The Technically Human Podcast

Welcome back, for another episode of the “22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology” series. In this episode, I speak with Dr. Lauren Klein about the complicated relationship between data, race, and gender, and what she calls “data feminism.” What is the relationship between data visualizations, representation, and construction of categories—and difference? How have visualizations constructed race and gender? And how can a feminist data science approach help in constructing a more just and equal world?

Dr. Lauren Klein is an associate professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University. She received her A.B. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her research interests include digital humanities, data science, data studies, and early American literature. Before arriving at Emory, Klein taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech where she directed the Digital Humanities Lab.

She is currently at work on two major projects: the first, Data by Design, is an interactive book on the history of data visualization. Awarded an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, Data by Design emphasizes how the modern visualizing impulse emerged from a set of complex intellectually and politically-charged contexts in the United States and across the Atlantic.

Her second project, tentatively titled Vectors of Freedom, employs a range of quantitative methods in order to surface the otherwise invisible forms of labor, agency, and action involved in the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth-century United States.

Dr. Klein is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). This book shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people, from the nation’s first presidents to their enslaved chefs, who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States. Klein is also the co-author (with Catherine D’Ignazio) of Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), a trade book that explores the intersection of feminist thinking and data science. With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. The most recent book in this series is Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019.

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Nick Chatrath about the crucial role that leadership plays in the future of AI development. We talk about organizational culture, the very human leaders driving technological production, and why human independent thinking matters more than ever, in the age of artificial intelligence.

Dr. Nick Chatrath is an expert in leadership and organizational transformation with the aim of helping humans flourish. He holds a doctorate from Oxford University and serves as managing director for a global leadership training firm. His book, The Threshold: Leading in the Age of AI, which comes out this week and is published by Diversion Books, offers a revolutionary framework for how leaders in all kinds of organizations can adapt to the new age of technology by leaning into the qualities and skills that make us uniquely human.

Today’s episode features a conversation with Medha Parlikar, about the ethics of the blockchain and cryptocurrency. We talk about the vision of what cryptocurrency could be, what dangers it might pose to our values, and what the future of cryptocurrency might look like in a web-3 world.

Medha Parlikar is co-founder and chief technology officer of CasperLabs. She has more than 30 years of tech experience and is one of the top women leaders in blockchain. She is a prolific speaker, having spoken at several global conferences including Davos, LA Blockchain Summit, and NFT.LA , among others. Medha is a mentor and has worked with organizations including Strongurl to elevate and encourage women in blockchain/tech.

In this week’s edition of the “22 lessons on ethics and technology series,” I speak with Dr. Nassim Parvin. We talk about the ethical and political dimensions of design and technology, especially as related to values of democratic participation and social justice. How have digital technologies impacted, and how do they continue to impact, the future of social and collective interactions, particularly in the arenas of political participation and social justice? How do the designs of technologies create platforms for participation--or inhibit it? And how have the values of democracy, equity, and justice nfluence the way we imagine and design the technologies that we claim will serve these values?

Dr. Nassim Parvin is an Associate Professor at the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Design and Social Justice Studio. Her research explores the ethical and political dimensions of design and technology, especially as related to questions of democracy and justice. Rooted in pragmatist ethics and feminist theory, she critically engages emerging digital technologies—such as smart cities or artificial intelligence—in their wide-ranging and transformative effect on the future of collective and social interactions.

Her interdisciplinary research integrates theoretically-driven humanistic scholarship and design-based inquiry, including publishing both traditional scholarly papers and creating digital artifacts that illustrate how humanistic values may be cultivated to produce radically different artifacts and infrastructures. Her scholarship appears across disciplinary venues in design (such as Design Issues), Human-Computer Interaction (such as ACM CSCW), Science and Technology Studies (such as Science, Technology, and Human Values), as well as philosophy (such as Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy). Her designs have been deployed at non-profit organizations such as the Mayo Clinic and exhibited in venues such as the Smithsonian Museum, receiving multiple awards and recognitions.

She is an editor of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, an award-winning journal in the expanding interdisciplinary field of STS and serve on the editorial board of Design Issues. My teaching has also received multiple recognitions inclusive of the campus-wide 2017 GATECH CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award.

Dr. Parvin received her PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University. She holds an MS in Information Design and Technology from Georgia Tech and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran.

We’re back for another installment of the “22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology” special series. In this week’s episode of the series, I am joined by Dr. Mar Hicks. This episode tells the story of labor and gender discrimination in the tech industry. Dr. Hicks explains the historical background of gendered technological production that has influenced the development of computing. In her historical outline, she explains that while women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s, American and British computing in the 1970s experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s. What can this history teach us about the need for gender equity in technological production now? And what are the consequences of continued gender inequity for our future?

