The Technically Human Podcast

In this episode of "Technically Human," I sit down with Dr. Steven Smith, the director USC's Dimensions in Holocaust Testimony.  

We talk about the ethics of memory, testimony, and witness, and how these fundamental concepts are being radically changed by developing technologies. Steven explains the ethics of Holocaust witness in the digital age and how a new interactive program that enlists virtual technologies may allow Holocaust testimony to remain vivified for generations to come. How should we think about the reality of virtual survivors? How is our basic concept of "witness"  transformed by new technologies? And what does  "memory" mean in our current digital age?

Dr. Stephen D. Smith is the Finci -Viterbi Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation, and holds the UNESCO Chair on Genocide Education.

Smith founded the UK Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire, England and cofounded the Aegis Trust for the prevention of crimes against humanity and genocide.

Smith has served as a producer on a number of film and new media projects, including Dimensions in Testimony, and the VR project The Last Goodbye. He also co-hosts the MemoryGeneration podcast, alongside documentary storyteller Rachael Cerrotti, a show that explores dimensions of testimony from survivors of genocide.

In recognition of his work, Smith has become a member of the Order of the British Empire and received the Interfaith Gold Medallion. He also holds two honorary doctorates, and lectures widely on issues relating to the history and collective response to the Holocaust, genocide, and crimes against humanity.

Dimensions in Testimony is a collection of interactive video testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation, enabling people to engage with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to genocide, by asking questions and conversing. It is the subject of the Academy-Award nominated documentary film, 116 Cameras.

This episode was produced by Mereck Palazzo & Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

This episode is dedicated to Izzy Arbeiter.

In this special edition of "Technically Human," we feature a live public conversation about the future of democracy, technology, and public policy. In 2017, Yaël Eisenstat came onboard Facebook to change it, joining the company as its Global Head of Elections Integrity Operations. What she discovered while working there alarmed her. She started speaking out, becoming a leading critic of tech’s threat to democracy.In this conversation, I sit down with Yaël in front of a live audience to ask:

• How can American Democracy persevere in the age of social media?
• Why does tech need regulation?
• Who can reign in Big Tech?
• What can we do to help?

Yaël Eisenstat works at the intersection of tech, democracy, and policy, with a focus on what the public square and open, democratic debate look like in the digital world. She works as a Future of Democracy Fellow at Berggruen Institute and a policy advisor to start-ups, governments, and investors looking to align technology to better serve the public.

She has spent 20 years working around the globe on democracy and security issues as a CIA officer, a White House advisor, the Global Head of Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising at Facebook, a diplomat, and the head of a global risk firm. She was a Researcher-in-Residence at Betalab in 2020-21 and a Visiting Fellow at Cornell Tech's Digital Life Initiative in 2019-2020, where she focused on technology's effects on discourse and democracy and taught a multi-university course on Tech, Media and Democracy.

Yaël Eisenstat has become a key voice and public advocate for transparency and accountability in tech, particularly where real-world-consequences affect democracy and societies around the world. Her recent TED talk addresses these issues and proposes ideas for how government and society should hold the companies accountable.

In 2017, she was named in Forbes' list of “40 Women to Watch Over 40”. She is also an Adjunct Professor at NYU's Center for Global Affairs, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and she provides context and analysis on social media, elections integrity, political and foreign affairs in the media. She has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Brookings Techstream, TIME, WIRED, Quartz and The Huffington Post, has appeared on CNN, BBC World News, CBS Sunday Morning, Bloomberg News, CBS News, PBS and C-SPAN, in policy forums, and on a number of podcasts. She earned an M.A. in International Affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

In this episode, I sit down with a personal hero, the iconic literary giant Dan Lyons. We discuss Dan's experience writing about tech culture for the hit HBO show "Silicon Valley," and Dan's own experience working in tech. We talk about what makes Silicon Valley funny--and how that humor gets at some of the deeply sobering realities of Silicon Valley culture. 

Dan Lyons is one of the best-known science and technology journalists in the United States. He was the technology editor at Newsweek, a staff writer at Forbes, and a columnist for Fortune magazine, while also contributing op-ed columns to the New York Times about the economics and culture of Silicon Valley. 

Dan is the author of two of the most important recent books about Silicon Valley: Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble, an international best-seller, and Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us, which was chosen by The Guardian as one of the best business books of 2018. He is also the mastermind of the epic parody blog “The Fake Steve Jobs Blog.” 

Dan has been a consistent and vocal critic of racial, gender, and age bias in the technology industry, penning articles about "bro culture," worker exploitation, and the "hustle" mentality that leads to employee burnout. He has become a leading advocate for greater diversity in the technology industry and an early critic of the gig economy for its abuse of workers. His work helped draw attention to the brutal working conditions in Amazon warehouses. He has earned a reputation as a fearless critic of powerful interests in Silicon Valley, with a voice that sets him apart from the often fawning journalism that comes out of the technology space. 

