The Technically Human Podcast

Last week, the internet had one of its worst stretches in memory. Between October 19th and 22nd, dozens of serious security problems came to light within a few days. Online, people started calling it “Black October.”

Much of the coverage has framed this as a story about AI-powered hackers. Frank Riccardi, who joins me today, has spent years making a less dramatic argument. He says most cyberattacks succeed because organizations neglect the basics, things like weak passwords and software that never gets patched. 

Frank Riccardi is an attorney and cybersecurity and privacy expert who spent 25 years building compliance and privacy programs for large healthcare systems. As a Chief Compliance and Privacy Officer, he oversaw investigations into high-profile data breaches. His YouTube Channel is the go-to channel for all things Cybersecurity.

We recorded this conversation before Black October. Frank’s arguments hold up remarkably well, but you won’t hear him mention last week’s events in our main conversation. So stay tuned after it ends. Frank and I sat down again for a short follow-up to talk about Black October directly.

One more thing. Frank’s author bio promises readers that he is a real human being and not a bot, which makes him an ideal guest for this show.

My guest today is Nabiha Syed, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, and one of the leading voices working at the intersection of technology, journalism, civil liberties, and the public interest.

Nabiha has spent her career examining questions of information, power, and accountability: who controls information, who has access to it, and how powerful institutions can be held accountable.

A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Nabiha studied at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar before earning her law degree at Yale Law School, where she co-founded the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic.

She began her career as a First Amendment and media lawyer, serving as a fellow at The New York Times before joining BuzzFeed as its first newsroom lawyer. She eventually became Vice President and Associate General Counsel, overseeing legal issues involving press freedom, newsgathering, and defamation, including BuzzFeed's successful defense of litigation surrounding the publication of the Steele dossier.

In 2019, she joined the founding leadership team of The Markup, an investigative journalism nonprofit dedicated to holding technology companies accountable through data-driven reporting. She subsequently became its CEO, leading an award-winning newsroom whose investigations helped shape public debate, regulatory scrutiny, and litigation concerning the technology industry.

In 2024, Nabiha became Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, where she leads efforts to advance a more open, trustworthy, and human-centered technological future, with particular attention to artificial intelligence.

Beyond her executive work, Nabiha serves on the boards of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian, the Mellon Foundation, and the Girl Scouts of the USA. Her contributions to journalism and civil liberties have earned numerous honors, including the 2023 NAACP–Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award.

Across law, journalism, and philanthropy, Nabiha's career has been defined by a commitment to protecting the public interest in an increasingly technologically mediated world.

Last week, the International Rescue Committee published an article titled “I’m a Humanitarian Leader Who’s All In on AI. Here’s Why,” written by its Senior Vice President and Chief Research and Innovation Officer, Jeannie Annan.

Annan argues that humanitarian organizations have a moral obligation to become some of its most ambitious users, reasoning that the decision not to explore technologies that could help organizations reach more people, more effectively, is itself an ethical choice—with potentially devastating consequences.

So what does responsible innovation look like when the stakes are literally life and death? How do we balance the risks of deploying imperfect technologies against the risks of failing to deploy them? And what might the technology industry learn from humanitarian organizations that have spent decades making consequential decisions under conditions of uncertainty, scarcity, and profound human vulnerability?

Jeannie Annan is Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation, AI, and People at the International Rescue Committee, one of the world's largest humanitarian organizations, working in around 40 countries. She co-founded and leads the Airbel Impact Lab, IRC's research and innovation engine, where researchers, designers and technologists build, adapt and test solutions for people caught in conflict and disaster, from getting vaccines to children to predicting climate disasters and responding before they strike. She also leads IRC's AI strategy, and recently launched Airbel Ventures, a first-of-its-kind humanitarian impact investing fund. Jeannie began her career running programs in Kosovo, northern Uganda and South Sudan. She holds a PhD in psychology. Her research on preventing violence against women and children has been published in leading academic journals and her work on AI in humanitarian response has been featured in Fast Company and Fortune.