Professor Mar Hicks is a historian of technology, gender, and labor, specializing in the history of computing. Dr. Hicks’s book, Programmed Inequality (MIT Press, 2017) investigates how Britain lost its early lead in computing by discarding the majority of their computer workers and experts--simply because they were women. Dr. Hicks’s current project looks at transgender citizens’ interactions with the computerized systems of the British welfare state in the 20th century, and how these computerized systems determined whose bodies and identities were allowed to exist. Hicks's work studies how collective understandings of progress are defined by competing discourses of social value and economic productivity, and how technologies often hide regressive ideals while espousing "revolutionary" or "disruptive" goals. Dr. Hicks is also co-editing a volume on computing history called Your Computer Is On Fire (MIT Press, 2020). Dr. Hicks runs the Digital History Lab at Illinois Tech.

In this week's episode, I am joined by Dr. Christopher Nguyen. We talk about the emerging concept of "human first AI," and the changing terrain of both AI ethics, and AI development. We imagine what a human-first approach to AI might look like, and what gets in the way of developing an ethical approach to AI in the tech industry.

Christopher Nguyen’s career spans four decades, and he has become an industry leader in the field of Engineering broadly, and AI specifically. Since fleeing Vietnam in 1978, he has founded multiple tech companies and has played key roles in everything from building the first flash memory transistors at Intel to spearheading the development of Google Apps as its first Engineering Director. As a professor, Christopher co-founded the Computer Engineering program at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, or HKUST. He earned his Bachelor of Science. degree from the University of California-Berkeley, summa cum lauday, and a PhD. from Stanford University. Today, he’s become an outspoken proponent of the emerging field of “AI Engineering” and a thought leader in the space of ethical, human-centric AI. With his latest company, Aitomatic, he’s hoping to redefine how companies approach AI in the context of life-critical, industrial applications.

This week, I turn my mic over to a guest host, for an interview with Dr. Jared Roach about the growing field of systems biology, an interdisciplinary field of study taking over the biological sciences, focused on complex interactions within biological systems. How can we update the study of biology for the 21st century? How can computational and mathematical analysis help us understand biological systems? And what can we newly see or understand about ourselves if we the way that complex networks interact within our bodies? 

Today's host, Zoë Gray, is a math major honor student at Cal Poly. She has a background in electrical engineering, and she is particularly interested in considering the pace of technological development, and the ethics of a system of technological production that moves so quickly.  

Dr. Jared Roach, MD, PhD is a Senior Research Scientist at The Institute for Systems Biology. Starting as a graduate student in the 1990s, Roach worked on the Human Genome Project from its early days through the end of the project. Dr. Roach contributed strategic and algorithmic designs to the Human Genome Project, including the pairwise end-sequencing strategy. He was a Senior Fellow at the Department of Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington from 1999-2000. In 2001, he became a Research Scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology. His group currently applies systems biology and genomics to complex diseases, focusing on the systems biology architecture of Alzheimer’s disease.

In this week's “22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology" special series, I sit down with Dr. Evelynn Hammonds to talk about how race and gender have shaped the histories of science, medicine, and technological development. We explore the divisions between investigations of gender within scientific and technological inquiry, and race within these same fields. How can an intersectional approach challenge our science and technologies to better serve, and include, a broader diversity of people? How have our concepts of science and technology, and our assumptions about what they can and should do, been shaped by exclusions? How can those trained and working in the Humanities can learn from those trained in and working in the Sciences and Technology fields, and vice-versa? How does an understanding of the history of ideas, and the people and forces that have shaped them, inform our ability to build, innovate, and create work cultures that are more ethical and equitable?

Professor Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University.  She was the first Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard University (2005-2008). From 2008-2013 she served as Dean of Harvard College and Chair of the Department of History of Science (2017-2022). Professor Hammonds’ areas of research include the histories of science, medicine and public health in the United States; race, gender and sexuality in science studies; feminist theory and African American history.  She has published articles on the history of disease, race and science, African American feminism, African-American women and the epidemic of HIV/AIDS; analyses of gender and race in science, medicine and public health and the history of health disparities in the U.S.. Professor Hammonds’ current work focuses on the history of the intersection of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race in the United States.  She is currently director of the Project on Race & Gender in Science & Medicine at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard.

