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The Good Robot podcast: Transhumanist fantasies with Alexander Thomas

AIHub

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.

  Country: Europe > United Kingdom > England > Greater London > London (0.27)
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The Good Robot Podcast: featuring Lorraine Daston

AIHub

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.