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, Eleanor talks to Alexander Thomas, a filmmaker and academic who leads the BA in Media Production at the University of East London. They discuss his new book about transhumanism, a philosophical movement that aims to improve human capabilities through technology and whose followers includes Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and also apparently the DJ Steve Aoki. Alex is himself one of the foremost commentators on transhumanism. He explores transhumanist fantasies about the future of the human, is obsessed with the extremes of possibility: they either think that AI will bring us radical abundance or total extinction.

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 Sebastián Lehuedé, a Lecturer in Ethics, AI, and Society at King's College London. We talk about data activism in Chile, how water-intensive lithium extraction affects people living in the Atacama desert, the importance of reflexive research ethics, and an accidental Sunday afternoon shot of tequila. Sebastián's research focuses on the governance of digital technologies from a global social justice perspective. His current project, AI's Nature, explores the connection between Artificial Intelligence and environmental justice.

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 chat to Shannon Vallor, the Baillie Gifford professor in the ethics and data of AI at the University of Edinburgh and the Director for the Centre for Technomoral Futures. We talk about feminist care ethics; technologies, vices and virtues; why Aristotle believed that the people who make technology should be excluded from citizenship; and why we still don't have the kinds of robots that we imagined that we'd have in the early 2000s. We also discuss Shannon's new book, The AI Mirror, which is now available for pre-order. Professor Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy.

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. This week we chat to Melissa Heikkilä about ChatGPT, image generation, porn, and the stories we tell about AI. Melissa is a senior reporter at MIT Technology Review, where she covers artificial intelligence and how it is changing our society. Previously, she wrote about AI policy and politics at POLITICO. She has also worked at The Economist and used to be a news anchor.

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 Eleanor and Kerry talk to Pedro Oliveira, a researcher and sound artist based at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Pedro does amazing work investigating border control technologies that listen to asylum seekers and claim to be able to discern where they came from from the way they speak. In this episode we discuss why these kinds of technologies rely on the assumption that there is an authentic way that a migrant from a particular place should sound. Our quest to unravel vocal authenticity takes us through frequency, timbre, and 1960s synthesisers from East Berlin.

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, the historian of science Lorraine Daston explains why science has long been allergic to emotion, which is seen to be the enemy of truth. Instead, objective reason is science's virtue. She explores moments where it's very difficult for scientists not to get personally involved, like when you're working on your pet hypothesis or theory, which might lead you to select data that confirms your hypothesis, or when you're confronted with some anomalies in your dataset that threaten a beautiful and otherwise perfect theory. But Lorraine also reminds us that the desire for objectivity can itself be an emotion, as it was when Victorian scientists expressed their heroic masculine self-restraint.