Season 3 is here!

On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, host Kristen Collins interview Kris Rose on deliberative democracy and Meta's community forums. Kris discusses Meta’s efforts to incorporate public input into decision-making through the Oversight Board and Community Forums. The Oversight Board, an independent body with binding authority over content moderation decisions, provides external accountability, while Community Forums proactively engage users on emerging technologies and policies. In particular, they focus on Meta’s Generative AI Community Forum, held in the US, Germany, Spain, and Brazil, which aimed to gather diverse perspectives on the principles that should guide AI development and use. Kristen also raises several concerns including selection biases, lacking transparency, and the potential influence of political pressures on corporate decision-making.

**This conversation was recorded in August 2024

Kris Rose is a Governance Director at Meta, where he works across the company to drive thought on emerging trends at the intersection of technology, society, and governance. He also leads the team's community governance work, including community forums and other pilots focused on empowering user voice in the company's decision making. Prior to this role, Kris helped launch the company’s Oversight Board, served as a geopolitical analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency for a decade—to include a secondment as the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) briefer to then US Vice President Mike Pence—and most recently served as a Senior Advisor at the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) during the Biden administration. Kris holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Georgetown University and is a Term Member with the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Notes:

• Stanford University’s Deliberative Democracy Lab’s Deliberative Polling Methodology
• Meta’s 2023 Community Forum on Generative AI, conducted in collaboration with Stanford University’s Deliberative Democracy Lab and the Behavioral Insights Team
• Meta’s January 7, 2025 Policy Announcement
• Meta’s Transparency Reports

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A special thanks to our listeners for joining us, and please enjoy the final episode of Season 2. We hope to see you again soon!

On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, host Kristen Collins interviews Lida Maxwell on whistleblowers, queer love, and outsider truth-telling. Lida uses Chelsea Manning, a representative outside truth-teller, as a case study to understand the interplay between personal identity and political activism, exploring the nuanced differences between public engagement and privacy. Lida also discusses her upcoming work on environmental and queer political theory that focuses on Rachel Carson’s public advocacy, influenced by her private relationships, and emphasizes the role that personal experiences and identities have in shaping public truths and political actions.

Professor Lida Maxwell is a political theorist and a Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Boston University. She is the author of Public Trials: Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling (Oxford University Press, 2019). She is currently working in environmental and queer political theory and is in the process of publishing her next book, Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

Check out Lida's work, "Another Silent Spring?" and "Whistleblower, Traitor, Soldier, Queer?: The Truth of Chelsea Manning"

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On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, host Kristen Collins interviews Samantha Cole on her book, How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex. Their conversation features discussion on the origins of deepfake technology, nonconsensual pornography, the rights of sex workers, concerns regarding sexual content bans, the importance of sex and intimacy in online interactions, and more.

Samantha Cole is a technology journalist and co-founder of 404 Media, a worker-owned tech publication. She is the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.

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On today's episode of Virtual Sentiments, host Kristen Collins interviews John Kaufhold on the history of image recognition and deep learning. With over 30 years of experience in the artificial intelligence and machine learning world, John shares his history starting from his early days in speech recognition in the 90s. He covers the ImageNet Big Bang in 2012, the dramatic improvement of image recognition error rates and hardware power, neural networks, the development of chatbots, terminology, and discusses challenges such as data privacy, bias reproduction, existential risk, transparency in data sets, and more!

Dr. John Kaufhold is an expert with over 30 years of experience in artificial intelligence and deep learning. He is the founder of Deep Learning Analytics, a machine learning company, and serves on the Advisory Board of the DC Data Community.

References and related works to this episode: "Munk Debate on Artificial Intelligence | Bengio & Tegmark vs. Mitchell & LeCun" and Data Science DC's "How Attention in 2017 got us Chat GPT."

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On today's episode of Virtual Sentiments, host Kristen Collins interviews Salomé Viljoen on relational data, governance, and privacy. Salomé shares insights into some of the key positions and debates about legal reforms relating to digital privacy and data governance, particularly the relational nature of digital data. In this conversation, Salomé balances serious concern for the harms presented by the status quo and the dangers of surveillance with a true desire to also appreciate and improve the benefits that we in our communities can derive from digital data.

Salomé Viljoen is an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she teaches and writes about contracts, privacy, commercial surveillance and data governance. Her work includes "A Relational Theory of Data Governance," "Data Relations," "Design choices: Mechanism design and platform capitalism," and "Valuing Social Data."

