Tom Coughlin is an IEEE Life Fellow, past president of IEEE-USA, past director of IEEE Region 6, past chair of the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Section, past chair of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley and is also active with the Storage Networking Industry Association and Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Coughlin is also president of Coughlin Associates, a digital storage analyst and business and technology consultant. He has over 40 years in the data storage industry with engineering and senior management positions at several companies. Coughlin Associates consults, publishes books and market and technology reports (including The Media and Entertainment Storage Report and an Emerging Memory Report) and puts on digital storage-oriented events. He is a regular storage and memory contributor for Forbes.com and media and entertainment organization websites

Vardon Hamdiu is the co-founder and head of Sparkable, a young nonprofit organization that builds a social media platform aimed at bridging divides.

Growing up immersed in diverse cultures, Vardon has always been a bridge-builder who navigates between worlds. His family history has exposed him to the devastating consequences of communication breakdowns between ethnic communities and the outbreak of war. These experiences have profoundly shaped his understanding of the importance of empathy and social cohesion.

Over the past decade, Vardon has worked on the communications team of a Swiss President, studied to become a teacher, spent an exchange semester in South Africa, and engaged with refugees facing often traumatic circumstances. These experiences made him acutely aware of the enormous disconnect between the information we consume online and the lived realities of many people around the globe. He became deeply passionate about exploring why today’s social media platforms are often dysfunctional and how these powerful systems, which govern our collective attention, could be constructed differently. Driven by this vision, he made the pivotal decision to quit his job, drop out of his studies, and launch Sparkable, aiming to foster a healthier online environment.

Dr. Todd Presner is Chair of UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies. Previously, he was the chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program (2011-21), and from 2011-2018, he served as the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. He holds the Michael and Irene Ross Chair in the UCLA Division of the Humanities. His research focuses on European intellectual and cultural history, Holocaust studies, visual culture, and digital humanities. Dr. Presner’s newest book was published with Princeton University Press: Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory  (Fall 2024). 

Daniel Kelley is the Director of Strategy and Operations of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center for Technology and Society (CTS). CTS works through research and advocacy to fight for justice and fair treatment for all in digital social spaces from social media to online games and beyond. For the last five years, Daniel has been the lead author of the first nationally representative survey of hate, harassment, and positive social experiences in online games. He is also the co-author of the Disruption and Harms in Online Games Framework, a resource to define harms in online multiplayer games together with members of the game industry coalition the Fair Play Alliance. He also leads CTS’ tech accountability research efforts, such as its Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial Report Card, which looks at ways to create research-grounded advocacy products to inform the public about the nature of hate and harassment online and to hold tech companies accountable.

In The Entanglement, Professor Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature. Neither biology, cognitive science, nor AI can tell a complete story of us, and we can no more pin ourselves down than we can fix or settle on the meaning of an artwork. Even more, art and philosophy are the means to set ourselves free, at least to some degree, from convention, habit, technology, culture, and even biology.

Dr. Alva Noë is a philosopher of mind whose research and teaching focus is perception and consciousness, and the philosophy of art. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); Varieties of Presence (Harvard, 2012); Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2015), Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (Oxford, 2019) and, most recently, Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (Oxford 2021).  He holds a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Columbia University; a Bachelors of Philosophy. from University of Oxford;  and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He teaches in the philosophy department of UC Berkeley.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy, at Stanford University. He is also the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow. 

He is the author or lead editor of 7 books, including The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, and The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing.  His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University.

After a long summer break we are back with a brand season and brand new episodes of the show! To kick off the season, we are bringing you an episode that I’m calling “agree to disagree,” with two guests, Robert D. Atkinson and David Moschella, who join me to argue that the critiques of tech circulating in our environment are full of “myths and scapegoats.” That’s the title of their new book, “Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths About Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy,” published this year by Pallgrave McMillan. The book argues that our era of tech critique, and the impetus for regulation that many critics advocate for and recommend, is misguided, and that our era is one of general pessimism toward AI, in which our society largely overlooks the benefits of this technology. In their words, quote, “These attitudes both reduce the enthusiasm for innovation and the efforts by government needed to spur it.”

Well, as the title of the episode suggests, agree to disagree, both on the facts and the merits of the argument! A key component of this show is my commitment to talking to people with whom I disagree, and foregrounding civil discourse with people whose ideas differ from my own. My hope is that you, the listeners, can weigh out their arguments against my own and see where you land. As always, if you have thoughts about the show, please get in touch!

Robert D. Atkinson is the founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He is an internationally recognized scholar and a widely published author whom The New Republic has named one of the “three most important thinkers about innovation,” Washingtonian Magazine has called a “tech titan,” Government Technology Magazine has judged to be one of the 25 top “doers, dreamers and drivers of information technology,” and the Wharton Business School has given the “Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award.”

A sought-after speaker and valued adviser to policymakers around the world, Atkinson’s books include Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths about Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Mythology of Small Business (MIT Press, 2018); Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage (Yale, 2012); Supply-Side Follies: Why Conservative Economics Fails, Liberal Economics Falters, and Innovation Economics is the Answer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); and The Past And Future Of America’s Economy: Long Waves Of Innovation That Power Cycles Of Growth (Edward Elgar, 2005).

President Clinton appointed Atkinson to the Commission on Workers, Communities, and Economic Change in the New Economy; the Bush administration appointed him chair of the congressionally created National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission; the Obama administration appointed him to the National Innovation and Competitiveness Strategy Advisory Board; as co-chair of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s China-U.S. Innovation Policy Experts Group; to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship; and the Trump administration appointed him to the G7 Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence. The Biden administration appointed him as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information, and a member of the Export-Import Bank of the United States' Council on China Competition.

Atkinson holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hil.

David Moschella is a nonresident senior fellow at ITIF. Previously, he was a research fellow at Leading Edge Forum (LEF), where he explored the global business impact of digital technologies, with a particular focus on disruptive business models, industry restructuring and machine intelligence. For more than a decade before LEF, David was in charge of worldwide research for IDC, the largest market analysis firm in the information technology industry, responsible for the company’s global technology industry forecasts and insights.

A well-known international speaker, writer, and thought leader, David’s books include Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths about Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Seeing Digital—A Visual Guide to the Industries, Organizations, and Careers of the 2020s (DXC Technology, 2018), Customer-Driven IT (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), and Waves of Power (Amacom, 1997). He has lectured and consulted on digital trends and strategies in more than 30 countries, working with leading customers and suppliers alike.

Projjal founded OnLoop in 2020 to create a category called Collaborative Team Development (CTD) to fundamentally reinvent how hybrid teams are assessed and developed,  after over a decade of frustration with clunky, traditional enterprise performance management and learning processes and tools that were either hated or ignored by his teams at companies like Uber and Accenture where he spent many years.

Prior to founding OnLoop, Projjal spent three and a half years at Uber in a variety of roles including leading Strategy & Operations for Business Development globally, leading Strategy & Planning for the APAC rides business, and GM of the Philippines rides business. Besides Uber, he also spent some time raising debt and equity from New York hedge funds for an industrial conglomerate (Essar), in strategy consulting in South East Asia (Accenture), and in early-stage companies in Latin America (BlueKite, El Market) prior to that. He holds an MBA from Stanford University.

Sarah Fairweather is the Senior Program Manager of Ethics at WellSaid Labs, shaping Responsible AI for synthetic voice technology and designing policies for WellSaid Labs’ ethical AI deployment. She leads the effort at WellSaid to ensure that every team in the organization is equipped with the tools and skills they need to make ethics-informed designs and decisions in support of responsible innovation. Before WellSaid Labs, she was the Director of Professional Learning at Code.org where she designed equity-focused K-12 professional development experiences and co-led the company’s first Equity Working Group.

Burner is a mind-bending thriller that dives headfirst into our modern online zeitgeist of social media disinformation, toxic internet subcultures, and the human need for belonging, purpose, and love in an age of distorted electronic personas. The story confronts the loss of the American dream and the societal factors behind it, including wealth inequality, lack of opportunity, and cultural prejudices. At the same time, it is a tragic love story, asking the question of whether real human connection is inherently incompatible with our addiction to online esteem.

For 18 years, Dr. Robert Pearl, MD served as CEO of The Permanente Medical Group (Kaiser Permanente). He is also former president of The Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group. In these roles he led 10,000 physicians, 38,000 staff and was responsible for the nationally recognized medical care of 5 million Kaiser Permanente members on the west and east coasts. 

He is a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on healthcare strategy, technology, and leadership. Pearl is board-certified in plastic and reconstructive surgery, receiving his medical degree from Yale, followed by a residency in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stanford University.

He’s the author of three books: Mistreated: Why We Think We’re Getting Good Healthcare—And Why We’re Usually Wrong, a Washington Post bestseller (2017); Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors & Patients, a Kirkus star recipient (2021); and his newest book ChatGPT, MD: How AI-Empowered Patients & Doctors Can Take Back Control of American Medicine (April 2024). All profits from sales of his books go to Doctors Without Borders.

