Too many young people – particularly young people of color – lack enough familiarity or experience with emerging technologies to recognize how artificial intelligence can impact their lives, in either a harmful or an empowering way. Educator Ora Tanner saw this and rededicated her career toward promoting tech literacy and changing how we understand data sharing and surveillance, as well as teaching how AI can be both a dangerous tool and a powerful one for innovation and activism.

By now her curricula have touched more than 30,000 students, many of them in her home state of Florida. Tanner also went to bat against the Florida Schools Safety Portal, a project to amass enormous amounts of data about students in an effort to predict and avert school shootings – and a proposal rife with potential biases and abuses.

Tanner speaks with EFF's Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley on teaching young people about the algorithms that surround them, and how they can make themselves heard to build a fairer, brighter tech future.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• Convincing policymakers that AI and other potentially invasive tech isn’t always the answer to solving public safety problems.
• Bringing diverse new voices into the dialogue about how AI is designed and used.
• Creating a culture of searching for truth rather than just accepting whatever information is put on your plate.
• Empowering disadvantaged communities not only through tech literacy but by teaching informed activism as well.

If you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]. Please visit the site page at https://eff.org/pod206 where you’ll find resources – including links to important legal cases and research discussed in the podcast and a full transcript of the audio. 

This podcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

Music for How to Fix the Internet was created for us by Reed Mathis and Nat Keefe of BeatMower. 

This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators: 

Meet Me at Phountain by gaetanh (c) copyright 2022 http://ccmixter.org/files/gaetanh/64711

Hoedown at the Roundabout by gaetanh (c) copyright 2022  http://ccmixter.org/files/gaetanh/64711

JPEG of a Hotdog by gaetanh (c) copyright 2022 http://ccmixter.org/files/gaetanh/64711

reCreation by airtone (c) copyright 2019 http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/59721