The Technically Human Podcast

Returning the Power of AI to the People

Any long-time listeners of the show know that I’m passionate about accessibility and disability technology. Technologies that support the idea that we can have an equitable world, and that creating a more accessible world makes things better not just for the group specifically considered in that technology, but for all of us, is a key idea to me. That’s why I wanted to sit down with Suman Kanuganti,  the former Co-founder and CEO of Aira Tech, a high-tech startup whose work helped pioneer a way to bridge the information gap for those who are blind or low vision. At Aira, Kanuganti transformed cities, airports, and universities across the country by helping to make those spaces accessible for people who are blind or low-vision.

After founding AIRA, Suman went on to start another company, PersonalAI, which is extending the principles of accessibility and mobility to the context of memory. In founding PersonalAI, Suman sought to create an AI to support memory, and to return data ownership back to the individual at this critical moment, when the assumptions that used to rule the web, where our personal data was the property of the companies whose products we use to move throughout digital space in our daily lives—Facebook, Google, WhatsApp—are in flux. In this conversation, we talk about the concept of memory and the transformation of this concept in the context of digital technologies; we talk about the challenges of, and possibilities, for creating accessibility technologies, and Suman shares his vision of returning data ownership to the people.

Suman Kanuganti is the CEO of PersonalAI. He holds an MBA in Entrepreneurship / Entrepreneurial Studies from the UC San Diego Rady School of Management, a Master’s in Computer Engineering from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and a Bachelor’s in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Kakatiya University, India.

Indigeneity in the Digital Age

Welcome to another episode of the "22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology" series!

In this episode, I sit down with Jason Edward Lewis to talk about how Indigenous peoples are imagining the futures while drawing upon their heritage. How can we broaden the discussions regarding technology and society to include Indigenous perspectives? How can we design and create AI that centers Indigenous concerns and accommodates a multiplicity of thought? And how can art-led technology research and the use of computational art in imagining the future?

Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media theorist, poet, and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he conducts research/creation projects exploring computation as a creative and cultural material. Lewis is deeply committed to developing intriguing new forms of expression by working on conceptual, critical, creative and technical levels simultaneously. He is the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University. Lewis was born and raised in northern California, and currently lives in Montreal.

Lewis directs the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, and co-directs the Indigenous Futures Research Centre, the Indigenous Protocol and AI Workshops, the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network, and the Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design.

Lewis’ creative and production work has been featured at Ars Electronica, Mobilefest, Elektra, Urban Screens, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, FILE and the Hawaiian International Film Festival, among other venues, and has been recognized with the inaugural Robert Coover Award for Best Work of Electronic Literature, two Prix Ars Electronica Honorable Mentions, several imagineNATIVE Best New Media awards and multiple solo exhibitions. His research interests include emergent media theory and history, and methodologies for conducting art-led technology research. In addition to being lead author on the award-winning “Making Kin with the Machines” essay and editor of the groundbreaking Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper, he has contributed to chapters in collected editions covering Indigenous futures, mobile media, video game design, machinima and experimental pedagogy with Indigenous communities.

Lewis has worked in a range of industrial research settings, including Interval Research, US West's Advanced Technology Group, and the Institute for Research on Learning, and, at the turn of the century, he founded and ran a research studio for the venture capital firm Arts Alliance.

Lewis is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada as well as a former Trudeau, Carnegie, and ISO-MIT Co-Creation Lab Fellow. He received a B.S. in Symbolic Systems (Cognitive Science) and B.A. in German Studies (Philosophy) from Stanford University, and an M.Phil. in Design from the Royal College of Art.

 

Technology and Genocide: What the Holocaust can tell us about perils of technological utopianism

Welcome back for another episode in the "22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology Series!

In this episode of the series, I speak to Dr. Eric Katz, and we take on the common utopian mythology of technology as inherently progressive, focusing specifically on the frequent slide from utopianism into terror. We talk about the uses of technology during the Holocaust and the specific ways in which scientists, architects, medical professionals, businessmen, and engineers participated in the planning and operation of the concentration and extermination camps that were the foundation of the 'final solution'. How can we think about the claims of technological progress in light of the Nazi's use of science and technology in their killing operations? And what can we learn from the Nazi past about how our commitment to a vision of technological progress can go horrifically wrong?