Dr. Pearl is a LinkedIn “Top Voice” in healthcare and host of the popular podcasts Fixing Healthcare and Medicine: The Truth. He publishes two monthly healthcare newsletters reaching 50,000+ combined subscribers. A frequent keynote speaker, Pearl has presented at The World Healthcare Congress, the Commonwealth Club, TEDx, HLTH, NCQA Quality Talks, the National Primary Care Transformation Summit, American Society of Plastic Surgeons, and international conferences in Brazil, Australia, India, and beyond.

Pearl’s insights on generative AI in healthcare have been featured in Associated Press, USA Today, MSN, FOX Business, Forbes, Fast Company, WIRED, Global News, Modern Healthcare, Medscape, Medpage Today, AI in Healthcare, Doximity, Becker’s Hospital Review, the Advisory Board, the Journal of AHIMA, and more.

Dr. Tamara Kneese is Project Director of Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab, where she is also a Senior Researcher. For the 2023-2024 academic year, she's a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. Before joining D&S, she was Lead Researcher at Green Software Foundation, Director of Developer Engagement on the Green Software team at Intel, and Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco.

Dr. Kneese holds a PhD in Media, Culture and Communication from NYU and is the author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond. In her spare time, she is a volunteer with Tech Workers Coalition.

Dr. Peter Bonutti, M.D. is a surgeon, inventor, author, professor, consultant, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Bonutti Research, a medical device incubator that has developed products and technology used around the world. He maintains his clinical and surgical practice, focusing on the integration of robotics into surgical procedures. He is the founder and president of Releave, a company whose technology has already been clinically proven in more than 700 patients for the treatment of a brain related disorder. Realeve’s ultimate goal is to solve one of the critical remaining barriers in brain health: the ability to bypass the brain's natural barrier preventing the delivery of effective drugs for stroke, cancer treatment, and other degenerative orders. Dr. Bonutti is a pioneer in Minimally Invasive Surgery, has over 500 patents and applications, more than 700 licenses and multiple FDA-approved products to date. Major corporations leveraging his technology include Hitachi, Kyphon, Covidien, US Surgical, Biomet, Arthrocare, Synthes, Zimmer/Biomet and Stryker. He is a prolific speaker, lecturing internationally, and has trained over 100 surgeons on his surgical techniques. In his career, Dr. Bonutti has received more than a dozen industry honors and awards for his achievements. Dr. Bonutti earned his medical degree at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and completed his Orthopaedic Surgery Residency at Cleveland Clinic Foundation with international fellowships in Canada, Australia, and Austria.

Dr. Sammane envisions a world where the rapid advancements in AI and technology are harnessed for the greater good, leading to a new age of global prosperity. He is a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple success exits, and an academic with a rich blend of expertise in applied physics, digital circuit design, nanotechnology, formal methods, life science, and business. Holding a Bachelor's degree and Master's degree in Applied Physics, a Master's degree in Digital Circuit Design, and a Ph.D. in Nanotechnology, Dr. Sammane has authored several articles on high-order logic, symbolic simulation, and automatic theorem proving. 

Beyond the academic realm, Dr. Sammane has co-founded and led multiple successful companies in the life sciences, IT and real estate industries. He resides in southern California with his wife and three daughters.

Dr. Deborah Stone is currently a Lecturer in Public Policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also an Honorary Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she occasionally teaches as a visiting professor. She has taught at Duke University in the Institute of Policy Sciences (1974-77); MIT Department of Political Science (1977-86); Brandeis University Heller School, where she held the David R. Pokross Chair of Law and Social Policy (1986-99); and Dartmouth College Government Department, where she was Research Professor of Government (1999-2014). She has taught as a visitor at Yale, Tulane, University of Bremen, Germany, and National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT.

Stone is the author of Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision-Making, which has been published in multiple editions (W.W. Norton), translated into five languages, and won the Aaron Wildavsky Award from the American Political Science Association for its enduring contribution to policy studies. She has also authored three other books: The Samaritan’s Dilemma (Nation Books, 2008), The Disabled State (Temple University Press 1984), and The Limits of Professional Power (University of Chicago Press, 1980). She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Health Politics, and Policy and Law (of which she was a founder); Women, Politics and Public Policy, and Critical Policy Studies. In addition to numerous articles in academic journals and book chapters, she writes for general audiences. She was the founding senior editor of The American Prospect and her articles have appeared there as well as in in Nation, New Republic, Boston Review, Civilization, Natural History, and Natural New England.

Stone has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard Law School, German Marshall Fund, Open Society Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She was a Phi Beta Kappa Society Visiting Scholar in 2005-2006, and a Senior Fellow at Demos from 2008-2012. She has served as a consultant to the Social Security Administration, the Institute of Medicine, the Office of Technology Assessment, and the Human Genome Project. Stone is also the recipient of numerous professional awards, including, the 2013 Charles M. McCoy Career Achievement Award for a progressive political scientist who has had a long successful career as a writer, teacher, and activist (American Political Science Association).

His most recent work, including his most recent publication, "Learning From the Past: Applying Concepts of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to Restore Consumer Trust in Global Data Privacy," involves the design and testing of a more holistic data privacy risk model, using some of the key tenets of independent auditing structures and oversight functions seen after the investor crises of Enron, Tyco, and other financial reporting fraud. Their goal is to leverage the same concepts that were once applied to restore investor trust in businesses, and to extend those concepts to data privacy in order to restore consumer trust in the businesses processing their personal data. 

Dr. Tonya M. Evans is a distinguished professor at Penn State Dickinson Law and a leading expert in intellectual property and new technologies. With a prestigious 2023 EDGE in Tech Athena Award, she is highly sought-after as a keynote speaker and consultant. Her expertise spans blockchain, entrepreneurship, entertainment law, and more.

As a member of international boards and committees, including the World Economic Forum/Wharton DAO Project Series, Dr. Evans remains at the forefront of cutting-edge research. She recently testified before the House Financial Services Committee and the Copyright Office and USPTO to advise on the intellectual property law issues related to NFTs and blockchain technology.

Brian Beckcom is a Texas Super Lawyer, a designation that recognizes him as one of the top legal experts and practitioners in his arena. In addition to his work as a lawyer, he is also a Computer Scientist and a Philosopher. He created and hosts the popular podcast "Lesson from Leaders with Brian Beckcom."

Brian is an honors graduate of the University of Texas School of Law. He is the author of 6 books and hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics.

He successfully prosecuted many high-profile cases, including the case that emerged in the aftermath of the Somali Pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama, which made headlines around the world, and the event was made into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Tom Hanks as Captain Phillips. Representing many members of the crew, Brian and his firm took on one of the largest shipping companies in the world, while simultaneously, his investigative efforts ensured that the true story was told.He also represented Captain Wren Thomas, who was kidnapped by Nigerian mercenaries while operating off the Coast of West Africa. Captain Thomas’ story has been featured in national and international media. The case received international attention from the media and maritime shipping companies because of the heroic acts of Captain Thomas during the attack and hostage situation and also because of connections to Boko Haram and corruption in West Africa.

In the conversation we talk about the way that case law formed to treat piracy, that is to say, the practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea, and piracy in our digital age, that is to say, the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted content that is then sold at substantially lower prices in the 'grey' market, We talk about the possibilities for, and the obstructions to, creating legislation that would stop some of the worst consequences and tendencies of big tech. And Brian makes the case for what law, at its most ethical and generative potential, might do to guide tech toward protecting and elevating human values.

Dr. Sagar is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Soul Machines, a company investigating how to use natural language processing with hyper-realistic visuals to create autonomously animated, emotionally dynamic Digital People. In addition to developing new technologies, the research seeks answers to big questions: should we be humanizing AI? How does feeding AI socio-emotional context help create rich, multimodal humanlike experiences, and at what point are we teetering on sentience? And what is really at stake the intersection of human cooperation with intelligent machines?

Dr. Mark Sagar is currently Director for the Auckland Bioengineering Institute's Laboratory for Animate Technologies. He is a two-time Oscar winner, in the categories of scientific and engineering awards, for his work creating realistic digital characters for the screen. The technology has been used in Spider-Man 2, Superman Returns, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Avatar. The technology he created emerged out of his research, completed in the late 1990s, in a landmark study that explored how to develop an anatomically correct virtual eye and realistic models of biomechanically-simulated anatomy. It was one of the first examples of how believable human features could be created on a screen by combining computer graphics with mathematics and human physiology.

 He is also the founder of the BabyX, a pioneering research initiative that  seeks to combine models of physiology, cognition and emotion with advanced lifelike CGI, in an attempt to create a new form of biologically inspired AI.

