Computer Says Maybe

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To be Seen and not Watched w/ Tawana Petty Jan 10, 2025

Show notes

Welcome back! Let us know what you think of the show and what you want to see more of in 2025 by writing in here, or rambling into a microphone here.

In this episode Alix is joined by Tawana Petty, who shares her experiences coming up as a political community activist in Detroit. Tawana studied the history of radical black movements under Grace Lee Boggs, and has taken these learnings into her work today.

Listen to learn about how places like Detroit are used as testing grounds for new ‘innovations’ — especially within marginalised neighbourhoods. Tawana explains in detail how surveillance and safety are often mistakenly conflated, and how we have to work to unlearn this conflation.

Further reading:

Our Data Bodies project: https://www.odbproject.org/
James and Grace Lee Boggs Center: https://www.boggscenter.org/
The Detroit Community and Technology Project: https://detroitcommunitytech.org/ who ran the digital stewards program
Detroit Digital Justice Coalition: https://alliedmedia.org/projects/detroit-digital-justice-coalition
We The People of Detroit: https://www.wethepeopleofdetroit.com/

Tawana Petty is a mother, social justice organizer, poet, author, and facilitator. She is the founding Executive Director of Petty Propolis, Inc., an artist incubator which teaches poetry, policy literacy and advocacy, and interrogates negative pervasive narratives, in pursuit of racial and environmental justice. Petty is a 2023-2025 Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council, a 2024 Rockwood National LIO Alum, and she currently serves on the CS (computer science) for Detroit Steering Committee. In 2021, Petty was named one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. In 2023, she was honored with the AI Policy Leader in Civil Society Award by the Center for AI and Digital Policy, the Ava Jo Silent Shero Award by the Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion, and with a Racial Justice Leadership Award by the Detroit People's Platform. In 2024, Petty was listed on Business Insider’s AI Power List for Policy and Ethics.

Our learnings from 2024 Dec 20, 2024

Show notes

We’re wrapped for the year, and will be back on the 10th of Jan. In the meantime, listen to Alix, Prathm, and Georgia discuss their biggest learnings from the pod this year from some of their favourite episodes.

**We want to hear from YOU about the podcast — what do you want to hear more of in 2025? Share your ideas with us here: https://tally.so/r/3E860B**

Or if you’d rather ramble into a microphone (just like we do…) use this link instead!

We pull out clips from the following episodes:

Further reading:

Learn more about what ex TikTok moderator Mojez has been up to this year via this BBC TikTok

A $20bn Search Engine w/ Michelle Meagher Dec 13, 2024

Show notes

Google has finally been judged to be a monopoly by a federal court — while this was strikingly obvious already, what does this judgement mean? Is this too little too late?

This week Alix and Prathm were joined by Michelle Meagher, an antitrust lawyer who shared a brief history of how antitrust started as a tool for governments to stop the consolidation of corporate power, and over time has morphed to focus on issues of competition and consumer protection — which has allowed monopolies to thrive.

Michelle discusses the details and her thinking on the ongoing cases against Google, and more generally on how monopolies are basically like a big octopus arm-wrestling itself.

Further reading:

US Said to Consider a Breakup of Google to Address Search Monopoly — NY Times
Google’s second antitrust suit brought by US begins, over online ads — Guardian
Big Tech on Trial — Matt Stoller
How the EU’s DMA is changing Big Tech — The Verge
UK set to clear Microsoft’s deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard — Guardian

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Michelle is a competition lawyer and co-founder of the Balanced Economy Project, Europe’s first anti-monopoly organisation. She is author of Competition is Killing Us: How Big Business is Harming Our Society and Planet - and What to Do About It (Penguin, 2020), a Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year. She is a Senior Policy Fellow at the University College London Centre for Law, Economics and Society. She is a Senior Fellow working on Monopoly and Corporate Governance at the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO).