 

Dr. Eric Katz is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy in the Department of Humanities at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.  He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale in 1974 and a Ph.D.in Philosophy from Boston Universityin 1983.  His research focuses on environmental ethics, philosophy of technology, engineering ethics, Holocaust studies, and the synergistic connections among these fields.  He is especially known for his criticism of the policy of ecological restoration. 

Dr. Katz has published over 80 articles and essays in these fields, as well as two books: Anne Frank’s Tree: Nature’s Confrontation with Technology, Domination, and the Holocaust (White Horse Press, 2015) and Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), winner of the CHOICE book award for “Outstanding Academic Books for 1997.” He is the editor of Death by Design: Science, Technology, and Engineering in Nazi Germany (Pearson/Longman, 2006).  He has co-edited (with Andrew Light) the collection Environmental Pragmatism  (London: Routledge, 1996) and (with Andrew Light and David Rothenberg) the collection Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). He was the Book Review Editor of the journal Environmental Ethics from 1996-2014, and he was the founding Vice-President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics in 1990.  From 1991-2007 he was the Director of the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program at NJIT. His current research projects involve science, technology, and environmental policy in Nazi Germany.

Instituting Integrity: The rise of the integrity worker collective

Today I’m sitting down with Talha Baig to talk about a new to me organization, the Integrity Institute. On the show, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about what I see as a new workforce emerging in the tech sector, of people working in jobs in the tech sector to try and understand, assess, and mitigate some of the harms caused by technologies. That’s why I was excited to learn about the Integrity Institute, a cohort of engineers, product managers, researchers, analysts, data scientists, operations specialists, policy experts and more, who are coming together to leverage their combined experience and their understanding of the systemic causes of problems on the social internet to help mitigate these problems. They want to bring this experience and expertise directly to the people theorizing, building, and governing the social internet. So I wanted to talk to Talha, who hosts the Trust in Tech podcast out of the institute, about the concept, the function, and the future of integrity work.

Talha Baig is an expert on using machine learning to address platform integrity issues. He has spent 3 years as a Machine Learning Engineer reducing human, drugs, and weapon trafficking on Facebook Marketplace. He has insider knowledge on how platforms use AI for both good and bad, and shares his thoughts on his new podcast Trust in Tech, where he has in-depth conversations about the social internet with other platform integrity workers. They discuss the intersections between internet, society, culture, and philosophy with the goal of helping individuals, societies, and democracies to thrive.

How We Breathe: how technology is changing approaches to ventilation

Between 2020 and 2022, I spent a lot of time reading about ventilators. So did a lot of the country. News coverage of the pandemic talked about everything from the serious shortage in ventilators around the country to new technologies available that might help save lives by helping victims of the virus breathe.

From the pandemic that started in March of 2020, to the wildfires in California in August of that same year that made it difficult to take the outside air, I have spent a lot of time over the last few years thinking about breathing, that simple and essential activity that we’ll do, mostly unconsciously, throughout our lives. And how that activity of breathing is, at this moment in history, connected to technology.

That’s why I wanted to talk to Aurika Savickaite, an- Acute Care Nurse Practitioner and medical professional at the University of Chicago who has spent her entire career providing top-quality patient care and advocating for the use of helmet-based ventilation to improve healthcare outcomes.

Aurika is a recognized expert in noninvasive ventilation via the helmet interface and has garnered widespread respect within the medical community for her passionate work in this area. In 2014, she was involved in a successful three-year trial study at the University of Chicago Medical Center that tested the effectiveness of helmet-based ventilation in the ICU. Drawing on this experience, she authored a capstone paper on Noninvasive Positive Pressure Ventilation for the Treatment of Acute Respiratory Failure in Immunocompromised Patients, which has been instrumental in raising awareness about the benefits of this technology.

In March 2020, Aurika founded HelmetBasedVentilation.com, a website that has become a valuable resource for medical professionals seeking to learn more about the benefits of helmets and their use in treating patients with respiratory distress. Aurika continues to actively manage the website and update it with the latest research and information about helmet-based ventilation.

Today, Aurika is dedicated to educating clinicians about the use of helmet-based ventilation and she believes that the evidence-based information she provides can help save lives, shorten ICU stays, lower the workload for medical staff, and improve overall healthcare outcomes. Her goal is to promote the use of this technology in both ICU and non-ICU settings and help to make it more widely available to those who need it.