Dr. Sagar received his Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Auckland, and was a post-doctoral fellow at M.I.T. In addition to his recognition by the Academy Awards, Dr. Sagar was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2019.

I know that many members of this listening community have been deeply affected by the loss of life and the brutality that began with the Hamas attack on Israel and is ongoing in Israel and in Gaza. This is not a show about my politics. But it is a show that strives toward the ideals of diverse representation, and bipartisan collaboration toward ethical and humanistic ends.

In this dark moment, I wanted to elevate one of our previous episodes featuring United Hatzalah. United Hatzallah is a volunteer-based organization which provides emergency medical response within minutes of any medical emergency for free. They are committed to saving human lives independent of race, religion, ethnicity, or national identity. They are non political and non religious. United Hatzalah volunteers respond to more than 675,000 calls per year throughout Israel and beyond its borders, saving lives every day. 

There are a lot of people in the region in need right now, and United Hatzallah is on the front lines. If you have the means, and if you want to support an organization that is working to save civilians lives, no matter what their religion, race, ethnic identity, or national identity might be, please consider supporting United Hatzallah.

Insight Partners, a global software investor partnering with high-growth technology, software and internet startups, is currently matching donations to United Hatzallah, up to $1,000,000. Please consider supporting this effort, if you have the means. The ideal of universal human rights is central to this show, and when I see the tech community driving toward that effort, I think it’s worth highlighting. That ideal is, and always has been, that human lives are human lives anywhere and everywhere, no matter which tribe they belong to, and that the global community has an obligation to protect those lives. 

Link to the donation site here: https://hedado.com/c/SoftwareinService 

And now, here is my episode featuring United Hatzallah, whose volunteers have been on the ground saving lives, as they have been doing since the organization was founded.

Artificial: A Love Story tells the story of three generations of artists whose search for meaning and connection transcends the limits of life. The story begins with the LLM generated chatbot that Amy’s father, the futurist Ray Kurzweil, created out of his father’s archive, but the story doesn’t start and end there. Instead, the story takes us on a journey through new questions that technologies are asking about what it means to be human.  How do we relate to—and hold—our family’s past? And how is technology changing what it means to remember the past? And what does it mean to know--and to love--in the age of AI?

Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two graphic memoirs: Flying Couch, a NYT’s Editor’s Choice and Kirkus “Best Memoir” of 2016, and Artificial: A Love Story, forthcoming October 2023. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and she’s received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz Award for “Technofeelia,” a four-part series with The Believer Magazine. Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, Longreads, Literary Hub, WIRED, and many other places. She’s taught writing and comics at Parsons The New School for Design, The Fashion Institute of Technology, Center for Talented Youth, Interlochen Center for the Arts, in New York City Public Schools, and in many other venues, and she currently teaches a monthly cartooning class to a growing community of virtual students all over the world.

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.

Dr. Julie Albright is a Sociologist specializing in digital culture and communications. She has a Masters Degree in Social and Systemic Studies and a Dual Doctorate in Sociology and Marriage and Family Therapy from the University of Southern California. Dr. Albright is currently a Lecturer in the departments of Applied Psychology and Engineering at USC, where She teaches master’s level courses on the Psychology of Interactive Technologies and Sustainable Infrastructure. 

Dr. Albright’s research has focused on the growing intersection of technology and social / behavioral systems.

She is also a sought after keynote speaker, and has given talks for major data center and energy conferences including SAP for Utilities, IBM Global, Data Center Dynamics and the Dept. of Defense. She has appeared as an expert on national media including the Today Show, CNN, NBC Nightly News, CBS, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, NPR Radio and many others. 

Her new book, Left to Their Own Devices: How Digital Natives Are Reshaping the American Dream (Random House/ Prometheus press), investigates the impacts of mobile - social- – digital technologies on society. 

In this episode of the show, I talk to Lily Gangas, Chief Technology Community Officer at the Kapor Center, and Amira Dhalla, Director of Impact Partnerships and Programs at Consumer Reports, about the film and about state of AI at the intersection of race and equity, and the importance of educating the public if we want to see change in the future of AI and human values.

Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization that works side by side with consumers to create a fairer, safer, and healthier world. They do it by fighting to put consumers’ needs first in the marketplace and by empowering them with the trusted knowledge they depend on to make better, more informed choices.

The Kapor Center’s work focuses at the intersection of racial justice and technology to create a more inclusive technology sector for all. Founded by Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor, the center seeks to develop a vision and practice to make the tech industry more diverse and inclusive. The Kapor Foundation, alongside Kapor Capital, and the STEM education initiative SMASH, takes a comprehensive approach to expand access to computer science education, conduct research on disparities in the technology pipeline, support nonprofit organizations and initiatives, and invest in gap-closing startups and entrepreneurs that close gaps of access for all. The Kapor Center seeks to intentionally dismantle barriers to tech and deployment of technologies across the Leaky Tech Pipeline through research-driven practices, gap-closing investments, increased access to computer science education, supporting and partnering with mission-aligned organizations, advocating for needed policy change, and more. 

Vinhcent Le (he/him/his) leads Greenlining’s work to close the digital divide, to protect consumer privacy, and to ensure algorithms are fair and that technology builds economic opportunity for communities of color. In this role, Vinhcent helps develop and implement policies to increase broadband affordability and digital inclusion as well as bring transparency and accountability to automated decision systems. Vinhcent also serves on several regulatory boards including the California Privacy Protection Agency.

Vinhcent received his J.D. from the University of California, Irvine School of Law and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. Prior to Greenlining, Vinhcent advocated for clients as a law clerk at the Public Defender’s Office, the Office of Medicare Hearing and Appeals, and the Small Business Administration.

Janet Haven is the executive director of Data & Society. She has worked at the intersection of technology policy, governance, and accountability for more than twenty years, both domestically and internationally. Janet is a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), which advises President Biden and the National AI Initiative Office on a range of issues related to artificial intelligence. She also acts as an advisor to the Trust and Safety Foundation, and has brought her expertise in non-profit governance to bear through varied board memberships. She writes and speaks regularly on matters related to technology and society, federal AI research and development, and AI governance and policy.

Before joining D&S, Janet spent more than a decade at the Open Society Foundations. There, she oversaw funding strategies and worldwide grant-making related to technology, human rights, and governance, and played a substantial role in shaping the emerging international field focused on technology and accountability.

Data & Society is an independent nonprofit research organization rooted in the belief that empirical evidence should directly inform the development and governance of new technologies — and that these technologies can and must be grounded in equity and human dignity. Recognizing that the concentrated, profit-driven power of corporations and tech platforms will not steer us toward a just future, our work foregrounds the power of the people and communities most impacted by technological change. Their work studies the social implications of data, automation, and AI, producing original research to ground informed public debate about emerging technology.

Dr. Morgan Ames is an adjunct professor in the School of Information and interim associate director of research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society (CSTMS) at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches in Data Science and administers the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. She is also affiliated with the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group (AFOG), the Center for Science, Technology, Society and Policy (CTSP), and the Berkeley Institute of Data Science (BIDS).

We’re ending the season with an episode of the 22 lessons on ethics and technology series, with a conversation featuring Dr. John Williams about the global imagination of tech.

Dr. John Williams is a professor of English Literature at Yale University. His work is focused on international histories of technological/media innovation and the perceived difference of racial and cultural otherness. His book, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and The Meeting of East and West (Yale University Press, 2014), examines the role of technological discourse in representations of Asian/American aesthetics in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century film and literature.  The book won the 2015 Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association. In the conversation, we explore the diverse international histories of technological innovation and how otherness and differences have been constructed across contexts and time.

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.

In April of this year, clashes broke out in cities, with the fighting concentrated around the capital city of Khartoum and the Darfur region. As of 27 May, at least 1,800 people had been killed and more than 5,100 others had been injured.

The conflict began with attacks by the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on government sites across Sudan. At present the conflict has killed hundreds, injured thousands, and triggered a humanitarian catastrophe with international sanctions and a global response emerging from governments, including the United States, and international groups.

In light of the conflict, I wanted to revisit the conversation I had with Mohamed, where we talked about the role that tech plays in democracy and revolution in the middle east to call attention to Sudan and those who are working passionately to help protect and restore democracy there, to recall the possibilities and optimism for a better Sudanese future, and to help remind us of our interconnectedness to others around the world.

Mohamed Abubakr is a Sudanese human rights activist and peacemaker with a decade and a half of civil society experience. Since high school, he has founded and led organizations and initiatives focused on humanitarian, human rights, youth empowerment and peace programs across the Middle East and Africa (MEA) including in Darfur, South Sudan, Sudan, Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Territories and beyond. Mohamed has also documented, reported and mobilized against human rights abuses across MEA, and since arriving in the United States has become a sought after voice at the State Department and in Congress concerning policy and human rights issues in the region.