The Age of Noise w/ Eryk Salvaggio Dec 06, 2024

Show notes

What happens if you ask a generative AI image model to show you what Picasso’s work would have looked like if he lived in Japan in the 16th century? Would it produce something totally new, or just mash together stereotypical aesthetics from Picasso’s work, and 16th century Japan?

This week, Alix interviewed Eryk Salvaggio, who shares his ideas around how we are moving away from ‘the age of information’ and into an age of noise, where we’ve progressed so far into a paradigm of easy and frictionless information sharing, that information has transformed into an overwhelming wall of noise.

So if everything is just noise, what do we filter out and keep in — and what systems do we use to do that?

Further reading:

Visit Eryk’s Website
Cybernetic Forests — Eryk’s newsletter on tech and culture
Our upcoming event: Insight Session: The politics, power, and responsibility of AI procurement with Bianca Wylie
Our newsletter, which shares invites to events like the above, and other interesting bits

Eryk Salvaggio has been making tech-critical art since the dawn of the Internet. Now he’s a blend of artist, tech policy researcher, and writer focused on a critical approach to AI. He is the Emerging Technologies Research Advisor at the Siegel Family Endowment, an instructor in Responsible AI at Elisava Barcelona School of Design, a researcher at the metaLab (at) Harvard University’s AI Pedagogy Project, one of the top contributors to Tech Policy Press, and an artist whose work has been shown at festivals including SXSW, DEFCON, and Unsound.

The Happy Few: Open Source AI (part two) Nov 29, 2024

Show notes

In part two of our episode on open source AI, we delve deeper into we can use openness and participation for sustainable AI governance. It’s clear that everyone agrees that things like the proliferation of harmful content is a huge risk — but what we cannot seem to agree on is how to eliminate this risk.

Alix is joined again by Mark Surman, and this time they both take a closer look at the work Audrey Tang did as Taiwan’s first digital minister, where she successfully built and implemented a participatory framework that allowed the people of Taiwan to directly inform AI policy.

We also hear more from Merouane Debbah, who built the first LLM trained in Arabic, and highlights the importance of developing AI systems that don’t follow rigid western benchmarks.

Mark Surman has spent three decades building a better internet, from the advent of the web to the rise of artificial intelligence. As President of Mozilla, a global nonprofit backed technology company that does everything from making Firefox to advocating for a more open, equitable internet, Mark’s current focus is ensuring the various Mozilla organizations work in concert to make trustworthy AI a reality. Mark led the creation of Mozilla.ai (a commercial AI R+D lab) and Mozilla Ventures (an impact venture fund with a strong focus on AI). Before joining Mozilla, Mark spent 15 years leading organizations and projects that promoted the use of the internet and open source as tools for social and economic development.

More about our guests:

Audrey Tang, Cyber Ambassador of Taiwan, served as Taiwan’s 1st digital minister (2016-2024) and the world’s 1st nonbinary cabinet minister. Tang played a crucial role in shaping g0v (gov-zero), one of the most prominent civic tech movements worldwide. In 2014, Tang helped broadcast the demands of Sunflower Movement activists, and worked to resolve conflicts during a three-week occupation of Taiwan’s legislature. Tang became a reverse mentor to the minister in charge of digital participation, before assuming the role in 2016 after the government changed hands. Tang helped develop participatory democracy platforms such as vTaiwan and Join, bringing civic innovation into the public sector through initiatives like the Presidential Hackathon and Ideathon.

Sayash Kapoor is a Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow in the University Center for Human Values and a computer science Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. He is a coauthor of AI Snake Oil, a book that provides a critical analysis of artificial intelligence, separating the hype from the true advances. His research examines the societal impacts of AI, with a focus on reproducibility, transparency, and accountability in AI systems. He was included in TIME Magazine’s inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in AI.

