The Technically Human Podcast

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! 

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this week's “22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology" special series, I sit down with Dr. Evelynn Hammonds to talk about how race and gender have shaped the histories of science, medicine, and technological development. We explore the divisions between investigations of gender within scientific and technological inquiry, and race within these same fields. How can an intersectional approach challenge our science and technologies to better serve, and include, a broader diversity of people? How have our concepts of science and technology, and our assumptions about what they can and should do, been shaped by exclusions? How can those trained and working in the Humanities can learn from those trained in and working in the Sciences and Technology fields, and vice-versa? How does an understanding of the history of ideas, and the people and forces that have shaped them, inform our ability to build, innovate, and create work cultures that are more ethical and equitable?

Professor Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University.  She was the first Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard University (2005-2008). From 2008-2013 she served as Dean of Harvard College and Chair of the Department of History of Science (2017-2022). Professor Hammonds’ areas of research include the histories of science, medicine and public health in the United States; race, gender and sexuality in science studies; feminist theory and African American history.  She has published articles on the history of disease, race and science, African American feminism, African-American women and the epidemic of HIV/AIDS; analyses of gender and race in science, medicine and public health and the history of health disparities in the U.S.. Professor Hammonds’ current work focuses on the history of the intersection of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race in the United States.  She is currently director of the Project on Race & Gender in Science & Medicine at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard.

Prof. Hammonds holds a B.S. in physics from Spelman College, a B.E.E. in electrical engineering from Ga. Tech and an SM in Physics from MIT.  She earned the PhD in the history of science from Harvard University. She served as a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2003-2005), a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, a Post-doctoral Fellow in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a Visiting Professor at UCLA and at Hampshire College. Professor Hammonds was named a Fellow of the Association of Women in Science (AWIS) in 2008.  She served on the Board of Trustees of Spelman and Bennett Colleges and currently on the Board of the Arcus Foundation, and the Board of Trustees of Bates College.

In 2010, she was appointed to President Barack Obama’s Board of Advisers on Historically Black Colleges and Universities and in 2014 to the President’s Advisory Committee on Excellence in Higher Education for African Americans. She served two terms as a member of the Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering (CEOSE), the congressionally mandated oversight committee of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Advisory Committee of the EHR directorate of the NSF, and the Advisory Committee on the Merit Review Process of the NSF. Professor Hammonds is the current vice president/president-elect of the History of Science Society.

At Harvard, she served on the President’s Initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery; the Faculty Executive Committee of the Peabody Museum and she chaired the University-wide Steering Committee on Human Remains in the Harvard Museum Collections.  She also works on projects to increase the participation of men and women of color in STEM fields. Prof. Hammonds is the co-author of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently released report (December 9, 2021) Transforming Technologies: Women of Color in Tech. She is a member of the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine (CWSEM) of the NAS and the NAS Roundtable on Black Men and Black Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds honorary degrees from Spelman College and Bates College. For the academic year 2022-2023, Prof. Hammonds is the inaugural Audre Lorde Visiting Professor of Queer Studies at Spelman College.

This week, we continue our “22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology series” with a conversation with Dr. John Basl about how our relationship with tech is changing what he calls an “ethic of life, an ethical perspective on which all living things deserve some level of moral concern.

Professor Basl is an associate professor of philosophy in the department of philosophy & religion at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He works primarily in moral philosophy and applied ethics, especially on issues related to emerging technologies. He is an editorial board member for the new journal AI and Ethics. His most recent book, The Death of the Ethic of Life, is available from Oxford University Press. 

And that’s all for this season! We are staying off our technologies for the winter break—we’ll be back with more episodes of the Technically Human podcast in 2023.

The “22 Lessons in Ethical Technology” series is co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Cal Poly Strategic Research Initiative Grant Award. The show is written, hosted, and produced by me, Deb Donig, with production support from Matthew Harsh and Elise St. John. Thanks to Jake Garner and Emma Zumbro for production coordination. Our head of research for this series is Sakina Nuruddin. Our editor is Carrie Caulfield Arick. Art by Desi Aleman.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the show to make sure you don’t miss an episode! You can find us on your favorite podcast app--Apple podcasts, Google Play, Spotify—or wherever you get your podcasts.  Enjoy the break, and we’ll see you in January.