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

In this episode of the podcast, I speak with Carlos Moreira, the CEO of WISeKey. We discuss the possibilities for building a human-centered technological future today—and the consequences if we do not. What does a human-centered model for technological production look like? How can we build human rights into our tech? And what needs to change to return human values to tech?

Carlos Moreira is the Founder Chairman CEO of the international cybersecurity firm WISeKey and the author (along with David Fergusson) of The Transhuman Code, a landmark book about ethics and technology. Before founding WISeKey, he served as the United Nations Expert on CyberSecurity and Trust Models. During his 17 years as UN Expert, he became recognized worldwide as an Internet Pioneer and a distinctive authority, thought leader, and entrepreneurial force in today’s digital world where the acquisition and trusted protection of Identity, Trust and Security has become an essential step for citizens and entities across the globe.

Guided by a belief that the Internet needs to be safe and universal and a tool for prosperity, he began developing technologies to protect the Internet and founded WISeKey. He is the founder of SG International Organization for Secure Electronic Transactions IOSET OISTE.org, a founding member of the “Comité de Pilotage Project E-Voting” of the Geneva Government, a Member of the UN Global Compact, and a Member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council—among many other leadership roles. He has previously served as an Adjunct Professor of the Graduate School of Engineering RMIT Australia, and as Head of the Trade Efficiency Lab at the Graduate School of Engineering at RMIT.

In The TransHuman Code, he and his co-author David Fergusson ask, ''Are we building a better future for humanity with the help of magnificent technology, or are we instead building a better future of better technology at the expense of humanity? The book imagines what it would look like to center humanity in the emerging tension between a human-controlled or a machine-controlled world.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Cover art by Desi Aleman.

In this episode, I speak to Kordel France, the CEO of Seekar Technology. We discuss the challenges of building an ethical tech company, the importance of creating unbiased data sets, and Kordel discusses the importance of making AI explainable.

Seekar technologies builds Artificial Intelligence across industries, with a specific focus on creating ethical AI for uses in ethical contexts. His technology has been involved in creating a response to the COVID-19 pandemic that allows doctors to more efficiently screen for the virus, and in environmental protection and conversation efforts. Kordel founded Seekar technologies to set new standards for how technologists create and deply AI, and seeks to make AI mobile, ethical, explainable, and dynamic. His vision for Seekar Technologies is committed to developing a tech culture in which the use of AI will remain ethical and equitable.

 

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

In this episode, I sit down with Chris Wexler, the CEO of Krunam, one of the world’s leading image and video classifiers of Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM). We discuss the dark side of the world wide web, and Chris explains how exploitative economies of human trafficking proliferate online. We discuss how Krunam puts AI to use combatting this exploitation. We also look at the rise of social justice-oriented technologies and the rise of social impact investing, and Chris shares why he is hopeful that the future of tech investing will be social-impact based.

Krunam has created one of the most potent AI tools for successfully identifying and removing digital toxic waste from the internet. By using AI to identify CSAM and other incendiary and exploitative content to improve and speed content moderation, Krunam’s technology has helped private platforms and law enforcement halt some of the most exploitative child sex trafficking outfits operating today. 

Before founding Krunam, Chris established several leading digital and analytics practices at four different major ad agencies while working with major brands. He now devotes his time to creating safer digital environments and developing social impact technology to better serve human values and social justice.

*A brief content warning note about today’s episode: my interview with Chris discusses using AI to classify images containing child sexual content. The work is important, but the discussion includes frank conversations about sexual material and is not suitable for all ears. Please consider your surroundings before listening, and you may want to avoid listening in a space that you share with children.

 

In this episode, I sit down with Ted Harrington, the author of Hackable: How to Do Application Security Right, and the Executive Partner at Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), one of the most prominent global companies working in the growing industry of ethical hacking. We talk about cybersecurity, the growth of the "ethical hacker" profession, and how the next generation of humanists and technologists can keep the internet safe.

For his stewardship of security research that Wired Magazine says “wins the prize, hands down,” Ted has been named both Executive of the Year [by American Business Awards] and 40 Under 40 [by SD Metro]. He leads a team that started and organizes IoT Village, an event whose hacking contest is a three-time DEFCON Black Badge winner, and which represents the discovery of more than 300 zero-day vulnerabilities (and counting). Ted’s work has been featured in more than 100 media outlets, including The New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and USA Today.

We are back with a brand-new season of the Technically Human podcast! This week's episode features Dr. Anthony Hatch. We discuss the use of psychotropic drugs in prisons as a form of carceral technology, race, and the bioethics of food systems. Learn more about how technologies are mediating health data, how our understanding of our bodies changes in response to new monitoring and mediating technologies, and how Dr. Hatch is creating a space for the next generation of technologists, humanists, and social scientists to develop more equitable, ethical relationships to building tech products.