Mohamed Abubar is the president of the African and Middle Eastern Leadership Project (AMEL). AMEL empowers young activists from the Middle Eastern and African region, and connects them with one another and with peers, leaders and audiences in the global north, in order to advance human rights for all human beings. Using online platforms, social media networks, and technological innovation, AMEL provides training, mentoring, and advocacy to African and Middle Eastern activists, empowering them to step up their civil society activism, while at the same time building their skills and experience to ascend to top leadership positions.

Compliance is a field that is growing in importance at both national and international level. In the EU where emerging ethical principles governing tech have led governments to pass new laws, and harms caused by the tech industry have provoked increasingly sharp public reactions, companies have realized that they now must abide by new reporting obligations, that seek to monitor and prevent environmental mismanagement, sexual harassment, questionable lobbying and tax offenses. Companies are increasingly seeking to protect themselves by introducing effective compliance systems so as to meet these new requirements.

In the episode, I speak with Ofir Shabtai, the Co-Founder & CTO at Shield, a company building compliance systems that can serve as internal watchdogs to monitor and ensure compliance. We talk about the emerging models of governance and the compliance movements mobilizing around the world, what compliance work looks like, and how technological systems intersect with compliance and governance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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! 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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?

OK, so I know it might seem a bit odd for a show about ethics and technology to feature what might seem like a purely philosophical concept. But spending time talking to folks in the tech scene, I discovered that the topic of free will comes up quite a lot. I wanted to understand why. The conversations made me wonder what it is about our technological culture—and maybe even our technologies themselves--that has reinvigorated this ancient debate, which extends back into the earliest philosophical traditions, and which is crucial to any concept of ethics.

In an age of algorithmic predictions, with tech companies and digital technologies that can anticipate and pinpoint our every move, can we still have free will as we know it? What happens to free will when our genetic technologies can plan what we’ll look like, how physically able we will be, and even who we’re likely to become? How free really are our actions when where we decide to eat is influenced by review sites that promote paid sponsors; where how we spend our money is dictated by data giants who tell us what we should like; and where even who we love is determined by algorithms on dating apps? How do we understand freedom of thought, and action, in an age where our biotechnologies not only record, but also predict and proscribe, how thoughts move around in our mind, and how they become actions?

To understand these questions, I turned to David Lawrence, the author of “Are We Biochemical Robots,” a book he wrote in opposition to Sam Harris’s popular argument against free will, a viewpoint endorsed by many in Silicon Valley. Lawrence, who holds a degree in philosophy from UCLA and a degree in law from USC, is a philosopher social critic, and a philosophical proponent of free will, opposing the determinist views held by many new media personalities. Here’s our conversation.

In addition to the “22 Lessons” special series, this season, we’re coming back with a ton of new exciting episodes from landmark thinkers and leaders in the industry, with guests like Gary Bengier, who debuted his first science fiction novel after a career in tech, notably as E-Bay’s Chief Financial Officer; Dr. Robert Pearl, the CEO of Kaiser health, in an episode about tech, medicine, and our health, and Medha Parlikar, the CTO of Casper Labs, for a discussion about the ethics of the blockchain. It’ll be an exciting year. If you want to learn more, or contact us with suggestions, complaints, or ideas, you can contact us. Be in touch! 

And 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.

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 Deb Donig, with production support from Matthew Harsh and Elise St. John. Our head of research for this series is Sakina Nuruddin. Our editor is Carrie Caulfield Arick.

Rate or review us on Apple Podcasts, and feel free to contact us with any suggestions, complaints, or ideas. 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!

Ok, ok ok. So I know I said that we weren’t releasing episodes until September. But this week, we learned that one of our previous guests, Steven Olikara, former Millennial Action Project CEO and current candidate for US Senate, just got one step closer to winning his bid to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the 2022 election. Steven is campaigning in Wisconsin for a critical seat in an election year that will determine which party controls the Senate as a majority for the next two years. The Democratic nominee will face off against current sitting senator, Republican Ron Johnson.

This is not a political podcast. And I’m not hosting this show as a partisan. But “Technically Human” is a podcast about human values, about the pursuit of ethics and equity in our society, and about how we can build a society that better stands to live up to our human values. So many issues at stake for the future of an ethical and equitable world, technological and otherwise, hang in the balance of this election. Steven is the only candidate in this race that I believe will unequivocally protect, support, and enhance these values.

There is only one debate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary for US Senate and Steven needs 5,000 people to donate by this Thursday in order to qualify for the debate stage. If 5,000 people donate just $1 each by this Thursday, June 30th at 11:59 pm EST, Steven will qualify for the debate and the world will get to hear his message. 

To support, please visit https://secure.actblue.com/donate/olikara_debate.

ORIGINAL SHOW NOTES: 

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.

As listeners may know, for the past year I have led a team of researchers for the National Science Foundation to explore this new profession, to assess what it means, and to proactively define it in order to ensure that workers in this profession can succeed in these roles, and that they can make the ethical difference they were hired to make.

So I was especially excited to talk to Rebekah Tweed, the creator of the Responsible Tech Job Board, which features roles that are focused on reducing the harms of technology, diversifying the tech pipeline, and ensuring that tech is aligned with the public interest. It’s the first job board of its kind, it attracts both hirers and job seekers who are interested in creating ethical change in tech, and it is already changing the industry and defining the field.  

Rebekah Tweed is a leader in Responsible Technology careers, talent, and hiring trends. Alongside her role as curator and creator of the Responsible Tech Job Board, she is the Program Director at All Tech is Human, where she heads up various programs including their mentorship program and university ambassadors program. She is also the Co-Chair of the IEEE Global AI Ethics Initiative Editing Committee and a member of the Arts Committee.

And that’s all for this season! We are off for the summer, but we’ll be back in September with brand new episodes of Technically Human. Until then, check out our archives. Enjoy the summer, and see you in September!

Dr. John Cooley is the founder and Chief of Products and Innovation at Nanoramic Laboratories, a company working to accelerate the adoption and universality of battery-powered transportation. He holds five (5) technical degrees from MIT including the Ph.D. from the Electrical Engineering dept. 

Dr. Cooley has been issued several patents including four for his thesis work. He has presented and published papers in the areas of power converter control and modeling, linearized circuit analysis, capacitive sensing, building energy management, and in education. His interests lie in energy-related problems of scale and the ways in which we can impact those with technology and policy.

The episode delves into the complications of recent technology, including social media apps and the shift into virtual education due to Covid-19. In a virtual world, we lose connection and intimacy in the relationships that should be most important to us, and Dr. Barrett helps us brainstorm ways that we can reconnect in our coldly digital world.

Dr. Elizabeth Barrett is a Psychology and Child Development professor at the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo where she lectures on the topics of counseling, family psychology, child abuse and neglect, and marriage and family therapy. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist of 20 years and a mental health coach specializing in personal growth, family life, and relationship issues. She has worked with the county of San Luis Obispo as a crisis/in-home counselor for a child abuse prevention program where she focused on communication’s importance in individual health and the well-being of a family. Her expertise surrounding family psychology and the psychological impact of our evolving society is enhanced through her roles as a wife, mother, grandmother, sister, and daughter. She shares her concerns regarding our collective mental health and the direction of the helping professions on her weekly radio program on Public Radio KCBX, A Conversation with the Reluctant Therapist.

Paul Shapiro author of the national bestseller Clean Meat, published in 2018. When Paul took his first bite of clean meat in 2014, more humans had gone into space than had eaten real meat grown outside an animal. In addition to being among the world’s first clean meat consumers, Paul is a four-time TEDx speaker, the host of the Business for Good Podcast, the CEO of The Better Meat Co., and long-time leader in food sustainability. Paul is a researcher, innovator, industry leader, and public scholar swho has published hundreds of articles in publications ranging from daily newspapers to academic journals. Paul lives in Sacramento, California with his wife Toni Okamoto, author and founder of Plant-Based on a Budget, and their very friendly pit bull Eddie. Clean Meat (2018) is his first book, is a Washington Post bestseller, and has been translated into seven languages.

You can read more about Paul’s work and contact him at www.paul-shapiro.com.

Intercode is a collective of voices exploring how the intersection of identity and privilege impacts every facet of the tech industry–including access, culture and the ethics governing the space. Through candid conversation and writing, we work to tackle the ways current DEI efforts can still fall short in fostering inclusive and equitable spaces. ​​

The idea for Intercode began with several candid discussions amongst a group of software developers and recent graduates from the Grace Hopper Program, a NY-based bootcamp targeted towards historically underrepresented candidates in the field of engineering. While sharing our perspectives we quickly realized that these discussions were valuable enough to merit a larger audience and began laying the groundwork to create a formal space for us to share these perspectives with the world.