In this episode of "Technically Human," I host Chris Leong and Maria Santacaterina for a conversation about the growing pervasiveness of sociotechnical systems. You may not know the term "sociotechnical system," but if you've booked a flight online, tried to reach an agent on the DMV's hotline, or  tried to contact your congressperson, you almost certainly have interacted with one of them. How have sociotechnical systems changed the way we access services, the way we spend our time, and the way we interact with one another? What are the benefits--and the consequences--of living in a world increasingly organized and processed through these systems?

Maria Santacaterina is a Global Strategic Leader & Board Executive Advisor, who has worked in 100+ markets and has over 30 years international experience. She focuses on leading growth, strategic change and digital business transformation, particularly on the level of corporate culture and strategy. She advocates for a new approach to futurist imagining, which she calls “adaptive resilience,” in order to build enduring value and values; while responding to an accelerating rate of change, complexity and exponential technological disruption.

Chris Leong is a Transformation and Change Leader with a career spanning over 30 years in financial services, enterprise software and consulting industries globally. He thinks about, writes, and advises on the impacts of automated decision-making and profiling outcomes from all digital services on customers and consumers, the trustworthiness of Socio-Technical Systems and the organisations that deploy them.

 

Together, Maria and Chris have co-authored several landmark articles on STSs, including their piece "Responsible Innovation: Living with socio-technical systems" and "Have you outsourced to a sociotechnical system." 

Enjoy the episode, and thanks for tuning in! We’re off next week for the thanksgiving break—join us the first week of December for a new episode of the “22 Lessons in Ethics and Technology” series. To learn more about the 22 Lessons on Ethical Technology series, visit www.etcalpoly.org. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show so that you don’t miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts! We’ll see you in December.

Welcome to another interview in the "22 Lessons in Ethics and Technology" series! In this episode, I speak with Dr. Pavel Cenkl, about the need for intellectual diversity and multidimensional approaches to technological solutions to the major problems of our time. Professor Cenkl discusses how the major problems we face require that we bring together people trained in a wide variety of approaches. Focusing on environmental issues--climate change, ecological destruction, and the possible proliferation of future pandemics--we consider how ethical approaches to technology depend on thinking across boundaries of ideas and including voices across a variety of institutions, cultures, and experiences.

Dr. Pavel Cenkl is the Head of Schumacher College and Director of Learning and Land at Dartington Trust. He has worked for more than two decades in higher education in America and has always been drawn to colleges and universities whose curriculum fully integrates learning with practice and thinking with embodiment.

Having taught and served as Dean for nearly 15 years at Vermont’s Sterling College, Pavel brings a depth of experience to Schumacher College’s unique approach to experiential learning. While pursuing research in ecologically-minded curriculum design and teaching courses in environmental philosophy, Dr. Cenkl is also a passionate endurance and adventure runner. Over the past five years through a project called Climate Run, he has covered hundreds of miles in the Arctic and subarctic on foot in order to bring attention to the connections between our bodies and the more-than-human world in the face of a rapidly changing climate.

Dr. Cenkl holds a Ph.D. in English and is the author of many articles, chapters, and two books: Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010); and This Vast Book of Nature: Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, 1784-1911 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006). He is currently working on a book titled Resilience in the North: Adventure, Endurance, and the Limits of the Human, which threads together personal narrative and observation with environmental philosophy and reflections on what it means to be human.

Welcome to our 3rd episode of the "22 Lessons on Ethical Technology" series! We will be releasing new episodes in the series every first and second Friday of the month through the duration of the series.

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. N. Kate Hayles, one of the founding theorists of posthumanism, a key term to understanding the changing and dynamic relationship between humans and machines in the digital age. What is the role of the Humanities in understanding our relationship to technology? How have our technological innovations have changed the nature of “the human?" And what is the future of the human relationship to our machines--and to our understanding of ourselves?

Dr. N. Katherine Hayles is a Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and the James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University. She teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her most recent book, Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, was published by the Columbia University Press (Spring 2021). Among her many books is her landmark work How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, which won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99, and Writing Machines, which won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. She has been recognized by many fellowships and awards, including two NEH Fellowships, a Guggenheim, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and two University of California Presidential Research Fellowships. 

