monthly healthcare newsletters reaching 50,000+ combined subscribers. A frequent keynote speaker, Pearl has presented at The World Healthcare Congress, the Commonwealth Club, TEDx, HLTH, NCQA Quality Talks, the National Primary Care Transformation Summit, American Society of Plastic Surgeons, and international conferences in Brazil, Australia, India, and beyond.

Pearl’s insights on generative AI in healthcare have been featured in Associated Press, USA Today, MSN, FOX Business, Forbes, Fast Company, WIRED, Global News, Modern Healthcare, Medscape, Medpage Today, AI in Healthcare, Doximity, Becker’s Hospital Review, the Advisory Board, the Journal of AHIMA, and more.

Taking the Temperature of AI: Measuring AI's Environmental Impact

In this episode of the show, I talk to Dr. Tamara Kneese about Data and Society's initiative to develop standards and ways to measure the environmental impact of AI. I talk to Dr. Kneese about her work at the Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab (AIMLab), we talk about the links and frictions between tech and climate change, and we consider how AI may be changing how we experience not only life, but also our experience of death.

Dr. Tamara Kneese is Project Director of Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab, where she is also a Senior Researcher. For the 2023-2024 academic year, she's a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. Before joining D&S, she was Lead Researcher at Green Software Foundation, Director of Developer Engagement on the Green Software team at Intel, and Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco.

Dr. Kneese holds a PhD in Media, Culture and Communication from NYU and is the author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond. In her spare time, she is a volunteer with Tech Workers Coalition.

Brain Storm: The new technologies that are changing how we think about brain function

In today's episode, I sit down with Dr. Peter Bonutti to talk about the ways in which technologies are revolutionizing our understanding of the brain, and how they may be used to treat crippling brain disorders such as stroke and seizures.

Dr. Peter Bonutti, M.D. is a surgeon, inventor, author, professor, consultant, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Bonutti Research, a medical device incubator that has developed products and technology used around the world. He maintains his clinical and surgical practice, focusing on the integration of robotics into surgical procedures. He is the founder and president of Releave, a company whose technology has already been clinically proven in more than 700 patients for the treatment of a brain related disorder. Realeve’s ultimate goal is to solve one of the critical remaining barriers in brain health: the ability to bypass the brain's natural barrier preventing the delivery of effective drugs for stroke, cancer treatment, and other degenerative orders. Dr. Bonutti is a pioneer in Minimally Invasive Surgery, has over 500 patents and applications, more than 700 licenses and multiple FDA-approved products to date. Major corporations leveraging his technology include Hitachi, Kyphon, Covidien, US Surgical, Biomet, Arthrocare, Synthes, Zimmer/Biomet and Stryker. He is a prolific speaker, lecturing internationally, and has trained over 100 surgeons on his surgical techniques. In his career, Dr. Bonutti has received more than a dozen industry honors and awards for his achievements. Dr. Bonutti earned his medical degree at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and completed his Orthopaedic Surgery Residency at Cleveland Clinic Foundation with international fellowships in Canada, Australia, and Austria.

The Singularity of Hope: The case for AI optimism

Today I am interviewing Dr. Sam Sammane about his forthcoming book, "The Singularity of Hope”, which aims to guide readers through the challenges and opportunities of the AI era, advocating for a harmonious fusion of human intelligence and machine capabilities.

Dr. Sammane envisions a world where the rapid advancements in AI and technology are harnessed for the greater good, leading to a new age of global prosperity. He is a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple success exits, and an academic with a rich blend of expertise in applied physics, digital circuit design, nanotechnology, formal methods, life science, and business. Holding a Bachelor's degree and Master's degree in Applied Physics, a Master's degree in Digital Circuit Design, and a Ph.D. in Nanotechnology, Dr. Sammane has authored several articles on high-order logic, symbolic simulation, and automatic theorem proving. 

Beyond the academic realm, Dr. Sammane has co-founded and led multiple successful companies in the life sciences, IT and real estate industries. He resides in southern California with his wife and three daughters.

The Count: The politics of data science

Welcome back to a brand-new season of Technically Human! We’re thrilled to be back with new episodes of the show. We are kicking off the new season, and the new year, with an episode featuring one of my favorite thinkers, Dr. Deborah Stone, to talk about what it means to count—that is to say, what it means to measure, and what it means to matter.

Dr. Deborah Stone is currently a Lecturer in Public Policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also an Honorary Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she occasionally teaches as a visiting professor. She has taught at Duke University in the Institute of Policy Sciences (1974-77); MIT Department of Political Science (1977-86); Brandeis University Heller School, where she held the David R. Pokross Chair of Law and Social Policy (1986-99); and Dartmouth College Government Department, where she was Research Professor of Government (1999-2014). She has taught as a visitor at Yale, Tulane, University of Bremen, Germany, and National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT.

Stone is the author of Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision-Making, which has been published in multiple editions (W.W. Norton), translated into five languages, and won the Aaron Wildavsky Award from the American Political Science Association for its enduring contribution to policy studies. She has also authored three other books: The Samaritan’s Dilemma (Nation Books, 2008), The Disabled State (Temple University Press 1984), and The Limits of Professional Power (University of Chicago Press, 1980). She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Health Politics, and Policy and Law (of which she was a founder); Women, Politics and Public Policy, and Critical Policy Studies. In addition to numerous articles in academic journals and book chapters, she writes for general audiences. She was the founding senior editor of The American Prospect and her articles have appeared there as well as in in Nation, New Republic, Boston Review, Civilization, Natural History, and Natural New England.

Stone has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard Law School, German Marshall Fund, Open Society Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She was a Phi Beta Kappa Society Visiting Scholar in 2005-2006, and a Senior Fellow at Demos from 2008-2012. She has served as a consultant to the Social Security Administration, the Institute of Medicine, the Office of Technology Assessment, and the Human Genome Project. Stone is also the recipient of numerous professional awards, including, the 2013 Charles M. McCoy Career Achievement Award for a progressive political scientist who has had a long successful career as a writer, teacher, and activist (American Political Science Association).