The Technically Human Podcast

The Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital innovation and humanistic computation with Dr. Todd Presner

In this episode of “Technically Human,” I sit down with Dr. Todd Presner to talk about ethics, algorithms, and the future of digital innovation. We discuss the need for technologists and humanists to work collaboratively together across disciplinary divides and specializations to solve complex problems, we discuss the consequences of automating the status quo, and we grapple with the ethical questions that algorithms evoke. How do we make algorithms accountable to the public? Just because we can automate something, should we? And how can we imagine differently, toward better possibilities, toward a world that we all want to live in, and in which we can all live generatively?

Professor Presner is the Chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program and the Ross Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature.

His work at the intersection of tech and ethics includes Digital_Humanities (published by MIT Press, 2012), co-authored with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Jeffrey Schnapp, which proposes a critical-theoretical exploration of the emerging field of digital humanities, and HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Harvard University Press, 2014), with David Shepard and Yoh Kawano, which explores digital cultural mapping using the HyperCities project, awarded the “digital media and learning” prize by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC in 2008.

Since 2018, Dr. Presner is the Associate Dean of Digital Innovation in the Division of Humanities and Adviser to the Vice-Chancellor of Research for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences research.

The Way Way Back Machine: A Dive into the Archive with Dr. Jason Lustig

In this episode of "Technically Human," I talk to Dr. Jason Lustig about the concept of the archive, and how we might understand its history in a digital and virtual context.

 

We tend to believe that the internet stores all, but does it? What do we gain, and what do we lose, in an internet age that proposes to keep even the smallest details of our lives? Who owns our data? Do we have the right to be forgotten? And who gets to decide what information about ourselves lives on forever?

PODCAST TAKEOVER SERIES: Episode 3

In the final episode of the Podcast Takeover Series, "School is Out," I get real about the move to online classes with Dr. Shira Lee Katz, Emily Bowden, and Erin Jeffs. In the first segment of the episode, we discuss how Coursera, a company that offers online education to distance learners, is leading the move in online education, and we talk about the advantages and disadvantages of virtual education.  

In the second segment of the episode, Erin and Emily discuss their experience of virtual classes at Cal Poly, and we talk about what we gain, and what we lose, when we can't meet for classes in person.

PODCAST TAKEOVER SERIES: Episode 2

It's a podcast takeover! In this series of episodes, I give my mic over to the next generation of humanists and technologists at Cal Poly who represent the future of ethical technology. Over the next hour, we will hear from the Summer 2020 “Technically Human” class. They have worked together to present to you their thinking about some of the most important and urgent issue in ethical technology.

In our second episode of the podcast takeover series, we are delving into the depths of technological futurity. Over the next hour, we’ll imagine possible utopian and dystopian technological futures, and explore how tech creates, and warns about, the possibilities that it engineers. We will take a trip into the intergalactic realm to think about how science fiction depicts the interaction between intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy and human…well, we’ll call it intelligence for now. And we will think about how the next generation of technologists are understanding the futures they will help to build.

PODCAST TAKEOVER SERIES: Episode 1

It's a podcast takeover! In this series of episodes, I give my mic over to the next generation of humanists and technologists at Cal Poly who represent the future of ethical technology. Over the next hour, we will hear from the Summer 2020 “Technically Human” class. They have worked together to present to you their thinking about some of the most important and urgent issue in ethical technology.

In this week's episode, we’ll hear them talk about the history and future of AI, the dangers and promises of Transplant Tech, and how we might understand the ethical concept of the “good” and its relationship to technology. They’ll discuss their vision for ethical technology, the history of these technological developments, and their concerns regarding the present and future of technological innovations.

Tech Stands Up: Talking tech leadership with Dex Hunter-Torricke

In this episode of “Technically Human,” I sit down with Dex Torricke-Hunter. We talk about Dex’s movement from working in the United Nations to working with some of the biggest names in tech, we talk about the global implications of social media driven connectivity, and we discuss whether we should really “move fast and break things.”

Dex Hunter-Torricke is head of communications for the Oversight Board, the new independent body that will be making binding decisions on Facebook and Instagram’s most challenging content issues. During his career, Dex has served in a string of high-profile roles across the tech and policy worlds, including as head of communications for SpaceX, head of executive communications for Facebook – including four years as speechwriter for Mark Zuckerberg – and as Google’s first executive speechwriter, where he worked with Eric Schmidt and Larry Page. Before that, he was a speechwriter for the office of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. 

In 2016, a week after the US election Dex left his job at SpaceX to spend the next 18 months focusing on working with leaders on social and political causes, including advising political leaders and candidates in Europe and the US. Dex is a New York Times-bestselling ghostwriter and frequent public speaker on technology issues. 

Biotechnically Human: George Estreich on disability, biotechnology, and how technologies are defining who counts as "human"

In this episode of "Technically Human," I speak to author George Estreich about the intersection of biotechnology and disability. We discuss the ways in which biotechnology is changing the nature of "the human," the ways in which technology defines and determines our understanding of disability, and George talks about what it means to write about disability and technology at the intersection of the personal and the political.

George Estreich's publications include a book of poems, Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body, which won the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books; the Oregon Book Award-winning memoir The Shape of the Eye; and Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories we Tell Ourselves, which NPR's Science Friday named a Best Science Book of 2019. Estreich has also published prose in The New York Times, Salon, The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, Tin House, Essay Daily, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with his family, where he teaches in Oregon State’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. You can read more about his work at georgeestreich.com.

This episode of "Technically Human" was produced by Emily Bowden and Erin Jeffs.