References and related works to this episode: Janet Vertesi's "My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal"

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Kristen Collins interviews Eric Schliesser on playing, liberty, and the Das Adam Smith Problem. In their conversation, they discuss the "Das Adam Smith Problem" which addresses the perceived inconsistency between Smith's works, "Wealth of Nations" and "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," as well as other topics including Smith's critique of Stoicism, how Smith's ideas still apply today in the modern era of AI technology, the invisible hand and its reinterpretation, and the division of labor and the side affects of social alienation. They converse on the role of childhood play and innovation on liberalism and building a sense of togetherness in society, and more!

Eric Schliesser is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Adam Smith: Systematic Philsopher and Public Thinker (Oxford University Press, 2017), and he received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. Eric runs a substack called "Digressions Impressions."

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Kristen Collin interviews James Goodrich on data monopolies and the neo-Brandeis movement. They begin their conversation by addressing the political nature of algorithmic bias and how we define data property rights. They discuss how certain firms have a sort of monopoly power over behavioral data gathering and converse on consumer welfare and market morality, the neo-Brandeis antitrust movement, the Sherman Act, the right to exclude, data as being nonrivalrous, concerns for privacy, cautions regarding the use of unvetted AI, and more!

James Goodrich is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of UW-Madison's interdisciplinary cluster in the ethics of computing, data, and information. He works primarily in normative ethics and the interdisciplinary field of philosophy, politics, and economics. He is an alum of the Mercatus Adam Smith Fellowship.

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References and related works to this episode: Sanjukta Paul's "Recovering the Moral Economy Foundations of the Sherman Act," Linda Khan's "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," Robert Bork's The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself, and “The Fallacy of AI Functionality” by Inioluwa Deborah Raji, I. Elizabeth Kumar, Aaron Horowitx, and Andrew D. Selbst.

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On this episode, Kristen Collins interviews Boris Litvin on spectatorship, memes, and Rousseau. Kristen and Boris delve into the relevance of Rousseau's insights on politics and the public stage, relating them to today's social media-driven democracy. They explore the concept of "audience democracy" coined by Bernard Manin, which distinguishes between those in power and the spectators of politics. They discuss the complexities of spectatorship, its passive nature, surveillance, and the role of social media in shaping political discourse and authenticity. They also examine how video technology, like body cams and bystander videos, impacts power dynamics and public scrutiny, highlighting the need for active participation alongside spectatorship for meaningful democratic change.

Boris Litvin is a Visiting Instructor, Ancient Studies and General Education at Eckerd College. His research interests include intellectual history, democracy, spectatorship, political representation, authority, rhetoric, media, and textual interpretation.

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References and related works to this episode: Bernard Manin's The Principles of Representative Government, Jeffrey Edward Green's Eyes of the People" Democracy in the Age of Spectatorship, Nadia Urbinati's Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People and Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy, Boris Litvin's "'This Hearing Should Be Flipped': Democractic Spectatorship, Social Media, and the Problem of Demagogic Candor" and "Staging Emile".

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Season 2 is here! On this episode, host Kristen Collins chats with Christopher Coyne on the history of surveillance state from the early 20th century to now and surveillance capitalism, where user data is sold or used for advertisement targeting. They also discuss foreign intervention, the interdisciplinary work on surveillance, his work on Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism, and more.

Christopher J. Coyne is associate director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and F. A. Harper Professor of Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a Professor of Economics at George Mason University.

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Works mentioned include: Mary Dudziak's War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule's Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts, Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, and Kenneth Boulding's The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society.

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On the last episode of Season 1 of Virtual Sentiments, Kristen Collins interviews Eileen Hunt, a Professor and Political Theorist at the University of Notre Dame, on Mary Shelley and the Ethics of AI. Hunt begins by providing historical context of Mary Shelley regarding her parents and Shelley as a child of the Enlightenment. Hunt explains the interdisciplinary nature of Mary Shelley’s work, rooted in a Grecian philosophical past and concerned with future-oriented questions about the rights of human beings, tying in Mary Shelley’s famous Gothic novel, Frankenstein, to modern considerations of the ethics and rights of artificial life. She encourages us to think of ourselves as artificial, technological creatures and to contemplate the rights of all artificial creatures, including humans and other forms of artificial intelligence. Additionally, Hunt discusses issues of genetic engineering, humanity as a built environment, Jeremy Bentham and reproductive justice.

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