What happens to mathematics when doing mathematics is no longer an exclusively human activity?

For years, we've watched artificial intelligence get progressively better at math: solving equations, passing exams, succeeding at mathematical competitions, and generating proofs. But recent developments seem to cross a different kind of threshold. This month, OpenAI announced that an internal AI system had produced a solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem—one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, designed to represent some of the most difficult unsolved questions in mathematics.

The announcement has generated excitement, skepticism, and controversy. But it also raises a much larger set of questions. What does it actually mean to do mathematics? Is mathematics about arriving at a correct answer, or understanding why that answer is true? What happens to ideas like discovery, creativity, and authorship when machines can participate in producing new mathematical knowledge? And what does that tell us about artificial intelligence—and about ourselves?

My guest today is Dr. Noah Giansiracusa, a math professor at Bentley University and a faculty associate at Harvard, with a PhD in algebraic geometry from Brown University.

Noah is cohost of the podcasts Breaking Math and AI in Academia, and his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Scientific American, TIME, Wired, Slate, and The Boston Globe, among others.

His first book, How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News, examined the mathematics and technology underlying our information ecosystem. His latest, Robin Hood Math, asks how people from all backgrounds can use mathematics to navigate—and reclaim some control over—a world increasingly governed by algorithms.

Today, we're talking about what happens when those algorithms begin doing mathematics themselves.

What does it mean for the web to be open—and open to whom?

For most of the web’s history, we’ve operated on a fairly simple assumption: if you put something on a public website, people could find it, search engines could index it, and information could move relatively freely across the internet. But as AI systems increasingly crawl, extract, learn from, and act on information from the web, that bargain is beginning to change.

My guest today is Shane Evans, co-founder and CEO of Zyte, a company that builds technology for extracting data from the public web for use in AI, analytics, and other applications.

Shane has been working on the web since the late 1990s. He was a lead engineer at lastminute.com during the dot-com era, later created Scrapy, the widely used open-source web-scraping framework, and founded Zyte in 2010.

Today, we’re talking about Zyte’s new research suggesting that the Open Web is increasingly becoming a “Controlled Web”—and what that means for publishers, AI companies, web users, and the future of access to information online.

My guest today is Dave Merritt, cofounder and Chief Technology Officer of Watch Duty.

Founded in 2021, Watch Duty is a nonprofit emergency-information platform that provides real-time, verified intelligence about wildfires and floods across all 50 states. Its network of active and retired firefighters, dispatchers, first responders, and reporters monitors radio traffic, satellites, cameras, weather data, and official sources to give people information they can act on—often in the critical period before traditional emergency communications catch up. Today, Watch Duty serves more than 16 million active users annually.

Building technology people rely on during a disaster raises profound questions about trust: How do you move information quickly without sacrificing accuracy? How much uncertainty should you expose to the public? What should we automate—and what decisions still require human judgment? And what happens when a nonprofit technology platform begins functioning as critical public infrastructure?

In our conversation, we talk about what technological infrastructure looks like when wildfire risk has increasingly become part of the background condition of everyday life. When a fire does start, one of the most consequential questions is also one of the simplest: What is actually happening, and what do I need to do?

Watch Duty was built to answer that question.

In the wake of this week’s landmark $18 billion settlement with Meta, we’re bringing you an episode with Yaël Eisenstat, one of the leading thinkers on the issues at the heart of that case — and the many other recent legal challenges that may be fundamentally changing how we think about the power and responsibility of technology platforms.

In recent months, courts and juries across the country have been confronting questions that technology policy has wrestled with for years: When should platforms be held responsible for harms facilitated by their products? Where is the line between regulating speech and regulating product design? And what does it look like to build the legal cases that hold Big Tech accountable?

And after decades in which Section 230 and other legal protections often prevented these questions from reaching juries at all, are we witnessing the beginning of what we’re calling tech’s Big Tobacco moment?

In the episode, I speak with Yaël Eisenstat about the recent cases against Meta and other platforms, the years of research, journalism, whistleblowing, advocacy, and litigation that made this moment possible, and what happens when evidence about the consequences of technological design finally reaches ordinary jurors.