Linking In: HireClub Founder Ketan Anjaria breaks down getting hired in the tech industry

In this episode of Technically Human, I talk to Ketan Anjaria, the founder of HireClub, a social network that enlists media platforms and leverages network connections to help job seekers find jobs. Anchored in SF, in the heart of the tech industry, Ketan outlines the logic behind hiring, discusses the gaps between academic and practical preparation, and explains how tech industry's hiring practices shape and determine the outcomes of the tech products that a global public interacts with on a daily basis.

Learn more about Ketan's work and HireClub: https://hireclub.com/

This week's episode was produced and edited by Emily Bowden and Erin Jeffs.

California Dreaming: Silicon Valley's Moral Vision

Welcome back to Season 2 of the "Technically Human" podcast! In the first episode of this season, I talk to Dr. Morgan Ames about the concept of utopia and Silicon Valley's moral vision. We discuss the ideas and frictions at the heart of Silicon Valley's growth, we talk about the inequalities at the heart of technological culture, and Morgan describes how Silicon Valley became THE Valley.

 

Dr. Ames is an assistant adjunct professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches in Data Science and administers the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies in affiliation with the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society. She is also affiliated with the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group, the Center for Science, Technology, Society and Policy, and the Berkeley Institute of Data Science. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Intel, and other organizations, and she has been invited to present her work at conferences around the world, including South by Southwest (SXSW).

 

Her next project explores the role that utopianism plays in discourses around childhood, education, and 'development' in two geographically overlapping but culturally divided worlds: developer culture of Silicon Valley and the working-class and immigrant communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

 

This week's episode was produced and edited by Emily Bowden and Erin Jeffs.

The Next Generation of Technologists: a roundtable with the future of ethical tech

In this episode, I speak with three Cal Poly undergraduates from my class on ethical tech. We discuss their vision for ethical technology, we talk about their concerns about the present and future of human values and tech, and they tell me about their quarter of distant learning, and what it has meant for them to live in the time of COVID.

Erin Jeffs, Nick Bell, and Geoff Sanhueza are undergraduate students at Cal Poly, working in different majors across campus, from architecture to computer science to Animal Science. We spent the last quarter getting to know each other in my class on ethical technology, where we thought together about how we might envision a more ethical, more equitable future of technological production and ideation.

They join me in this episode to share their insights about, and their vision for, ethical technology as they navigate the move from student to practitioner.

Science as a Human Endeavor: Carl Zimmer explains the meaning of life, and what it means to write about it

In this episode of "Technically Human," I speak with Carl Zimmer, who reports from the frontiers of biology, where scientists are expanding our understanding of life.

Drawing from his experience hosting the popular podcast "What is Life?" Carl explains the meaning of life to me, and he talks about what it means to write about it. We talk about the challenges of writing and reading about science, and how we should read articles about the most urgent scientific concern of our moment: Coronavirus.

Zimmer is a popular speaker at universities, medical schools, museums, and festivals, and he teaches workshops and seminars at Yale. His column Matter appears weekly in The New York Times, and he is the author of thirteen books about science, including his newest book is She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.  

He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom a species of tapeworm has been named.

 

Making up our minds: how AI is rewiring our brains with Professor De Kai

In this episode of "Technically Human," I speak to Professor De Kai at Hong Kong University. De Kai is one of eight members of Google's AI Ethics Council and is listed as one of Hong Kong's 100 most influential figures. We debate whether laptops and lapdogs have souls, De Kai tells us why President Obama is retweeting his recent work on mask simulations in the context of the coronavirus epidemic, and we discuss the possibility that an AI encoded with human biases will drive extremism to the point of civilization's collapse.

The Meaning of Life: Professor Arthur Caplan Discusses Medical Tech and the Rise of Bioethics

In this episode, I speak with Professor Arthur L. Caplan, the Drs. William F and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor at the NYU School of Medicine in New York City and the founding head of NYU’s Division of Medical Ethics. 

We talk about brain death, moral worth, the ethics of the non-human, and the concept of the "self" as humans increasingly turn our bodies and biology over to technological interventions. Dr. Caplan discusses medical privacy as the right to know becomes increasingly in tension with the right to privacy, how the practice of medicine interacts with humanist practices, and what is keeping him up at night.

Cultural Revolution: Chris Ategeka calls for a paradigm shift in tech

In this episode of "Technically Human," I speak with Chris Ategeka, the CEO of UCOT, the Center for the Unintended Consequences of Technology. Chris talks about what led him to build UCOT, what drives unethical tech, and how the destructive consequences in technological culture and products may be less unintended than willfully ignored. Chris and I talk about the relationship between diversity in tech culture on the one hand, and equity in tech products and outcomes on the other. Finally, Chris makes a case for why staying optimistic in this moment is not a choice--for him, it is an ethical mandate. 

Data Dystopia: Dave Eggers Discusses Digital Human Rights

In this episode of "Technically Human," I talk to author Dave Eggers about his novel The Circle. We discuss the growth of digital tracking, the evolution of Silicon Valley culture, and the idea that people under surveillance are not free. Dave discusses the role and of and possibilities for art, literature, and satire in creating change, and he tells me why he is optimistic about the next generation of students creating powerful, lasting change.

Dave Eggers is the author of The Circle, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What is the What, A Hologram for the King, and The Lifters, among many other books.

He is the founder of McSweeney’s, which publishes literature, satire, and "Voice of Witness," a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world.

Eggers is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers around the United States. Realizing the need for greater college access for low-income students, Eggers founded ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization designed to connect students with resources, schools and donors to make college possible.

McSweeneys: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/about-dave-eggers

ScholarMatch:https://scholarmatch.org/

826National: https://826national.org/