Mérouane Debbah is a researcher, educator and technology entrepreneur. He has founded several public and industrial research centers, start-ups and held executive positions in ICT companies. He is professor at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, and founding director of the Khalifa University 6G Research Center. He has been working at the interface of AI and telecommunication and pioneered in 2021 the development of NOOR, the first Arabic LLM.

Further reading & resources

Polis — a real-time participation platform
Recursive Public by vTaiwan
Noor — the first LLM trained on the Arabic language
Falcon Foundation
Buy AI Snake Oil by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan

The Happy Few: Open Source AI (part one) Nov 22, 2024

Show notes

In the context of AI, what do we mean when we say ‘open source’? An AI model is not something you can straightforwardly open up like a piece of software; there are huge technical and social considerations to be made.

Is it risky to open-source highly capable foundation models? What guardrails do we need to think about when it comes to the proliferation of harmful content? And, can you really call it ‘open’ if the barrier for accessing compute is so high? Is model alignment really the only thing we have to protect us?

In this two-parter, Alix is joined by Mozilla president Mark Surman to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of open and closed models. Our guests are Alondra Nelson, Merouane Debbah, Audrey Tang, and Sayash Kapoor.

Listen to learn about the early years of the free software movement, the ecosystem lock-in of the closed-source environment, and what kinds of things are possible with a more open approach to AI.

More about our guests:

Alondra Nelson is s scholar of the intersections of science, technology, policy, and society, and the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent research center in Princeton, New Jersey. Dr. Nelson was formerly deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). In this role, she spearheaded the development of the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, and was the first African American and first woman of color to lead US science and technology policy.

Further reading & resources

Polis — a real-time participation platform
Recursive Public by vTaiwan
Noor — the first LLM trained on the Arabic language
Falcon Foundation
Buy AI Snake Oil by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan

Algorithmically cutting benefits w/ Kevin De Liban Nov 15, 2024

Show notes

This week Alix was joined by Kevin De Liban, who just launched Techntonic Justice, an organisation designed to support and fight for those harmed by AI systems.

In this episode Kevin describes his experiences litigating on behalf of people in Arkansas who found their in-home care hours cut aggressively by an algorithm administered by the state. This is a story about taking care away from individuals in the name of ‘efficiency’, and the particular levers for justice that Kevin and his team managed to take advantage of to eventually ban the use of this algorithm in Arkansas.

CW: This episode contains descriptions of people being denied care and left in undignified situations at around 08.17- 08.40 and 27.12-28.07

Further reading:

Spencer Overton is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor at GW Law School. As the Director of the Multiracial Democracy Project at the GW Equity Institute, he focuses on producing and supporting research that grapples with challenges to a well-functioning multiracial democracy. He is currently working on research projects related to the regulation of AI to facilitate a well-functioning multiracial democracy and the implications of alternative voting systems for multiracial democracy.

Net 0 ++: Reporting on AI’s climate injustices w/ Karen Hao Nov 01, 2024

Show notes

For our final episode in this series on the environment, Alix interviewed Karen Hao on how tough it is to report on environmental impacts of AI.

The conversation focusses on two of Karen’s recent stories, linked below. One of the biggest barriers to consistent reporting on AI’s climate injustices is the sheer opaqueness of information about what companies are trying to do when building infrastructure and what they think the actual costs — primarily of energy use and water — will be. Tech companies that Karen has written about enter communities via shell companies and promise relatively big deals for small municipalities if they allow development of new data centres — and community members often don’t know what they’re signing up for before it’s too late.

Listen to learn about how difficult it is to report on this industry, and the tactics and methods Karen has to use to tell her stories.

Further reading:

Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI by Karen Hao
AI is Taking Water from the Desert by Karen Hao

Karen Hao is an American journalist who writes for publications like The Atlantic. She was previously a foreign correspondent based in Hong Kong for The Wall Street Journal and a senior artificial intelligence editor at the MIT Technology Review. She is best known for her coverage on AI research, technology ethics and the social impact of AI.

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