Technically Human Rights: How technologies are changing the state of human rights

Welcome back to another episode in the “22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology for the 21^st Century” series. In this episode of the series, we take a deep dive into the history of how technology intersects with human rights. My thinking on ethics and technology has human rights at its foundations, so I was particularly excited to sit down with Dr. Jay Aronson, one of the leading thinkers on science, technology, and human rights. We explore how technologies have coincided with the development of human rights in ethical and political terms, and we look at the role that technologies play in our contemporary moment in enforcing human rights--and violating them.

Dr. Jay Aronson is the founder and director of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also Professor of Science, Technology, and Society in the History Department. Aronson’s research and teaching examine the interactions of science, technology, law, media, and human rights in a variety of contexts. His current project focuses on the documentation and analysis of police-involved fatalities and deaths in custody in the United States.This work is being done through collaborations with the Pennsylvania Prison Society and Dr. Roger A. Mitchell, the Chief Medical Examiner of Washington, DC. In addition, he maintains an active interest in the use of digital evidence (especially video) in human rights investigations. In this context, he primarily facilitates partnerships between computer scientists and human rights practitioners to develop better tools and methods for acquiring, authenticating, analyzing, and archiving human rights media. Previously, Aronson spent nearly a decade examining the ethical, political, and social dimensions of post-conflict and post-disaster identification of the missing and disappeared in collaboration with a team of anthropologists, bioethicists, and forensic scientists he assembled. This work built on his doctoral dissertation, a study of the development of forensic DNA profiling within the American criminal justice system. His recent book, Who Owns the Dead? The Science and Politics of Death at Ground Zero (Harvard University Press, 2016), which analyzes the recovery, identification, and memorialization of the victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, is a culmination of this effort. Aronson has also been involved in a variety of projects with colleagues from statistics, political science, and conflict monitoring to improve the quality of civilian casualty recording and estimation in times of conflict. Aronson received his Ph.D. in the History of Science and Technology from the University of Minnesota and was both a pre- and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. His work is funded by generous grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Oak Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations.

 

The Global Technological Imaginary: Sci-Fi, Tech, and the Ethics of Representation

Welcome back to a brand new season of “Technically Human!” Today’s episode features another conversation in the "22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology" series.

I teach science fiction as a way of thinking about ethics and technology, because I fundamentally believe that before we can build anything, we first have to imagine it. Science fiction is at the core of so many of our technological innovations, offering us utopian visions of how the world could be, or how our values might be captured and catapulted by new technologies—or dystopias about how technology’s promise can go terribly, horribly wrong. So I was thrilled to talk with Professor Lisa Yaszek, one of the world’s leading experts on science fictions, for this episode, about the role of science fiction in creating a global imaginary about technology that crosses centuries, continents, and cultures.

Dr. Lisa Yaszek is Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She is particularly interested in issues of gender, race, and science and technology in science fiction across media as well as the recovery of lost voices in science fiction history and the discovery of new voices from around the globe.  

Dr. Yaszek’s books include The Self-Wired: Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary American Narrative (Routledge 2002/2014); Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (Ohio State, 2008); Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction (Wesleyan 2016); and Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (OSUP Fall 2020). Her ideas about science fiction as the premiere story form of modernity have been featured in The Washington Post, Food and Wine Magazine, and USA Today and on the AMC miniseries, James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction. A past president of the Science Fiction Research Association, Yaszek currently serves as an editor for the Library of America and as a juror for the John W. Campbell and Eugie Foster Science Fiction Awards.

Zoom Fatigue: Distance Learning and Social Engagement in the Age of Social Distancing

Welcome back to another episode of the 22 lessons on ethics and technology series, in a conversation with Dr. Judith Kalb about the growth of online education and technologies of virtual meeting.

How have our human interactions changed with the introduction, and normalization, of online meetings? How have virtual technologies transformed our relationships to one another, and to the information we exchange when we meet?  What are the ethics of learning and the transformation of what it means to learn, to teach, and to interact with our colleagues, students, and bosses online?

Dr. Judith E. Kalb is a professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and culture at the University of South Carolina. She earned a BA in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University and a joint PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Humanities at Stanford University. Dr. Kalb’s research focuses on the interactions between Russian culture and the Greco-Roman classical tradition. Her book Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890-1930, examines the image of ancient Rome in the writings of Russian modernists. Her new project focuses on Russia’s reception of Homer. An award-winning teacher and a pioneer in online teaching and pedagogy, Dr. Kalb enjoys introducing students to the incredible world of Russian culture and the larger European literary tradition of which it forms a part.  