Prof. Hammonds holds a B.S. in physics from Spelman College, a B.E.E. in electrical engineering from Ga. Tech and an SM in Physics from MIT.  She earned the PhD in the history of science from Harvard University. She served as a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2003-2005), a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, a Post-doctoral Fellow in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a Visiting Professor at UCLA and at Hampshire College. Professor Hammonds was named a Fellow of the Association of Women in Science (AWIS) in 2008.  She served on the Board of Trustees of Spelman and Bennett Colleges and currently on the Board of the Arcus Foundation, and the Board of Trustees of Bates College.

In 2010, she was appointed to President Barack Obama’s Board of Advisers on Historically Black Colleges and Universities and in 2014 to the President’s Advisory Committee on Excellence in Higher Education for African Americans. She served two terms as a member of the Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering (CEOSE), the congressionally mandated oversight committee of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Advisory Committee of the EHR directorate of the NSF, and the Advisory Committee on the Merit Review Process of the NSF. Professor Hammonds is the current vice president/president-elect of the History of Science Society.

At Harvard, she served on the President’s Initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery; the Faculty Executive Committee of the Peabody Museum and she chaired the University-wide Steering Committee on Human Remains in the Harvard Museum Collections.  She also works on projects to increase the participation of men and women of color in STEM fields. Prof. Hammonds is the co-author of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently released report (December 9, 2021) Transforming Technologies: Women of Color in Tech. She is a member of the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine (CWSEM) of the NAS and the NAS Roundtable on Black Men and Black Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds honorary degrees from Spelman College and Bates College. For the academic year 2022-2023, Prof. Hammonds is the inaugural Audre Lorde Visiting Professor of Queer Studies at Spelman College.

This week, we continue our “22 Lessons on Ethics and Technology series” with a conversation with Dr. John Basl about how our relationship with tech is changing what he calls an “ethic of life, an ethical perspective on which all living things deserve some level of moral concern.

Professor Basl is an associate professor of philosophy in the department of philosophy & religion at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He works primarily in moral philosophy and applied ethics, especially on issues related to emerging technologies. He is an editorial board member for the new journal AI and Ethics. His most recent book, The Death of the Ethic of Life, is available from Oxford University Press. 

And that’s all for this season! We are staying off our technologies for the winter break—we’ll be back with more episodes of the Technically Human podcast in 2023.

The “22 Lessons in Ethical Technology” series is co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Cal Poly Strategic Research Initiative Grant Award. The show is written, hosted, and produced by me, Deb Donig, with production support from Matthew Harsh and Elise St. John. Thanks to Jake Garner and Emma Zumbro for production coordination. Our head of research for this series is Sakina Nuruddin. Our editor is Carrie Caulfield Arick. Art by Desi Aleman.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the show to make sure you don’t miss an episode! You can find us on your favorite podcast app--Apple podcasts, Google Play, Spotify—or wherever you get your podcasts.  Enjoy the break, and we’ll see you in January.

In this episode of "Technically Human," I host Chris Leong and Maria Santacaterina for a conversation about the growing pervasiveness of sociotechnical systems. You may not know the term "sociotechnical system," but if you've booked a flight online, tried to reach an agent on the DMV's hotline, or  tried to contact your congressperson, you almost certainly have interacted with one of them. How have sociotechnical systems changed the way we access services, the way we spend our time, and the way we interact with one another? What are the benefits--and the consequences--of living in a world increasingly organized and processed through these systems?

Maria Santacaterina is a Global Strategic Leader & Board Executive Advisor, who has worked in 100+ markets and has over 30 years international experience. She focuses on leading growth, strategic change and digital business transformation, particularly on the level of corporate culture and strategy. She advocates for a new approach to futurist imagining, which she calls “adaptive resilience,” in order to build enduring value and values; while responding to an accelerating rate of change, complexity and exponential technological disruption.

Chris Leong is a Transformation and Change Leader with a career spanning over 30 years in financial services, enterprise software and consulting industries globally. He thinks about, writes, and advises on the impacts of automated decision-making and profiling outcomes from all digital services on customers and consumers, the trustworthiness of Socio-Technical Systems and the organisations that deploy them.

Together, Maria and Chris have co-authored several landmark articles on STSs, including their piece "Responsible Innovation: Living with socio-technical systems" and "Have you outsourced to a sociotechnical system." 

Enjoy the episode, and thanks for tuning in! We’re off next week for the thanksgiving break—join us the first week of December for a new episode of the “22 Lessons in Ethics and Technology” series. To learn more about the 22 Lessons on Ethical Technology series, visit www.etcalpoly.org. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show so that you don’t miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts! We’ll see you in December.