Serena Chang is a Fullstack software engineer and professional dancer in New York City looking to combine both these passions in her next career. Chang was dancing as one of the lead roles in the off-broadway performance, “Then She Fell” and prepared to go on an international tour prior to the performance shutdowns due to Covid. Looking for another creative and technical pathway, she became immersed in coding and the endless creative possibilities it offered to interface with humans.

Kelsey Roy is a Software Engineer who is seeking to implement socially conscious practices in the tech sphere. She has held previous roles as a Data Analyst and Operations Manager and as a Project Management Consultant. Kelsey is devoted to a career working for mission-driven organizations with diverse and collaborative environments that make a positive difference in the world. Related to her passion for supporting DEI efforts in tech, she is also interested in the ethics surrounding AI, machine learning, and computing in general.

Jazma Foskin is a Fullstack Software Engineer who recently graduated from the Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy. She is an Army Veteran who is passionate about learning, traveling, and growing. Combining technology and creativity has allowed her to work on passion projects that are aiming to push the Black and LGBTQIA+ community forward. As a Black woman, Jazma is continuing to be a representation so that others may see themselves in her and understand they too no matter their starting point can accomplish their goals.

Diana Viglucci (they/them) is a full stack developer, community-builder, and lifelong learner. They like writing code that brings people joy, helps them learn something new, or that makes resources more accessible. Diana completed their technical training at the Grace Hopper Program, where they were best known for their Stackathon-winning rat tracker app. Prior to transitioning into tech, they worked in community-based nonprofit programs, supporting individuals and their families as they navigated mental health issues, career changes, and LGBTQ+ identity. A cum laude graduate of Cornell University, Diana finds joy in making art, spending time in nature, and turning off their phone for hours-long stretches. Their work is grounded in person-centered, trauma-informed, and intersectional perspectives - and always will be - because software is for people.

Violet Cutler (She/They) is a trans woman living in Philadelphia. She has been an artist and performer for more than a decade. She has also spent that time organizing DIY events in the queer and trans community and really values community building. She spent the last 4 years working in a food coop. She co-organized a successful union campaign when Covid struck. Despite this success, the dangers of the pandemic drove her to look for another way to support herself. In August of 2021, she quit her job and began studying to get into the Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy. She graduated in April 2022 and looks forward to a career in Tech and Game Development. Her priorities moving forward are accessibility of the web and creating spaces in tech for other marginalized identities.

Jessica Donig (she/her) is a Fullstack software engineer with a background in social entrepreneurship. Prior to attending Grace Hopper, Jessica co-founded a nonprofit, worked as the first employee of a YC-backed startup, and conducted clinical research at Stanford University.  From the time she entered the startup world in 2015, Jessica wanted to learn to code, but the lack of female representation in the field had made her hesitant to do so. Now that she has completed her coursework, Jessica is passionate about helping other nontraditional engineers—especially women—see themselves in tech.

Dov Maisel is an Innovator, volunteer and world renown expert in disaster management. In 2006, Dovi helped to cofound United Hatzalah, Israel’s first nationwide, all volunteer EMS organization. He invented the technology for United Hatzalah’s Uber-like GPS based dispatch system which locates and sends the EMT closest to the medical emergency to provide aid. He led the United Hatzalah international relief missions in Haiti, Nepal and in both Houston and Florida, USA, after the devastating hurricanes that decimated the communities there, and he managed the United Hatzalah EMS response teams in Mumbai immediately after the shocking terror attacks that took place there in 2008. He works as the head of International Operations of United Hatzalah, which is currently providing critical care and emergency aid in Ukraine. He continues to save lives as a volunteer, instructor and mass casualty incident manager. United Hatzalah is the largest independent, non-profit, fully volunteer Emergency Medical Service organization providing free emergency medical first response. They have provided critical life-saving care in the wake of devastating disasters in Haiti, Nepal, Houston, Florida, Mumbai, and they are currently on the ground in Ukraine. United Hatzalah’s service is available to all people regardless of race, religion, or national origin. United Hatzalah has more than 6,200 volunteers around the country, available around the clock – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

United Hatzalah is currently providing crucial on the ground aid in Ukraine. To donate to United Hatzalah and to support their work in Ukraine, please visit their website: https://israelrescue.org/

Prateek Joshi is the Founder and CEO of Plutoshift, a company that leverages AI to create sustainable, and life-saving, technologies that help meet basic needs in developing countries. He is the author of 13 books on ML, including a #1 Best Seller, and the host of the Infinite Machine Learning podcast  He has been featured on Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, TechCrunch, and Bloomberg, and he publishes a tech blog with readership in 200+ countries. 

Dr. Pallavi Banerjee is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary. Her research interests lie at the intersections of sociology of families, immigration, labour, gender, transnationalism and critical feminist theories. Her new book looks at the experience of Indian immigrants coming to the U.S. to work in the tech sector through the American visa program, and the problems with an immigration system that offers opportunities for immigrants, while often simultaneously wreaking havoc on their lives and families.

For our first episode of the season, we're bringing you a conversation with Dr. Steven Kelts. We talk about corporate ethics, we debate the role of values in tech culture, and Steven plays "optimistic cop" to my "cynical cop," to argue that he's hopeful for, and excited about, the future of ethics in tech culture.

Steven Kelts is a political theorist and long-time ethics educator, and a Lecturer at Princeton University, in the Politics Department and at the University Center for Human Values. 

His current research is on the history and uses of market ideas, including theories of the firm and corporate organization. In addition to ongoing writing projects, Dr. Kelts consults in the private sector with companies looking to align their market value with their ethical values, working to develop frameworks to help employees navigate ethical pitfalls in their organizational culture.

This episode was produced by Deb Donig and Sakina Nuruddin.

Art by Desi Aleman.

Manjula Padmanabhan is an author, playwright, artist and cartoonist. She grew up in Europe and South Asia, returning to India as a teenager. Her play Harvest won the Onassis Award for Theatre, in 1997, in Greece. Her books include Getting There, Escape, and The Island of Lost Girls. She has illustrated over twenty children’s books including I Am Different and Shrinking Vanita. She lives in the US, with a home in New Delhi.

This episode concludes the 7th season of "Technically Human." We’ll be back at the beginning of April, with more episodes of the show. 

One important note: our producer, Matt Perry, who has been with the show since its early days, is moving on to pursue some dreams. Matt's work, his brilliance, and his vision has helped to build the show to what it is today. Thank you, Matt! 

To our listeners, thanks for listening, and we will see you in April with more episodes of Technically Human.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry and Sakina Nuruddin.

Art by Desi Aleman.

Christopher Willis is the Chief Marketing Officer of Acrolinx, an industry pioneer that is changing how we think about language across borders, cultures, and national boundaries. We talk about how tech is transforming translation, and just how human language is, in an age where AI can do a lot of the talking. Chris is widely recognized for his public speaking, his innovation, and his ability to build success from the ground up. His work focuses on centering tech around human values and foregrounding inclusive language practices in technology and translation.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

Dr. Eric Daimler is a leading authority in robotics and artificial intelligence with over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, investor, technologist, and policymaker. He served under the Obama Administration as a Presidential Innovation Fellow for AI and Robotics in the Executive Office of President, as the sole authority driving the agenda for U.S. leadership in research, commercialization, and public adoption of AI & Robotics.

Dr. Daimler has incubated, built and led several technology companies recognized as pioneers in their fields ranging from software systems to statistical arbitrage. His newest venture, Conexus, is a groundbreaking solution for what is perhaps today's biggest information technology problem — data deluge.

As founder and CEO of Conexus, Dr. Daimler  is leading the development of CQL, a patent-pending platform founded upon category theory — a revolution in mathematics — to help companies manage the overwhelming and rapidly growing challenge of data integration and migration.

His academic research has been at the intersection of AI, Computational Linguistics, and Network Science (Graph Theory). His work has expanding to include economics and public policy. He served as Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science where he founded the university's Entrepreneurial Management program and helped to launch Carnegie Mellon's Silicon Valley Campus. He has studied at the University of Washington-Seattle, Stanford University, and Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Dr. Daimler’s extensive career spanning business, academics and policy give him a rare perspective on the next generation of AI. Dr. Daimler sees clearly how information technology can dramatically improve our world. However, it demands our engagement. Neither a utopia nor dystopia is inevitable. What matters is how we shape and react to, its development.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Our head of reseaarch is Sakina Nuruddin.

Art by Desi Aleman.

PJ Manney is the author of the bestselling and Philip K. Dick Award-nominated science fiction technothriller, (R)EVOLUTION (2015), published by 47North in the Phoenix Horizon trilogy with, (ID)ENTITY (2017), and (CON)SCIENCE, (2021). Set as alternate, future American histories, the novels chart the influence of world-changing technologies on power and nations. 

