This week Tom Ascott speaks to Jacob Williamson about the business of AI.

The pair talk through the emerging markets for AI in different fields, boutique uses for AI, and if the market for AI is overheating!

This week Tom Ascott talks with Kate Devlin a Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence at King's College London and author of Turned On.

The pair discusses the ethics and morality around sex robots and they touch on artificial intimacy, algorithmic attraction, and tackles the thorny question of should you say thank you to Alexa.

Platforms could replace their metrics based on engagement and growth with metrics based on happiness, community strength and wellbeing. In this episode, Tom Ascott talks to Christine Jakobson, a tech ethics researcher, and consultant, about how platforms can respond to the growing issues of disinformation and online hate to create a more friendly timeline.

Islamophobia has been wielded as a weapon to draw support from right wing actors as well as to disenfranchise Muslim populations.

In this episode Zahed Amanullah, a Resident Senior Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, explains how Islamophobia has been refined, amplified and duplicated into a process that is being used globally.

It’s taken us ten weeks but it’s finally time to address the elephant in the room: cryptocurrency!

This week Erica Stanford, founder of the Crypto Curry Club and author ‘Crypto Wars: Faked Deaths, Missing Billions and Industry Disruption’, talks Tom Ascott through everything crypto. 

The episode starts with the basics of Bitcoin and ramps up to complex crypto issues!

The internet has been a platform for creating new tools and engaging platforms. But these innovations are also being used by those who would seek to perpetrate violence against women.

In this episode Vaibhav Sahgal, a Senior Manager at The Economist Intelligence Unit, explains the problems that women face online and what solutions are on the horizon in the fight against online misogyny.

Dr. Greenstein’s Memory, Affect, Decision-making (MAD) lab examines how emotions affect memory and decision-making, and this week he walks Tom Ascott through how anger online can increase our susceptibility to misinformation.

In a future where it is increasingly difficult to tell authentic from synthetic, Anna Bulakh, Policy Advisor at Reface, gives a thoughtful roadmap to upcoming digital policy. She highlights the importance of baking safety and security into apps to future proof against any malicious use.

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.

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.