The Technically Human Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Active Imagination: Malka Older talks humanitarianism, science fiction, and the future of democracy Nov 13, 2020

Show notes

Malka Older moves between the practice of on-the-ground disaster relief work and the practice of in-the-mind science fiction writing. She converges her experience with real-life dystopias with the imagined dystopias of science-fiction.

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: Marcus Miller on mobilizing Black voters, the 2020 Election and grassroots organizing in the age of tech Nov 06, 2020

Show notes

As the counting continues, it becomes clear that the 2020 election may be decided by a handful of voters in a few key states. In the months leading up to the election, Block Power, a nonprofit focused on uplifting Black voices by engaging new and infrequent Black voters in the electoral process, mobilized over 200,000 voters through a grassroots organizing campaign that took place almost exclusively online.
In this episode, Marcus Miller, a lead organizer in the Block Power grassroots movement, talks to me about how Block Power successfully built a major voter mobilization strategy that would help decide the future of the country. We talk about the ethics and stakes of representation, particularly for historically marginalized communities, the history of Black voter suppression and the challenges of mobilizing Black voters, and the symbolism of this election falling on the 150 year anniversary of the 15th Amendment, which granted African-American men the right to vote, and how a team of humanists and technologists built a movement.

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

Server Technology: Ret.Col Robert Gordon III on tech and service Oct 30, 2020

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

The Impact of Impact: Ethical and socially responsible tech investing Oct 23, 2020

Show notes

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

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

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

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

Technically Legal: Professor Jeff Ward explores the relationship between law and tech Oct 16, 2020

Show notes

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

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

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

This episode of Technically Human was produced by Matthew Perry

Of the people, by the people, for the people: Public Interest Technology with Hana Schank Oct 09, 2020

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

The Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital innovation and humanistic computation with Dr. Todd Presner Oct 02, 2020

Show notes

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

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

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

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

The Way Way Back Machine: A Dive into the Archive with Dr. Jason Lustig Sep 25, 2020

Show notes

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

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

PODCAST TAKEOVER SERIES: Episode 3 Sep 18, 2020

Show notes

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

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

PODCAST TAKEOVER SERIES: Episode 2 Sep 13, 2020

Show notes

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

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

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