Anthony Ryan Hatch, Ph.D., is a sociologist and Associate Professor and Chair of the Science in Society Program at Wesleyan University where he is also affiliated faculty in the Department of African American Studies, the College of the Environment, and the Department of Sociology. He is the author of Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (Minnesota, 2019) and Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America (Minnesota, 2016). He recently appeared in the PBS documentary Blood Sugar Rising and lectures widely on health systems, medical technology, and social inequalities. 

In Spring 2021, he started Black Box Labs, an undergraduate research and training laboratory that offers students training in qualitative research methods aligned with science and technology studies and the opportunity to collaborate with faculty on social research. 

This episode was produced by Matt Perry

Art by Desi Aleman

In this episode of "Technically Human," I talk to Dr. Ethel Mickey about tech's "pipeline problem." We discuss STEM culture in universities, how inequality gets generated through a culture of networking, and Dr. Mickey walks me through the pipeline from campus culture to the tech workforce. 

Dr. Ethel Mickey is a sociologist of gender, work, and organizations, with a focus on science & technology settings. She received her PhD from Northeastern University, and is currently a postdoc at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with the NSF-funded UMass ADVANCE program. Her research broadly explores the persistence of intersectional inequalities through relational dynamics including networks and collaborative teams, and she is currently working on a book manuscript on gendered and racialized networks in the tech sector. Her work has appeared in Gender & Society, and Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and has been recognized by the American Sociological Association and Sociologists for Women in Society. 

And this episode concludes season 5 of the Technically Human podcast. We’ll be on hiatus for the next few weeks. Please stay tuned, and join us for an exciting new season of the show when we return in the middle of July to bring you interviews with Silicon Valley writer Dan Lyons on satire, ethics, and tech culture, sociologist Dr. Anthony Hatch on biology, tech, and prisons, and many more exciting conversations. See you in July!

Podcast produced by Matt Perry and Ana Marsh.

Podcast art by Desi Aleman.

In this week's episode, I speak to Steven Olikara, founder of the Millenial Action Project (MAP), the largest nonpartisan organization of young lawmakers in the U.S. Steven and I discuss the role of tech in political activism and the challenges of bipartisanship in a technological age. 

Steven Olikara has been named a Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum, a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Law & Policy, and a Forward Under 40 by the Wisconsin Alumni Association. 

JUST IN: This week, Steven announced his decision to form an exploratory committee for the U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, with the goal of running as a candidate in the 2022 election.

To learn more about Steven's campaign and his vision for the senate, grounded in the ideal of dignity for all, visit www.www.stevenolikara.com. 

Podcast produced by Matt Perry and Ana Marsh.

Podcast art by Desi Aleman.

 

In this episode, I talk to Dr. Sharla Alegria about inequality in the tech workforce. We discuss tech workplace culture, the relationship between ethics and equality, and Sharla explains why robots aren't really taking your job--but growing culture of inequality might.

Dr. Alegria earned her Ph.D. in Sociology with a certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2016 and joined the faculty at the University of Toronto in 2019. She teaches classes on work; race, class, and gender; science, knowledge, and technology; stratification and inequality. Sharla’s research on inequality in the new economy, knowledge-based work examines tech work to understand why women’s representation in computing jobs has decreased since the early 1990s despite public and private sector investment. Beyond tech work, her research examines race and gender inequality in workplaces and institutions invested in diversity and equity. Her award-winning research appears in American Journal of Sociology, Gender & Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. 

We are currently in the middle of a series of live events on ethics and technology, scheduled for the next few weeks. On May 25, we will host a screening of the new documentary, Coded Bias, followed by a Q and A with the director, Shalini Kantayya, and All events are free, virtual, and open to the public, but space is limited. Check out our “Upcoming Events” page for more information about the events, and to reserve your spot.

Podcast produced by Matt Perry and Ana Marsh.

Podcast Art by Desi Aleman.

In this episode of "Technically Human," I talk to Dr. Rashawn Ray and Dr. Nicol Turner Lee, both Fellows at the Brookings Institution, about race, tech, policing, and the digital divide. We talk about the role of video technology and social media in police accountability, the dangers of surveillance technologies developed in Silicon Valley when deployed in policing, and the long history--and the consequences--of the digital divide in the context of social equity.

Dr. Rashawn Ray, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, is Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Ray has published over 50 books, articles, and book chapters, and roughly 50 op-eds. Recently, Dr. Ray published  How Families Matter: Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work (with Pamela Braboy Jackson) and another edition of Race and Ethnic Relations in the 21st Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy, which has been adopted nearly 40 times in college courses. Ray has written for the Washington Post, New York Times, Newsweek,  Business Insider, Huffington Post, and NBC News. 

