The Technically Human Podcast

As the counting continues, it becomes clear that the 2020 election may be decided by a handful of voters in a few key states. In the months leading up to the election, Block Power, a nonprofit focused on uplifting Black voices by engaging new and infrequent Black voters in the electoral process, mobilized over 200,000 voters through a grassroots organizing campaign that took place almost exclusively online.

In this episode, Marcus Miller, a lead organizer in the Block Power grassroots movement, talks to me about how Block Power successfully built a major voter mobilization strategy that would help decide the future of the country. We talk about the ethics and stakes of representation, particularly for historically marginalized communities, the history of Black voter suppression and the challenges of mobilizing Black voters, and the symbolism of this election falling on the 150 year anniversary of the 15th Amendment, which granted African-American men the right to vote, and how a team of humanists and technologists built a movement.

Block Power is a nonprofit focused on uplifting Black voices by engaging new and infrequent Black voters in the electoral process. Their strategy enlists tech-based strategies, including a software platform that makes grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts more efficient, effective, and data-driven.

What is the relationship between technological production and the United States military? What can career technologists learn from service careers? And how can entrepreneurs stay the course of their vision of “doing good,” and also “do well?”

In this episode, I sit down with Ret. Col. Rob Gordon III, now the Chief Growth Officer of SBG Solutions to talk about what the tech sphere can learn from the culture and values of national service.

Robert L. Gordon III has extensive senior management and cross-sector experience in the military, government, high tech, and nonprofit sectors. He is currently the Chief Growth Officer of SBG Technology Solutions, leading SBG's growth and strategy portfolio to expand capabilities in national security and health among SBG’s government clientele.

In 2010 Rob was appointed the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Military Community and Family Policy in the Obama Administration, where Rob was responsible for defense-wide policy, program execution and oversight of more than $20 billion of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) worldwide community and family programs and initiatives affecting over four million military active duty service and family members, and two million retirees. Rob also led the effort to revitalize 160 public schools on US based military installations – a $900 million initiative. For his Pentagon service Rob was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service.

He is an advisor to several technology startups, and is on the advisory council of Princeton University’s School for Public and International Affairs. Among Rob’s awards and recognitions, he is the recipient of the Bernard Gill Urban Service-Learning Leadership Award from the National Youth Leadership Council; Princeton University's Edward P. Bullard Distinguished Alumnus Award; two awards of the Honorable Order of Saint Barbara; and the Franklin Award by the National Conference on Citizenship.

In this episode of "Technically Human," I talk to Todd Johnson about socially responsible and impact investing. Todd explains why investment is a critical point in the ecosystem of tech production and culture, and he argues that socially responsible investing is not just a growing dimension of the investment market: it is, rather, the future of investing.

We talk about how entrepreneurs can stay ethically motivated while growing, we discuss the challenges of mission drift, and we ask what it means to invest in the future.

R. Todd Johnson us a leader, counselor, advisor, lawyer and mentor. iPar, built by the CAPROCK Group, is a multi-family office that deploys more than $1 billion for impact. During his 29 years as a lawyer, partner and leader at Jones Day, Todd founded the Firm’s Northern California presence and served as the founder and Global Head for its Renewable Energy and Sustainability practice, where he served companies, funds, family offices, multi-family offices and nonprofits focused on renewable energy, sustainability, and models designed to help our planet and its people to flourish. 

Todd serves on the Boards of Directors of Activate Global (a nonprofit working to activate the world’s innovators to redefine how science serves society and sustains the planet, offering fellowships with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lincoln Labs at MIT) and ImpactAlpha (providing investment news for a sustainable edge).

It's our 21st episode of Technically Human, and we're celebrating by going legal!

In the episode, I sit down with Professor Jeff Ward, the Associate Dean of Technology and Innovation and the Director of Duke’s Center on Law & Technology (DCLT), which coordinates Duke’s leadership at the intersection of law and technology with programs such as the Duke Law Tech Lab, a pre-accelerator for legal technology companies, and the Access Tech Tools initiative, a program to help students and Duke’s community partners to employ human-centered design thinking and available technologies to create tools to enhance access to legal services.

Jeff and I talk about the relationship between ethics and the law, we talk about the role that legal practitioners play in tech, and Jeff explains how and why we need new legal frames to govern tech culture—and what we need to know as technologies emerge with the ability to govern legal structures. How can we design laws to protect us from some of the unintended and destructive consequences of technology? Could we one day have AI as our judges and juries? And how can we train the next generation of lawyers to engage with the ethics and justice in the tech sphere?

This episode of Technically Human was produced by Matthew Perry

In this episode of “Technically Human,” I talk to Hana Schank, Director of Strategy for Public Interest Technology at New America. We discuss a new vision for technologists working in the public sector, we discuss the relationship between ethical technology and public interest technology, and Hana persuades me that the future of the tech workforce is in solving public problems.

Hana Schank is the Director of Strategy for Public Interest Technology at New America, where she works to develop the public interest technology field via research, storytelling and fostering connections. She founded and edits The Commons, a publication for people working in and around government innovation efforts.

Previously, as a part of the United States Digital Service, Schank was a director with the Department of Homeland Security, where she worked with TSA and Customs and Border Protection to improve the air travel experience. In the private sector, Schank founded and ran CollectiveUX, a user experience consultancy, for over a decade, working with startups, Fortune 500 companies, and governmental organizations to research and design human-centered products.

In addition to her research and design work, Schank is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the author of three works of nonfiction. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, and holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. Schank lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with her husband and two children.

Cal Poly joined the Public Interest Technology University Network in 2019.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.