A former chairperson of Humanity Plus, she helped rebrand the organization, launch H+ Magazine and organize the first multi-org conference on futurist topics, Convergence ’08. She authored "Yucky Gets Yummy: How Speculative Fiction Creates Society"​ and "Empathy in the Time of Technology: How Storytelling is the Key to Empathy,"​ foundational works on the neuropsychology of empathy and media.

Manney presented her ideas to National Geographic, the Producers Guild of America, Directors Guild of America, NASA-JPL, M.I.T., Huffington Post, The H+ Summit, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, She is also a frequent guest on podcasts and webshows, and is widely published in as a public thinker and critic. Manney consults for varied organizations about the future of humanity and technology, including artificial intelligence, robotics, cyborgs, nanotechnology, biotechnology, brain-computer interfaces, space, blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Manney worked for over 25 years in film/TV: motion picture PR at Walt Disney/Touchstone Pictures; story development for independent film production companies; and writing as Patricia Manney for the critically acclaimed hit TV shows Hercules — The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. She also co-founded Uncharted Entertainment, writing and/or creating many pilot scripts for television networks, including CBS, Fox, UPN, Discovery, ABC Family and Comedy Central.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Our Head of Research is Sakina Nuruddin.

Art by Desi Aleman.

Professor Chimène Keitner is the Alfred and Hanna Fromm Professor of International Law at UC Hastings, where she teaches courses on International Law; on Democracy, Technology and Security; and on legal approaches to Evidence, among many other topics. She is a leading authority on international law and civil litigation, and served as the 27th Counselor on International Law in the U.S. Department of State. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history and literature with high honors from Harvard, a JD from Yale, where she was a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, and a doctorate in international relations from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

She has authored two books and dozens of articles, essays, and book chapters on questions surrounding the relationship among law, communities, and borders, including issues of jurisdiction, extraterritoriality, foreign sovereign and foreign official immunity, and the historical understandings underpinning current practice in these areas.

Professor Keitner has served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and as Co-Chair of the ASIL International Law in Domestic Courts Interest Group. She is a member of the American Law Institute and an Adviser on the ALI’s Fourth Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. She is also a founding co-chair of the International Law Association’s Study Group on Individual Responsibility in International Law., and a member of the state department’s advisory committee on international law.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Our head of research is Sakina Nuruddin.

Art by Desi Aleman.

Ram Fish is the CEO of 19Labs. Throughout his career in Apple, Samsung, Nokia, as well as Co-Founder CEO of three startups, he specializes in leading interdisciplinary special consumer projects, bridging technology, consumer needs, and business & regulatory constraints. 

Mr. Fish has an MBA from Yale University as well as Computer Engineering Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Case Western Reserve University, where he is also a lecturer in Technology Management.

He has authored many articles on the topic of democracy, ethics, and technology, including, most recently “Twitter fact-checking Trump: Good intentions. Wrong approach. And a proposal for how to do it right,” and "Four proposals to neutralize social media’s threat to democracies," co-authored with Professor Chimène Keitner.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

Dr. Foaad Khosmood is the Forbes Professor of Computer Engineering and Associate Professor of Computer Science at California Polytechnic State University.  His research interests include natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence, interactive entertainment, game AI and game jams.

At Cal Poly, Professor Khosmood usually teaches AI, Interactive Entertainment, Computational Linguistics, Data Mining and Operating Systems. He serves as the faculty advisor for the Cal Poly Game Development (CPGD), SLO Hacks and Color Coded student clubs. He is the founder of the Digital Democracy Project, a platform that seeks to use digital technologies to Make Government More Transparent one Video at a Time, and the lead researcher on a new project at the Cal Poly Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy to strengthen democracy by developing an artificial intelligence system that will expand and improve state government coverage at local and regional media outlets—an area of journalism that has especially suffered amid the economic slide of the news industry.

Dr. Khosmood is the Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Technology & Public Policy. He is also a board member, former CTO and past president of Global Game Jam, Inc. where he helps to organize the world's largest game creation activity (120+ countries). He is also the general chair of the Foundations of Digital Games, a major international "big tent" academic conference dedicated to exploring the latest research in all aspects of digital games, and to increasing diversity and inclusion in the world of computing .

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

Dr. John C. Williams is a Professor in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University, in the UK.

Among the many areas of his research, Dr. Williams is an expert on the ethics of war and challenges presented by changing patterns and technologies of violence and the issue of democratic authority over warfare. His work looks at key technologies including drones and emergent autonomous weapons systems, and considers the ethics of meaningful human control as AI increasingly becomes part of what it means to wage war. He is the author of Ethics, Diversity and World Politics: Saving Pluralism From Itself? (Oxford University Press), and The Ethics of Territorial Borders: Drawing Lines in the Shifting Sand. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, as well as multiple other articles on the ethics of technology at the intersection of war.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

D.J. MacLennan is a writer of speculative fiction and non-fiction from the Isle of Skye in the Highlands of Scotland. His new book, Future Bright, Future Grimm: Transhumanist Tales for Mother Nature's Offspring reboots the Grimms brothers' fables to imagine how the fairy tales help us imagine the future, and how science fiction blends with fairy tale mythologies,  as technology becomes increasingly embedded in our bodies and our landscapes.

This podcast was produced by Matt Perry.

Artwork by Desi Aleman.

In our first episode of the season, I sit down with film director Jake Wachtel to talk about his debut film, "Karmalink," the first science fiction film set in Cambodia. We discuss the connection between digital technologies, reincarnation, and Buddhism, we talk about the state of technological development in Cambodia, and Jake reflects on how Cambodians are imagining the future, in light of Cambodia's past.

Jake Wachtel grew up in California, and studied Film and Neuroscience at Stanford University. In 2015, he moved to Cambodia to teach filmmaking to children through Filmmakers Without Borders. His short THE FOREIGNER HERE premiered at the Cambodian International Film Festival alongside the new wave of Cambodian directors. His doc work has been featured on NYTimes.com, Wired, NPR and MSNBC. KARMALINK is his debut feature.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

In memory of Leng Heng Prak.

Dr. Brooke Erin Duffy is an Associate Professor at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in the Department of Communication and the Program in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her work spans the topics of social media, gender, identity and inequality, digital labor, and promotional culture.

She's the author of two monographs on gender and cultural production, including (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, in 2017), which draws upon research with fashion bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagram influencers to explore the culture and politics of the digital labor. Wired named it one of the "Top Tech Books of 2017." Dr. Duffy's first monograph, Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013), examined the rapidly changing technologies and political economies of media production through an analysis of the magazine industry. Duffy’s third book, Platforms and Cultural Production with Thomas Poell and David Nieborg, is forthcoming with Polity in 2021. She is also the co-editor of Key Readings in Media Today: Mass Communication in Contexts with Joseph Turow (Routledge press, in 2009). 

Dr. Duffy’s research has been published in a wide variety of academic journals, and she is also a public scholar, whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Vox, Times Higher Education, Wired, and Quartz. Her commentary has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, Vox, The Washington Post, The USA Today, and Vice, among others.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

That is why, this week, I invited the founder of the Open Dyalog movement, Zahabiya Nuruddin, to join me this week to talk about how, in a time when we interact with one another increasingly online, through our tech, we can practice the ethics of civil discourse. The head of research for the “Technically Human” team, Sakina Nuruddin, co-hosts this week's show. Sakina is the founder of the Cal Poly chapter of Open Dyalog. 

Interested in Open Dyalog? Contact Sakina at snuruddi@calpoly.edu. 

Thanks for listening! We are off next week for the Thanksgiving break—we’ll return the first week of December for our final episode of the Technically Human season.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

Rob Dickinson is Co-Founder and CEO at Resurface, an innovative platform focused on data privacy and API activity. His work around observability, cybersecurity and the “internet of things” has set him out as a thought leader in this part of the tech world. As a technologist, Rob seeks to build a future of responsible and ethical API. He is a pioneering thinker in the movement to regain ownership of our data, and in what he calls ZeroTrust cybersecurity.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

We've put together a show that answers some of the top questions that we consistently get asked about ethics and technology, with some of "Technically Human's" most memorable guests.

This episode features commentary on the philosophy of the good with Ryan Jenkins, bioethics with Art Caplan, digital human rights and sci-fi with Dave Eggers, BUMMR technological critiques by Jaron Lanier, commentary on democracy and tech Yaël Eisenstat, Silicon Valley humor with Dan Lyons, technology's impact on intimacy with Julie Albright, a meditation on the ethics of the algorithm with Todd Presner, a consideration of disability and tech with George Estreich, and a conversation about technological utopianism with Morgan Ames.

If you're looking for a crash course in ethical technology, this is the episode for you!

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

We talk about the evolution of wearables, the technologies that go into wearable tech, and why you might want to think twice about wearing devices that collect information about what goes on inside your body, especially if you don't know who might be using that data--or why.

