Tim Wu is the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia University, and a renowned scholar on communications networks, having coined the phrase “net neutrality.” He has written extensively on technology and its impact on society and has served both inside and outside of government and academia. Mo Lotman discusses Wu’s 2016  book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Attention Merchants is a history of advertising, and it’s not pretty.

Mo and Tim discuss our declining private spheres, the current state of the Internet, and the effects of what Wu calls The Cycle, as new communications technologies inevitably move from open to closed. Wu also proved prescient in this interview, describing the deterioration of the advertising model for online content, and how subscription content was a ray of hope (which the success of Substack has since validated). They also discuss Wu’s 2010 book, The Master Switch.

When this interview first ran, Wu was still writing, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, released in 2018.

In 2021, Wu was appointed Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy.

We recently ran a lengthy print interview with Michaela Headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh about her school’s Digital Detox program and parents’ struggles in implementing it, Choosing Smart Kids over Smartphones.

This podcast is the conversation we recorded with Michaela’s Headmistress as part of updating our 2019 with her. Some of the material in this podcast appeared in the “Smart Kids” article, but we also covered some spicy topics in this podcast, including some speculation on why her successful school draws so much flak, that we didn’t have space for in the Smart Kids article.

David Krakauer is President and Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute, a private, not-for-profit, independent research and education center. Krakauer focuses on the evolutionary history of information-processing mechanisms in biology and culture. He chatted with The Technoskeptic to discuss complementary vs. competitive cognitive artifacts—that is, how technologies extend or suppress our capabilities. The study of human stupidity is (no kidding) one of David Krakauer’s specialties. One emergent question: will reliance on AI make us dumber and less creative?

This podcast was recorded pre-COVID, but the conversation has only become more relevant in the last year. Consider recent reporting that college students are using Chat GPT 4 to do their homework. Large Language Models (LLM) like Chat GPT can whip up a college essay or even a whole book by synthesizing huge swaths of the internet. But what does that kind of use do for real learning and the creation of crucial long-term memory? Can LLMs make novel discoveries in medicine, physics, or chemistry? (Note: so far, they can’t.)

We’ve come to depend on scientific advances to improve our standard of living. Krakauer airs his concerns on AI’s impact on real scientific discovery as we sprint into the AI age—whether we’re ready for it or not.

Mo Lotman interviews mathematician Cathy O’Neil. O’Neil worked in the private sector to make the algorithmic systems that automatically judge and score us. Deeply troubled by what she saw, she went on to write the 2016 bestseller Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. She shares her insider’s look at how algorithms are gaming our world, with the worst consequences for those who can least afford them.

Nobody escapes the grasp of algorithms in modern life. Per our recent article on Yelp, small business owners who have fallen afoul of Yelp’s manipulative algorithmic ranking have seen their businesses lose vast sums of money or be destroyed. If you live in the wrong neighborhood, algorithms may give you a worse credit rating, see that you spend more time in prison if you commit a crime, or even show you entirely different web pages when you are shopping online.

O’Neil’s insights on algorithms are important in their own right, but algorithms are also the base layer of the AI that will be given more and more control of our society. What algorithms and AI have in common is the GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) Problem: if you put in bad data, you get bad decisions. The other commonality is both are frequently “black boxes,” which is to say, even the people who create algorithms and AI often cannot explain the decisions they generate.

O’Neil originally founded O'Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing to make algorithms fairer and more transparent, but has since expanded that to include assessing AI risks.

(For further reading, here’s a 20-second primer from the CMS Wire article AI vs. Algorithms what’s the difference?

“An algorithm is a set of instructions — a preset, rigid, coded recipe that gets executed when it encounters a trigger. AI on the other hand — which is an extremely broad term covering a myriad of AI specializations and subsets — is a group of algorithms that can modify its algorithms and create new algorithms in response to learned inputs and data as opposed to relying solely on the inputs it was designed to recognize as triggers. This ability to change, adapt and grow based on new data, is described as ‘intelligence.’ ”)

Kentaro Toyama

At the Technsoskeptic Magazine, we often find that technologists provide the most salient critiques of technology’s effects on society. In this episode, Mo Lotman speaks with Kentaro Toyama, computer scientist, Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan, and author of the book “Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology.” After spending five years in India attempting to deploy technology to aid international development, Toyama came back disillusioned. He chats with the Technoskeptic about his experience there and how his years of teaching led him to understand how technology often exacerbates, rather than levels, underlying disparities.

Toyama also delves into the rather…odd trend displayed by Silicon Valley elites of keeping their children far away from the same technology they frenetically urge everybody else’s children to adopt.

With a bit of a detour into the wisdom of Dr. Suess, the discussion wends its way into some philosophical territory, examining how technology can make it harder to maintain the heart, mind, and will to be good people.

This podcast originally aired in late 2016.

Cal Newport, Deep Work, Productivity and Focus