That's all for this season of “Technically Human.” We will return with new episodes in April. In the meantime, check out our archive, of over 100 episodes of the show, featuring conversations with thinkers, critics, and leaders across fields, industries and from around the world about how we navigate our humanity in the age of technology. We’ll see you in April!

Data Feminism

Welcome back, for another episode of the “22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology” series. In this episode, I speak with Dr. Lauren Klein about the complicated relationship between data, race, and gender, and what she calls “data feminism.” What is the relationship between data visualizations, representation, and construction of categories—and difference? How have visualizations constructed race and gender? And how can a feminist data science approach help in constructing a more just and equal world?

Dr. Lauren Klein is an associate professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University. She received her A.B. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her research interests include digital humanities, data science, data studies, and early American literature. Before arriving at Emory, Klein taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech where she directed the Digital Humanities Lab.

She is currently at work on two major projects: the first, Data by Design, is an interactive book on the history of data visualization. Awarded an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, Data by Design emphasizes how the modern visualizing impulse emerged from a set of complex intellectually and politically-charged contexts in the United States and across the Atlantic.

Her second project, tentatively titled Vectors of Freedom, employs a range of quantitative methods in order to surface the otherwise invisible forms of labor, agency, and action involved in the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth-century United States.

Dr. Klein is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). This book shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people, from the nation’s first presidents to their enslaved chefs, who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States. Klein is also the co-author (with Catherine D’Ignazio) of Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), a trade book that explores the intersection of feminist thinking and data science. With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. The most recent book in this series is Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019.

The Threshold: Leading in the Age of AI

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Nick Chatrath about the crucial role that leadership plays in the future of AI development. We talk about organizational culture, the very human leaders driving technological production, and why human independent thinking matters more than ever, in the age of artificial intelligence.

Dr. Nick Chatrath is an expert in leadership and organizational transformation with the aim of helping humans flourish. He holds a doctorate from Oxford University and serves as managing director for a global leadership training firm. His book, The Threshold: Leading in the Age of AI, which comes out this week and is published by Diversion Books, offers a revolutionary framework for how leaders in all kinds of organizations can adapt to the new age of technology by leaning into the qualities and skills that make us uniquely human.

The Ethics of the Blockchain

Today’s episode features a conversation with Medha Parlikar, about the ethics of the blockchain and cryptocurrency. We talk about the vision of what cryptocurrency could be, what dangers it might pose to our values, and what the future of cryptocurrency might look like in a web-3 world.

Medha Parlikar is co-founder and chief technology officer of CasperLabs. She has more than 30 years of tech experience and is one of the top women leaders in blockchain. She is a prolific speaker, having spoken at several global conferences including Davos, LA Blockchain Summit, and NFT.LA , among others. Medha is a mentor and has worked with organizations including Strongurl to elevate and encourage women in blockchain/tech.

A quick note: Medha and I recorded this episode right before some really big things happened in the crypto world. Like the crypto crash in December of 2022 when it was revealed that the notorious Crypto entrepreneur, investor, and billionaire “SBF,” or Sam Bankman Fried, the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and associated trading firm Alameda Research, was discovered to have likely committed massive fraud. The discovery led to a high-profile collapse resulting in chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2022, and a massive shake to the crypto industry. Things might have changed in the crypto world a bit since then, but even so, neither blockchain technology, or the place of cryptocurrencies in the financial industry, seem to be going anywhere, and I think the conversation stands up to time. You be the judge! 

Digital Democracy: How Tech Shapes Democratic Participation and Social Justice

In this week’s edition of the “22 lessons on ethics and technology series,” I speak with Dr. Nassim Parvin. We talk about the ethical and political dimensions of design and technology, especially as related to values of democratic participation and social justice. How have digital technologies impacted, and how do they continue to impact, the future of social and collective interactions, particularly in the arenas of political participation and social justice? How do the designs of technologies create platforms for participation--or inhibit it? And how have the values of democracy, equity, and justice nfluence the way we imagine and design the technologies that we claim will serve these values?

Dr. Nassim Parvin is an Associate Professor at the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Design and Social Justice Studio. Her research explores the ethical and political dimensions of design and technology, especially as related to questions of democracy and justice. Rooted in pragmatist ethics and feminist theory, she critically engages emerging digital technologies—such as smart cities or artificial intelligence—in their wide-ranging and transformative effect on the future of collective and social interactions.