This episode was produced by Mereck Palazzo & Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

Vivek Wadhwa is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. He is the author of five best-selling books: From Incremental to Exponential; Your Happiness Was Hacked; The Driver in the Driverless Car; Innovating Women; and The Immigrant Exodus.

He has been a globally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post and held appointments at Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, Stanford Law School, UC Berkeley, Emory University, and Singularity University. In 2012, the U.S. Government awarded Wadhwa distinguished recognition as an “Outstanding American by Choice” for his “commitment to this country and to the common civic values that unite us as Americans.”

He was also named one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy magazine in that year; in June 2013, he was on TIME magazine’s list of “Tech 40”, one of forty of the most influential minds in tech; and in September 2015, he was second on a list of “ten men worth emulating” in The Financial Times. In 2018, he was awarded Silicon Valley Forum’s Visionary Award, a list of luminaries “who have made Silicon Valley synonymous with creativity and life-changing advancements in technology.”

Wadhwa is an advisor to several governments; mentors entrepreneurs; and writes for top publications across the globe. He has also researched Silicon Valley’s diversity, or the lack of it.  He documented that women entrepreneurs have the same backgrounds and motivations as men do, but are rare in the ranks of technology CEOs and CTOs. He is the founding president of the Carolinas chapter of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TIE), a non-profit global network intended to foster entrepreneurship.  He has been featured in thousands of articles in publications worldwide, including the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Forbes magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, and Science Magazine, and has made many appearances on U.S. and international TV stations, including CBS 60 Minutes, PBS, CNN, ABC, NBC, CNBC, and the BBC.

This episode was produced by Mereck Palazzo & Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

Joe Toscano is an award-winning designer, published author, and international keynote speaker. Joe previously consulted for Google in Mountain View, CA. Joe left because he believes the industry misuses data and felt the issues needed to be addressed through innovation rather than strict regulation.

Since leaving, Joe has traveled the world speaking to audiences ranging from 10 people at local events to 15,000 person corporate events, he has written a book, called Automating Humanity, and he has started the Better Ethics and Consumer Outcomes Network (BEACON), all focused on increasing technology literacy, discovering opportunities for intentional and thoughtful innovative practices, and moving communities forward through purpose-driven innovation.

Outside of BEACON Joe also writes for Forbes, is a member of the World Economic Forum's Steering Committee for Data Protection, and is featured in The Social Dilemma. His work is in the process of being translated into law, putting him in the room with legislators across the United States, including NY State Senate and dozens of Attorney's General, to whom he submitted evidence in the antitrust case against Google.

This episode was produced by Mereck Palazzo & Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Rob Rastovich is the Chief Technology Officer of ThingLogix, and an expert on the Internet of Things, or IoT. He has been actively involved in technology for nearly 30 years, from building a top 10 e-commerce site in a time when e-commerce was still in its infancy to establishing Amazon’s AWS IoT. ThingLogix was awarded the 2018 IoT Platforms Leadership Award, and has become an advanced tier technology partner for Amazon Web Services. When he’s not at the forefront of IoT, Rob can be found maintaining his cattle ranch in Central Oregon.

Episode produced by Ana Marsh and Matt Perry.

Artwork by Desi Aleman.

Ezra Frech is an American Paralympian Athlete who competes in high jump, long jump, and sprinting events in international level events. Ezra was born with congenital limb differences, missing his left knee, left shin bone, and fingers on his left hand, and has used a running blade since he was 4 years old. 

In 2019 Ezra made the US Paralympic Track and Field Team and, as the youngest athlete on the team at 14 year’s old, competed in three international events, including the Junior World Para-Para-Athletics Championships, where he won three medals, the Parapan American Games where he won two silver medals, and the World Para-Athletics Championships, where he placed in the top 8 in all three of his events and was the youngest athlete out of 1,400 competitors. He’s slated to compete for Team USA in the upcoming 2021 Tokyo Paralympic Games.

He is an advocate for disability rights, and the inspiration behind and co-founder of Angel City Sports, a high-growth, high-impact non-profit organization dedicated to providing the joy of sports to children and adults with physical disabilities. 

Episode produced by Matt Perry and Ana Marsh.

Over the last twenty-five years, Clayton Frech has held leadership roles in the business, government, and non-profit sectors. He became involved in the disability community when his first son, Ezra, was born missing his left knee and left fibula and with only one finger on his left hand.  Following Ezra’s passion for sports, Mr. Frech identified major gaps in access to sports programming for athletes with physical disabilities in the U.S.  In 2013, with the help of friends and family, he set out to address these gaps, and in 2015, he produced the first Angel City Games, which is now the largest Paralympic competition in the country, and the West Coast’s most prestigious Paralympic event. 

 In 2015, Mr. Frech started Angel City Sports to address inequities in access to sport for kids and adults living with physical disabilities. In addition to serving as a strategic advisor to a number of small and mid-sized companies, he recently launched Ampla Institute, a career development and planning firm dedicated to helping people find their purpose and optimize their career potential.

Stay tuned for next week’s episode, where we talk to Ezra Frech about running on a blade as a US Paralympian athlete, headed to Tokyo for the International Paralympic Games in Tokyo.

Episode produced by Matt Perry and Ana Marsh.

Haley Pavone is the Founder & CEO of Pashion Footwear. She is a Cal Poly graduate in Business and Entrepreneurship, and an alumnus of the University's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She has appeared been profiled by Forbes, Businesswire, and she recently appeared on the critically acclaimed and multi-Emmy® Award-winning entrepreneurial-themed ABC reality show “Shark Tank.” She’s passionate about empathic and humane design, and building collectively and collaboratively, with insight, inclusion, and compassion.

Art by Desi Aleman Produced by Matt Perry

Dr. John Maeda is an American technologist and product experience leader who is known around the world for building bridges between business, engineering, and design—and his dedication to working inclusively. He is the SVP Chief Customer Experience Officer at Everbridge, where he works on the future of Critical Event Management technologies for saving lives and keeping businesses and society running.

He is an MIT-trained computer scientist, who blends his training as a computer scientist with an MBA. He is the author of five books including the new How To Speak Machine and the bestselling Laws of Simplicity. Among his MANY leadership positions, he serves on the board of Directors at Sonos and the Smithsonian Design Museum, he is the former President/CEO of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and he is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins venture capital in Silicon Valley.

During his early career, Dr. Maeda was an MIT research professor in computational design,  represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He is also a recipient of the White House’s National Design Award. He has appeared as a speaker all over the world, from Davos to Beijing to São Paulo to New York, and his TED talks have received millions of views. 

To quote WIRED Magazine, “Maeda is to design what Warren Buffett is to finance.”

Today’s hosts, Ana Marsh and Matt Perry, are producers on the Technically Human podcast.

Ana Marsh is a fourth-year computer science student at Cal Poly. She is graduating in the Spring of 2021 and plans to start full-time at Microsoft in the Fall. She has a deep interest in ethical technology, cultivated through her coursework in computer science and the University’s new technically human course, part of the Cal Poly ethical technology initiative. Matt Perry is a fifth-year architecture student at Cal Poly from Las Vegas, NV. Now in the final year of his degree, he is doing research on ephemeral architecture and designing for the human experience, while exploring the future of architecture. He hopes to spend his time designing architecture with the human experience at the forefront of design.

Ana and Matt talk about what it means to blend tech and art, how we can think about the future of humane design, and how we can make tech great again. Art by Desi Aleman Produced by Matt Perry

We talk about the technologies that can prevent environmental destruction, and how tech innovation can drive a clean energy vision for the future. Mark explains why we already have the science and tech to build this future, and how--with the political and social will--we can create a world powered by renewable energy--not in a distant future, but NOW. 

Mark Z. Jacobson is Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental  Engineering at Stanford University. He seeks to understand air pollution and global warming problems, and to develop large-scale clean, renewable energy solutions to these major and urgent problems. His most recent book, published by Cambridge University Press, is titled 100 Percent Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything. The book is the culmination of Dr. Jacobson’s life's work on  transitioning the world to 100% clean, renewable energy, and it examines the  technologies, economics, and social/political aspects of that transition.

On February 9, as part of the Joint Declaration of the Global 100% Renewable Energy Strategy Group, Dr. Jacobson joined other leading climate scientists and experts to propose a 10 point declaration to transform the world’s energy supply to 100% renewable energy. This statement will be specifically published in support of President Biden’s United States climate change agenda.

To support the transformation to renewable energy by signing your name to the declaration, please visit www.global100restrategygroup.org.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry. Podcast art by Desi Aleman

Jaron Lanier is the founder of the field of virtual reality. From 2009, he has worked at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist in a role called “The Octopus,” (which stands for Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist).

