This week host Tom Ascott talks to Walter Pasquarelli, AI Readiness & Data Policy Lead at Oxford Insights.

Walter is the lead author for the ‘Government AI Readiness Index’, and the two of them discuss what it takes for a government to be AI ready, whether AI is levelling the playing field for less developed countries and if we governments should behave more like tech companies. 

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Lockdown has seen a surge in conspiracy theories, and as the world starts to emerge from another lockdown Katy Murray talks to Tom Ascott about what we can learn from conspiracy theories.

She breaks down how a conspiracy theory forms, how they function and how they get in to our information ecosystem.  

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In technology we trust, or do we? This week Dr Allison Gardner, co-founder of Women Leading in AI and lecturer at Keele University, talks to Tom Ascott about the problems inherent in technology and the pair try to establish where the line is between tech solutionism and real ways that technology can benefit our lives. 

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This week host Tom Ascott speaks with Olivia Gambelin, AI ethicist and Founder of Ethical Intelligence. As a philosopher by trade, Olivia walks us through what it means to apply ethics to the problems that AI has thrown up. 

AI is giving us the ability to improve much of our work, and we can apply philosophical tools, such as moral reflection to make sure that the road AI is taking us is the right one.

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Deepfakes, images in which a person has their face replaced with someone else’s, pose a unique set of problems to society. In this interview host Tom Ascott talks with deepfake expert Henry Ajder about where deepfakes are causing the most philosophical and policy problems right now as well as the creative, emotional and artistic benefits this technology confers.

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Since the US election electronic voting has come under more scrutiny than it ever has before, despite not being as recent as is sometimes thought. 

In this episode Sonya Anderson, a Senior Partner at Smartmatic, talks Tom Ascott through how end-to-end electronic voting works, why this is such an important issue and if you will ever be able to vote in a national election from your couch.

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As technology, AI and the internet weave themselves deep into our societies, Synthetic Society is here to help you untangle and understand the mess. Listen to interviews with leading experts, political figures, and entrepreneurs, guiding us through complex issues.

This week our guest is Lord Clement Jones, and we’ll be talking about if technology is becoming more polarised, how the government can lead on regulation for the internet and artificial intelligence, and the relevance of culture and the arts in the digital space.

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