Dr. Hayles is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science. She holds a B.S. from the Rochester Institute of Technology, an M.S. from the California Institute of Technology, an M.A. from Michigan State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. Within the field of Posthuman Studies, Dr. Hayles'  book How We Became Posthuman is considered "the key text which brought posthumanism to broad international attention. Her work has laid the foundations for multiple areas of thinking across a wide variety of urgent issues at the intersection of technology, including cybernetic history, feminism, postmodernism, cultural and literary criticism, and is vital to our ongoing conversations about the changing relationship between humans and the technologies we create.

In this episode of "Technically Human," I give my mic over to two guest hosts, David Geitner and Roman Rosser, to interview Dr. Robert Pearl about the intersection between tech, medicine, and our health. Dr. Pearl answers questions about the way that technologies are radically reshaping health care; the hosts ask questions about bias in medicine; and the group discusses the ways in which our current system fails to treat us, well, well.

Dr. Robert Pearl is the former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group (1999-2017), the nation’s largest medical group, and former president of The Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group (2009-2017). He serves as a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and is on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on strategy and leadership, and lectures on information technology and health care policy. He is the author of Mistreated: Why We think We’re Getting Good Healthcare—And Why We’re Usually Wrong, a Washington Post bestseller that offers a roadmap for transforming American healthcare. His new book, Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors & Patients is available now. All proceeds from these books go to Doctors Without Borders. 

Dr. Pearl hosts the popular podcasts "Fixing Healthcare" and Coronavirus: The Truth. He publishes a newsletter with over 12,000 subscribers called  HYPERLINK "https://robertpearlmd.com/newsletter/" Monthly Musings on American Healthcare and is a regular contributor to Forbes. He has been featured on CBS This Morning, CNBC, NPR, and in TIME, USA Today and Bloomberg News. 

David Geitner is a third-year Biological Sciences major and Frost Scholar at California Polytechnic State University. He grew up in Yuba City California where he learned to love science, sports, community service, and the outdoors. He works in an on-campus research lab working with protein phosphomimetics for protein-to-protein interactions. David aspires to be a dentist as quality dental care is a necessity for society. David hopes to go into the military as a dentist and provide a service to his country. Roman Rosser is a student studying Aerospace Engineering at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He recently joined the PROVE team which is building a long-distance electric car. Roman hopes to work on designing or building new vehicles and has a particular passion for orbital rockets. His hobbies include lifting, backpacking, surfing and reading.

A special thank you to David Geitner and Roman Rosser for hosting this week’s episode, and to Dr. Pearl for joining us for the show. We’ll be back next week with another episode of the “22 Lessons in Ethical Technology special series,” so stay tuned! You can find more information about the 22 Lessons series and the Technically Human Podcast, on our website, www.etcalpoly.org. 

And don’t forget to subscribe to the show! You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

 

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Michael Huth to talk about the ethics of data collection, privacy, and the new age of “privacism.” We talk about his new platform, Xayn, we discuss what it looks like to build a company based on ethical principles like privacy and user autonomy, and Michael explains why we should care about our privacy online.

Professor Michael Huth is Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer of Xayn. He teaches at Imperial College London, where he is on the faculty of the department of Engineering, and he serves as the Head of the Department of Computing, at the Imperial College London. His research focuses on Cybersecurity, Cryptography, Mathematical Modeling, as well as security and privacy in Machine Learning, with with expertise in trust and policy. He served as the technical lead of the Harnessing Economic Value theme at PETRAS IoT Cybersecurity Research Hub in the UK. He holds associations with the Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering; the Centre for Smart Connected Futures; the Engineering Secure Software Systems; the Immuno-Pathology Network; and the Quantitative Analysis and Decision Science Section. In 2017, he founded the privacy tech company together with Leif-Nissen Lundbæk and Felix Hahmann. Xayn offers a privacy-protecting search engine that enables users to gain back control over algorithms and data harvesting.

Production and research support from Jared Maslin.

Welcome to our 2nd episode of the "22 Lessons on Ethical Technology" series!