In 2010, Lanier was named to the Time 100 list of most influential people. In 2018, Lanier was named one of the 25 most influential people in the previous 25 years of tech history by Wired Magazine, and one of the 100 top public intellectuals by Foreign Policy Magazine. His books include the bestsellers “You Are Not a Gadget, A Manifesto,” “Who Owns the Future?,” and “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.” His writing appears in The New York Times, Discover, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Harpers Magazine, Atlantic, Wired Magazine (where he was a founding contributing editor), and Scientific American. He has appeared on TV shows such as The View, PBS NewsHour, The Colbert Report, Nightline and Charlie Rose, and has been profiled on the front pages of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times multiple times. He regularly serves as a creative consultant for movies, including Minority Report and The Circle.

He has received honorary doctorates from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Franklin and Marshall College, was the recipient of CMU's Watson award in 2001, was a finalist for the first Edge of Computation Award in 2005, and received a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE in 2009 for contributions to Virtual Reality. Jaron Lanier is also a musician and artist. He has been active in the world of new "classical" music since the late '70s and writes chamber and orchestral works. He is a pianist and a specialist in unusual and historical musical instruments; he maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played instruments in the world.

Produced by Matt Perry Art by Desi Aleman

Across the 3 episodes, we focus on civil discourse, and we ask what it means to engage in dialogue with people with whom we disagree, sometimes deeply.  In the first two episodes, I spoke with Daryl Davis about racism, and how he envisions the possibility of changing the minds of those who believe, and participate in, white supremacist and separatist movements.

In our third and final episode of the “changing minds” series, I sit down with Bill Ottman. Bill Ottman is the founder of Minds.com, a new community-owned, “open source” social media network that prizes privacy, transparency, and open exchange. We explore the advantages, and the challenges, of unfettered free speech, we talk about relationship between tech and civil discourse, and Bill talks about his vision of a social media ecosystem that can help pave the way toward creating a healthier and more vibrant national conversation—not in spite of our differences and distances, but because of them.

In thinking about the ethics of technology, and in particular, its relationship to our moment of political, cultural, and ideological polarization, the ethics of technology extend far beyond how we use tech. Social media offers the potential for new connections, or new levels of disconnect and partisanship. The ethics and intentions we bring to social media matter, and our approach starts far before we ever sit down at our computer to respond to a Facebook post, or broadcast our views on Twitter. They start with how we imagine, and practice, civil discourse, how we think about meeting other folks where they are, considering the journey that led them to believe as they do.

Here's part 3, with Bill Ottman

Produced by Matt Perry Artwork by Desi Aleman

Daryl Davis is a Black singer and author who has facilitated over 200 members of the KKK to leave the organization, simply by befriending them and letting them know who he is. He's big on simply reaching out rather than censorship and has created a deradicalization movement at change.minds.com to help people connect in a civil way online.    

In thinking about the ethics of technology, and in particular, its relationship to our moment of political, cultural, and ideological polarization, the ethics of technology extend far beyond how we use tech. Social media offers the potential for new connections, or new levels of disconnect and partisanship. The ethics and intentions we bring to social media matter, and our approach starts far before we ever sit down at our computer to respond to a Facebook post, or broadcast our views on Twitter. They start with how we imagine, and practice, civil discourse, how we think about meeting other folks where they are, considering the journey that led them to believe as they do.

In my conversations with Daryl, we explore what those ethics can look like, and how they can come to transform our approach to engaging in dialogue with distant others. Distant others can mean geographical distance. It can also mean political distance, ideological distance, or cultural difference. Daryl’s work, and his activism, shows an important alternative to the discord that dominates our current conversation and points us to the possibility of ethical engagement across that distance.

Next week, I sit down with Bill Ottman, the CEO of Minds.com, a social media platform that provides an alternative to Facebook, and that seeks to prioritize privacy, transparency, and open exchange. Building on my conversations with Daryl in the first two episodes, Bill and I explore the relationship between tech and civil discourse, and ways that we all can be part of creating a healthier and more vibrant national conversation—not in spite of our differences and distances, but because of them. 

Here's part 2 of my conversation with Daryl.

Produced by Matt Perry

Artwork by Desi Aleman

Daryl Davis is an Black singer and author who has facilitated over 200 members of the KKK to leave the organization, simply by befriending them and letting them know who he is. He's big on simply reaching out rather than censorship and has created a deradicalization movement at change.minds.com to help people connect in a civil way online.    

Across these two episodes, I talk to Daryl about his work and his views on navigating this particularly fraught moment. In thinking about the ethics of technology, and in particular, its relationship to our moment of political, cultural, and ideological polarization, the ethics of technology extend far beyond how we use tech. Those ethics start far before we ever sit down at our computer to respond to a Facebook post, or broadcast our views on Twitter. They start with how we imagine, and practice, civil discourse. In my conversations with Daryl, we explore what those ethics can look like, and how they can come to transform our approach to engaging in dialogue with distant others. Distant others can mean geographical distance. It can also mean political distance, ideological distance, or cultural difference. Daryl’s work, and his activism, shows an important alternative to the discord that dominates our current conversation, and points us to the possibility of ethical engagement across that distance.

In the third of these episodes, I speak to Bill Otman, the CEO of Minds.com, a social media platform that provides an alternative to Facebook, and that seeks to prioritize privacy, transparency, and open exchange. Between these conversations, and across these 3 episodes, we explore the relationship between tech and civil discourse, and ways that we all can be part of creating a healthier and more vibrant national conversation—not in spite of our differences and distances, but because of them.

Produced by Matt Perry

Artwork by Desi Aleman

Produced by Matt Perry Podcast art designed by Desi Aleman Music by Bensound

Dr. Julie Albright is a Sociologist specializing in digital culture and communications. She has a Masters Degree in Social and Systemic Studies and a Dual Doctorate in Sociology and Marriage and Family Therapy from the University of Southern California. Dr. Albright is currently a Lecturer in the departments of Applied Psychology and Engineering at USC, where She teaches master’s level courses on the Psychology of Interactive Technologies and Sustainable Infrastructure. 

Dr. Albright’s research has focused on the growing intersection of technology and social / behavioral systems.

She is also a sought after keynote speaker, and has given talks for major data center and energy conferences including SAP for Utilities, IBM Global, Data Center Dynamics and the Dept. of Defense. She has appeared as an expert on national media including the Today Show, CNN, NBC Nightly News, CBS, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, NPR Radio and many others. 

Her new book, Left to Their Own Devices: How Digital Natives Are Reshaping the American Dream (Random House/ Prometheus press), investigates the impacts of mobile - social- – digital technologies on society. 

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

We discuss the role of social media in mobilizing democratic movements, including anti-autocratic movements in the Middle East and Africa, and its simultaneous role in the collapse of democratic norms in the United States. We talk about the future of both democracy and online networks, what it means to know of the lives of others virtually, and how global connection creates new possibilities for revolution.

In this episode of "Technically Human,' I speak to Brad about what motivated his decision to stand up. We talk about how technologists can leverage their position to demand social change, we discuss the challenges of speaking up, and Brad talks about how he envisions the world that he hopes his kids, and the next generation, will inherit.

Brad Taylor is the founder of the "Tech Stands Up" movement. He is an engineer, founder, and father who has worked in Silicon Valley for the last 15 years building digital marketing tools for some of the world's largest brands.

Brad hosts the Tech Stands Up Podcast, a series dedicated to the intersection of technology and civic engagement at the local, state, and federal levels. He discusses the extraordinary impact new technologies have on our society and how we can solve some of the most challenging problems we face today.

This episode was produced by Matthew Perry.

In the episode, I ask Malka about how these areas of her work blend together, how she understands the boundaries and the interplay between the real and the imaginary, and the role that science fiction plays in our understanding of tech—its promises and its perils.

We talk about use of science fiction in helping us avoid disasters, the relationship between tech, science fiction, and democracy, and Malka shares her predictions about the future of tech, democracy, and human rights as we move into the future of the 21st century.

Malka Older is a writer, academic, and aid worker. She is currently a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and an Associate Researcher at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations. Her  science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. She has written opinion pieces for the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and NBC Think.

She has more a decade of experience in humanitarian aid and development, ranging from field level experience as a Head of Office in Darfur to supporting global programs and agency-wide strategy as a disaster risk reduction technical specialist. Her doctoral work on the sociology of organizations at the Institut d’Études Politques de Paris (Sciences Po), completed in 2019, explored the dynamics of multi-level governance and disaster response using the cases of Hurricane Katrina and the Japan tsunami of 2011. As part of this work she has been selected as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, on an Alliance Grant, and at the Fletcher School of International Affairs at Tufts University. She has an undergraduate degree in literature from Harvard and a Masters in international relations and economics from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Johns Hopkins University.

She was named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, and has conducted research for the French Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) on the human and organizational factors involved in the Fukushima Dai-Ichi crisis. Her research interests include intra-governmental relations in crises; the paradox of well-funded disaster responses; measurement and evaluation of disaster responses; and the effects of competition among actors in humanitarian aid.

This episode was produced by Matthew Perry.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/