We also ask what these cases can—and cannot—accomplish. Can litigation succeed where legislation and regulation have struggled? Can social media actually be redesigned to serve the public interest, or are its harms inseparable from its underlying business model? And as our technological landscape shifts from social media toward increasingly personalized and intimate AI systems, are we building an accountability framework for the last technological era just as the next one arrives?

Yaël Eisenstat is the Director of Policy and Impact at the CyberSafety Research Center, where she works on policy approaches to holding online platforms accountable for their effects on public safety and democracy. She previously served as Vice President of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology & Society and, in 2018, joined Facebook as its Global Head of Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising. Before entering technology policy, Eisenstat spent 14 years in public service as an intelligence officer, diplomat, and White House adviser. She has since become a prominent advocate for greater transparency and accountability in the technology industry.

My conversation today is with Monika Bielskyte, a futurist, foresight strategist, speculative designer and founder of Protopia Futures. She developed the Protopia World Stack, a science-informed, life-centric foresight methodology. Protopia is an Inclusive future vision based on evolved values, informed by bleeding edge scientific research and supported by advanced technological tools.

She was Nike's first Futurist in Residence, is an EY Luminary, and has consulted across entertainment, technology, science, and government – including Disney and Marvel's Black Panther franchise. Her technical expertise spans AI, spatial computing, XR, and synthetic media, with particular attention to how these systems can expand human agency or be weaponized for behavioral manipulation and disinformation.

Monika bridges the worlds of entertainment and real future-making by prototyping culturally expansive, socially and environmentally engaged future visions that combine the best of creativity and science, delivering energizing vision, lasting value and resilience to disruptions. What connects all of it is a commitment to futures literacy - the belief that rendering better futures compelling, curiosity-inducing, and inhabitable is the mechanism by which transformation happens.

On this episode I’m joined by Jess Holbrook, Head of UX Research for Microsoft AI.

We talk about what UX research can—and cannot—tell us about what people need; why user-centered design may be too individualistic for technologies whose effects extend across families, workplaces, communities, and institutions; and what it means to put researchers in the room while AI systems are still being built rather than after fundamental design decisions have already been made.

Over the past 12 years, Jess has held senior research and design leadership roles across Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon. He previously led Generative AI, Responsible AI, and data transparency UX research at Meta, and at Google he founded and led the People + AI Research group, or PAIR, before serving as Head of UX for the Responsible AI and Human-Centered Technology group. His work has focused on bringing human-centered and inclusive approaches into the development of AI systems and translating emerging machine-learning capabilities into products designed around people’s needs.

Jess also writes regularly about AI, frontier UX research, research slop and the future of human-centered technology on his Substack, Gen Purpose.

Today I’m speaking with Dana Mazia, General Manager of the Bright Initiative by Bright Data, which provides nonprofits, academic institutions, and public bodies with pro bono access to public web data and expertise.

Dana is a lawyer, social entrepreneur, and World Economic Forum Global Shaper with more than 14 years of experience across technology, data, and social impact.

Bright Data is a web-data platform that provides the infrastructure organizations use to collect, process, and analyze publicly available information from across the internet. The Bright Initiative is its public-interest program, making that technology and expertise available to organizations working in academic research, public policy, transparency, and social impact.

Conversations about artificial intelligence typically focus on models: what they can do, what they produce, and whether their outputs are accurate or safe. But behind every model is a less visible infrastructure—the systems through which information is collected, organized, and made usable.

That raises important questions about who can access public web data, what “public” really means, and whether an open internet benefits everyone equally or primarily its most powerful actors. These questions become even more urgent as AI systems move from learning from the web to actively operating within it.

Dana and I discuss the politics of data infrastructure, the ethics of web scraping, the risk of information monopolies, and the legal and ethical questions that arise when information from the public web is collected and operationalized at scale. Ultimately, we ask who should have access to this infrastructure—and who will have the power to shape the AI ecosystem built upon it.