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh, one of the world's leading experts on ethics and technology, in particular robotics and artificial intelligence. We talk about the way that technologies are changing our understanding of ethics and philosophical thinking, how technologies have added to and altered philosophical thinking throughout history, how new technologies--particularly robots, AI, cybernetics, and memory devices--are changing the way we think, and how we understand our ethical obligations to the world, and to each other. 

Prof. Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh is a Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology in the Philosophy of Department at the University of Vienna, and until recently Vice Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Education. He is also the former President of the Society for Philosophy and Technology (SPT). His expertise focuses on ethics and technology, in particular robotics and artificial intelligence. He is a member of various entities that support policy building in the area of robotics and artificial intelligence, such as the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, the Austrian Council on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, and the Austrian Advisory Council on Automated Mobility. He is the author of 16 philosophy books and numerous articles, and is involved in several European research projects on robotics.

From 2012-2014, Prof. Coeckelbergh served as the Managing Director of the 3TU Centre for Ethics and Technology), and from 2013-2015, he served as the co‐chair of the Technical Committee ‘Robot Ethics’ of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society.

He serves on numerous journal advisory boards at the intersection of ethics, society, and technology; he is a fellow of the World Technology Network (WTN) and a finalist of the 2017 World Technology Awards in the category “Ethics”. His new book, Robot Ethics (MIT Press, 2022) is a landmark guide to the ethical questions that arise from our use of industrial robots, robot companions, self-driving cars, and other robotic devices.

Welcome to our very first episode of the "22 Lessons on Ethical Technology" series!

 

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Herman Tavani to introduce some of the foundational principles of ethical technology, particularly in computing and digital contexts. We focus on how the current need for an ethics of technology developed, and the debates and key moments that gave rise to the current debates about ethics and technology. Professor Tavani introduces listeners  to issues and controversies that comprise the relatively new field of  digital ethics, or “cyberethics.” We discuss a wide range of ethical issues in digital technologies--from specific issues of moral responsibility that directly affect computer and information technology (IT) professionals to broader social and ethical concerns that affect each of us in our day-to-day lives. We discuss how modern day controversies created by emerging technologies can be analyzed from the perspective of standard ethical concepts and theories.

 

Herman T. Tavani, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Rivier University and currently a visiting scholar (applied ethics) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.  He is the author of Ethics and Technology (Wiley), a widely–used textbook that is currently in its fifth edition.  His academic publications include six other books and more than 100 articles, reviews, and edited works.  He has presented more than 100 invited talks and conference papers at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and in twelve countries in Europe, Asia, and South America.  Prof. Tavani has been active in several professional academic organizations; he served as an executive director and later as President of the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology, and served two terms as President of the Northern New England Philosophical association.  He has been the Book Review Editor of the journal, Ethics and Information Technology since 1998. 

In this episode of “Technically Human,” I interview Gary Bengier, the author of the award-winning science fiction novel, Unfettered Journey. We talk about the relationship between his prior work as a technologist, and his current career as a writer of science fiction; we talk about the relationship between technology, philosophy, and science fiction; and we talk about the possibility of making moral choices in a world governed by deterministic technologies.

Gary F. Bengier is a writer, philosopher, and technologist. After a career in Silicon Valley, Gary pursued multiple projects animated by his intellectual passions, studying astrophysics and philosophy. He is the author of the award winning science fiction novel, Unfettered Journey. Before turning to writing speculative fiction, Gary worked in a variety of Silicon Valley tech companies. He was eBay's Chief Financial Officer, and led the company's initial and secondary public offerings. Gary has an MBA from Harvard Business School, and an MA in philosophy from San Francisco State University.

Set in a richly imagined near future, Gary’s novel, Unfettered Journey is a cross-genre novel combining thrilling action, adventure, and a love story. It traces an epic journey – from inside the human mind to the vastness of space, from AIs battling in the desert to the peace of a mountain refuge. It asks social, spiritual, and philosophical questions that reach into some of the major topics of this show. How do human values interact with technological products? How does ethics—that is to say, what we should do or ought to do, change and our respond to our new technological world? And how can science fiction itself transform our vision of who we want to become?