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee is a senior fellow in Governance Studies, the director of the Center for Technology Innovation, and the Co-Editor-In-Chief of TechTank. Dr. Turner Lee researches public policy designed to enable equitable access to technology across the U.S. and to harness its power to create change in communities across the world. Dr. Turner Lee has been cited in the New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Communications Daily, Multichannel News, and Washington Informer. She can also be seen or heard on NPR, NBC News, ABC, and more, she has testified before Congress, and she is Chair of the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC), which is committed to joining policymakers and academics around significant tech policy issues. Her new book, Digitally Invisible: How the Internet is Creating the New Underclass (Brookings Press, 2021), examines the history, and the consequences, of the digital divide.

And now some exciting news!

We are currently in the middle of a series of live events on ethics and technology, scheduled for the next few weeks. Next Tuesday, May 18, I will host a Fireside chat with former CIA officer and former NSA advisor to Joe Biden, Yaël Eisenstat, who oversaw Facebook’s Global Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising and has since become one of facebook’s leading critics.

The following week, on May 25, we will host a screening of the new documentary, Coded Bias, followed by a Q and A with the director, Shalini Kantayya, and All events are free, virtual, and open to the public, but space is limited. Check out our website, www.etcalpoly.org for more information about the events, and to reserve your spot.

Hope to see you there! 

Podcast produced by Ana Marsh and Matt Perry.
Podcast art by Desi Aleman.

In this episode, I talk to Jeff Ryan, author of Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. We discuss gaming culture, the gender dynamics of the gaming community, and Jeff defines the key to gaming, in what he calls "the ludology of play."

Jeff Ryan is the author of A MOUSE DIVIDED: HOW UB IWERKS BECAME FORGOTTEN...AND WALT DISNEY BECAME UNCLE WALT and SUPER MARIO: HOW NINTENDO CONQUERED AMERICA. He has been published in Salon, Slate, Fast Company, Wired.com, Kotaku, and All Things Considered; and has been featured on NPR’s Marketplace, Time, Forbes, The New York Times, The Economist, The Independent, and Star Talk With Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He lives in Bloomfield, NJ, with his wife and two daughters. A lifelong gamer, he has reviewed over 500 video games and covered four console launches as the games editor for Katrillion, a popular dotcom-era news and entertainment Web site. He swears his books were not undertaken to write off family vacations to Orlando on his taxes.

A note on today’s episode: In recording this episode of “Technically Human,” our human interlocutors encountered some technical interference! None of this at all alters the brilliance of Jeff’s comments.

Some exciting news: We are launching a series of live events on ethics and technology, scheduled for the next few weeks, including an important and urgent conversation with Dr. Rashawn Ray on race, policing, and tech, a screening of the new documentary, Coded Bias, followed by a Q and A with the director, Shalini Kantayya, and a Fireside chat with former CIA agent and former NSA advisor to Joe Biden, Yaël Eisenstat, who, in the wake of the 2016 election, oversaw Facebook’s Global Elections Integrity Operations, and has since become one of facebook’s leading critics.

All events are free and open to the public, but space is limited.

Check out our website, www.etcalpoly.org for more information about the events, and to reserve your spot.

This episode was produced by Ana Marsh and Matt Perry

Podcast art by Desi Aleman

In this episode, I speak to Dr. Sandra Steingraber. We discuss the links between environmental destruction, contamination of vital resources, and the grave dangers that fracking technology poses to human health. Dr. Steingraber explains the link between environmental justice and social justice, and we talk about what the state of collaboration across fields and areas of expertise as universities increasingly turn into what she calls "Disaster Capitalism."

Biologist, author, and cancer survivor Dr. Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D. writes about climate change, ecology, and the links between human health and the environment. She has been named a Woman of the Year by Ms. Magazine, a Person of the Year by Treehugger, and one of 25 “Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” by the Utne Reader. She is the recipient of the biennial Rachel Carson Leadership Award and the Jenifer Altman Foundation’s Altman Award for “the inspiring and poetic use of science to elucidate the causes of cancer.” Steingraber received a Hero Award from the Breast Cancer Fund and the Environmental Health Champion Award from Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles. She has testified in the European Parliament, at the European Commission, before the President’s Cancer Panel, and has participated in briefings to Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, and before United Nations delegates in Geneva, Switzerland.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry and Ana Marsh.

Podcast art by Desi Aleman.

In this episode, I sit down with ecocritic Dr. Timothy Morton to talk about the relationship between tech and ecocriticism. We talk about the human relationship to the non-human world, we discuss the ethics of technological production in the age of the Anthropocene, and we analyze how the stories we tell ourselves about tech production as "progress" may bear devastating consequences in the form of environmental destruction. 

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe.

Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. 

This episode was produced by Matt Perry and Ana Marsh.

Podcast art by Desi Aleman.