Her interdisciplinary research integrates theoretically-driven humanistic scholarship and design-based inquiry, including publishing both traditional scholarly papers and creating digital artifacts that illustrate how humanistic values may be cultivated to produce radically different artifacts and infrastructures. Her scholarship appears across disciplinary venues in design (such as Design Issues), Human-Computer Interaction (such as ACM CSCW), Science and Technology Studies (such as Science, Technology, and Human Values), as well as philosophy (such as Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy). Her designs have been deployed at non-profit organizations such as the Mayo Clinic and exhibited in venues such as the Smithsonian Museum, receiving multiple awards and recognitions.

She is an editor of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, an award-winning journal in the expanding interdisciplinary field of STS and serve on the editorial board of Design Issues. My teaching has also received multiple recognitions inclusive of the campus-wide 2017 GATECH CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award.

Dr. Parvin received her PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University. She holds an MS in Information Design and Technology from Georgia Tech and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran.

Computing Women: Gender Disparity in STEM Education

We’re back for another installment of the “22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology” special series. In this week’s episode of the series, I am joined by Dr. Mar Hicks. This episode tells the story of labor and gender discrimination in the tech industry. Dr. Hicks explains the historical background of gendered technological production that has influenced the development of computing. In her historical outline, she explains that while women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s, American and British computing in the 1970s experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s. What can this history teach us about the need for gender equity in technological production now? And what are the consequences of continued gender inequity for our future?

Professor Mar Hicks is a historian of technology, gender, and labor, specializing in the history of computing. Dr. Hicks’s book, Programmed Inequality (MIT Press, 2017) investigates how Britain lost its early lead in computing by discarding the majority of their computer workers and experts--simply because they were women. Dr. Hicks’s current project looks at transgender citizens’ interactions with the computerized systems of the British welfare state in the 20th century, and how these computerized systems determined whose bodies and identities were allowed to exist. Hicks's work studies how collective understandings of progress are defined by competing discourses of social value and economic productivity, and how technologies often hide regressive ideals while espousing "revolutionary" or "disruptive" goals. Dr. Hicks is also co-editing a volume on computing history called Your Computer Is On Fire (MIT Press, 2020). Dr. Hicks runs the Digital History Lab at Illinois Tech.

Human First AI

In this week's episode, I am joined by Dr. Christopher Nguyen. We talk about the emerging concept of "human first AI," and the changing terrain of both AI ethics, and AI development. We imagine what a human-first approach to AI might look like, and what gets in the way of developing an ethical approach to AI in the tech industry.

Christopher Nguyen’s career spans four decades, and he has become an industry leader in the field of Engineering broadly, and AI specifically. Since fleeing Vietnam in 1978, he has founded multiple tech companies and has played key roles in everything from building the first flash memory transistors at Intel to spearheading the development of Google Apps as its first Engineering Director. As a professor, Christopher co-founded the Computer Engineering program at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, or HKUST. He earned his Bachelor of Science. degree from the University of California-Berkeley, summa cum lauday, and a PhD. from Stanford University. Today, he’s become an outspoken proponent of the emerging field of “AI Engineering” and a thought leader in the space of ethical, human-centric AI. With his latest company, Aitomatic, he’s hoping to redefine how companies approach AI in the context of life-critical, industrial applications.

Science for the 21st Century: Understanding Systems Biology

This week, I turn my mic over to a guest host, for an interview with Dr. Jared Roach about the growing field of systems biology, an interdisciplinary field of study taking over the biological sciences, focused on complex interactions within biological systems. How can we update the study of biology for the 21st century? How can computational and mathematical analysis help us understand biological systems? And what can we newly see or understand about ourselves if we the way that complex networks interact within our bodies? 

Today's host, Zoë Gray, is a math major honor student at Cal Poly. She has a background in electrical engineering, and she is particularly interested in considering the pace of technological development, and the ethics of a system of technological production that moves so quickly.  

Dr. Jared Roach, MD, PhD is a Senior Research Scientist at The Institute for Systems Biology. Starting as a graduate student in the 1990s, Roach worked on the Human Genome Project from its early days through the end of the project. Dr. Roach contributed strategic and algorithmic designs to the Human Genome Project, including the pairwise end-sequencing strategy. He was a Senior Fellow at the Department of Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington from 1999-2000. In 2001, he became a Research Scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology. His group currently applies systems biology and genomics to complex diseases, focusing on the systems biology architecture of Alzheimer’s disease.