Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, we talk to N. Katherine Hayles who's the distinguished research professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. Her prolific research focuses on the relationship between science, literature and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. We explore her newest book, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts, and discuss how the biological concept of symbiosis can inform the relationships we have with AI; how a neural network experiences the world; and whether ChatGPT can be conscious. N. Katherine Hayles is the Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University.

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. To develop voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, companies spend years investigating what sounds like a human voice and what doesn't. But what we've ended up with is just one possibility of the kinds of voices that we could be interacting with. In this episode, we talked to sound engineer Frederik Juutilainen, and assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, Stina Hasse Jørgensen, about their participation in [multi'vocal], an experimental research project that created an alternative voice assistant by asking people at a rock festival in Denmark to speak into a portable recording box. We talk about voice assistants' inability to stutter, lisp and code switch, and whether a voice can express multiple personalities, genders and ages.

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, we talked to Jill Walker Rettberg, Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about machine vision's origins in polished volcanic glass, whether or not we'll actually have self-driving cars, and that famous photo-shopped Mother's Day photo released by Kate Middleton in March, 2024. Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), a Norwegian Center of Research Excellence that has received a 15 million grant from the Norwegian Research Council (2023-2033). She is also Principal Investigator of the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media (2018-2024), and of the ERC Advanced grant project AI Stories: Narrative Archetypes for Artificial Intelligence (2024-2029).

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, we talk to Yasmine Boudiaf, a researcher, artist and creative technologist who uses technology in beautiful and interesting ways to challenge and redefine what we think of as'good'. We discuss her wide-ranging art projects, from using AI to create a library of Mediterranean hand gestures through to her project Ways of Machine Seeing, which explored how machine vision systems are being taught to'see'. Throughout the episode, we explore how Yasmine creatively uses technology to challenge the colonial gaze and the predominance of Western European ideas and concepts in ethics. Yasmine Boudiaf is a researcher and creative technologist focusing on data, epistemology and the absurd.

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In the second instalment of our EU AI Act series we talk to Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West, the Co-Directors of the AI Now Institute, a leading policy thinktank based in New York. Amba and Sarah talk about why policy narratives matter, why it's actually fake news that AI is moving too fast for regulation to follow, and why innovation versus regulation is a lazy and outdated maxim. Meanwhile, we chip in with some weird comments about why kitchen whisks are awesome, and why getting inundated by emails is the present day equivalent of somebody badgering your cows in the 1800s. Don't forget to check out our first instalment of the EU AI Act series with Daniel Leufer and Caterina Daniels from Access Now, which is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or any of your other favourite podcasting platforms.

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, we talk to Daniel Leufer and Caterina Rodelli from Access Now, a global advocacy organization that focuses on the impact of the digital on human rights. As leaders in this field, they've been working hard to ensure that the European Union's AI Act doesn't undermine human rights or indeed fundamental democratic values. They share with us how the EU AI act was put together, the Act's particular downfalls, and where the opportunities are for us as citizens or as digital rights activists to get involved and make sure that it's upheld by companies across the world. Note: this episode was recorded back in February 2024.

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. We often think that maths is neutral or can't be harmful, because after all, what could numbers do to hurt us? In this episode, we talk to Dr Maurice Chiodo, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, who's now based at the Centre for Existential Risk. He tells us why maths can actually throw out big ethical issues. Take the atomic bomb or the maths used by Cambridge Analytica to influence the Brexit referendum or the US elections.

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, Helen Hester talks about technology used around the house. We bring to you a special LIVE episode from Tech Transformed! Helen is a leading thinker of feminism, technology and the future of work, and she explores the history of domestic technologies, so technology used around the house. It's really important that we understand that technologies like the washing machine were actually not as liberatory for women as we'd like to think.

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, we talk to Heather Zheng, who makes technologies that stop everyday surveillance. This includes bracelets that stopped devices from listening and on you, to more secure biometric technologies that can protect us by identifying us by, for example, our dance moves. Most famously, Zheng is one of the computer scientists behind Nightshade, which helps artists protect their work by'poisoning' AI training data sets. Heather is the Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at University of Chicago.

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode we talk to British physicist Jess Wade about the 1923 Wikipedia pages (and counting) she's created and edited in her aim to put more women and more people of colour onto the online encyclopaedia. Jess Wade is an Imperial College Research Fellow investigating spin selective charge transport through chiral systems in the Department of Materials. Broadly speaking, her research considers new materials for optoelectronic devices, with a focus on chiral organic semiconductors. She currently works in SPIN-Lab at Imperial, which is led by Professor Sandrine Heutz.