A weekly podcast featuring academics, industry practitioners and activists, launched at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), is celebrating five years. Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney launched the Good Robot podcast five years ago aiming to discuss questions such as: What is a good technology? Is it even possible? And how feminism can help us toward it.
Since Summer 2021 more than 120 episodes have been released on topics ranging from Buddhism and AI ethics, mental health, myths in technology, to AI in creative industries, the rise of TikTok, and the future of data centres.
Dr Eleanor Drage, Assistant Research Professor at CFI, has been running the podcast on her own since Kerry moved to New Zealand last year.
“We started the podcast during the pandemic, when our academic heroes were stuck inside eating cornflakes with their labradors, and thus available for interviews. From the get-go, guests embraced the tongue-in-cheek provocation of ‘the good robot’. Over the past five years, this podcast has been a joy to make and a sanctuary for sensible, brilliant, approaches to technology – whether feminist, crip, anti-racist or of other pro-justice orientations,” Eleanor says.
“Its mission has, if anything, intensified as tech opinion leaders vacillate between utopianism and apocalypticism. We hear from sensible, grounded people who aren’t losing sight of what’s actually important. Without fanfare, the artists, activists, technologists and scholars who come on the show are making life more liveable for people across the world. From pioneering open license microscopes to exposing the inadequacies of cochlear implant infrastructures, my guests have given me and thousands of Good Robot listeners hope and courage.”
A number of episodes feature CFI academics – Dr Aisha Sobey, Dr Amy Gaeta, Dr Beryl Pong, and Dr Tomasz Hollanek.
Anti-fat bias
In the episode entitled AI needs fat liberation! our Research Fellow Dr Aisha Sobey, explores how anti-fat bias shapes our digital lives. She discusses its effects on health technologies, social media, and generative AI, and explains why anti-fatness must be seen as a systemic issue.
“Anti-fat bias is negative attitudes toward weight and body size,” Aisha says. “It’s not just harmful to fat people, though the bigger you are, the more discrimination you face, but it harms everyone. We’re losing generations of young people who invest energy into controlling their body size rather than things that matter.”
Drone warfare
In The vulnerabilities of drone warfare episode Dr Amy Gaeta, a researcher at the Centre for Drones and Cultures and CFI, discusses how drones both uphold and subvert traditional masculine norms and the implications of their use in various contexts, from hobbyist communities to pornography.
“Across my work, one of the big questions in drone studies is the gendering of the drone itself. And this varies based on model, but there are some questions about what the gender of the drone is, ultimately, if it is. And especially when it comes to large warfare drones, they’re very phallic shaped and their associations with power and brutality, and control,” Amy says. “I tend to align them more with like, femaleness, ultimately.
Good drones
An episode entitled What makes a drone “good”? features Dr Beryl Pong, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at CFI where she leads the Centre for Drones and Culture. In this episode she reflects on what it means to think about drones as “good” or “ethical” technologies and how it can be assessed through its socio-political context.
“There’s a whole discourse around drones for good that asks how we use a drone in a way that serves some kind of sociopolitical benefit, but capital and profit are part of it being good,” Beryl says.
“A good drone is not drones for good. A good drone would be a drone that understands the limitations of itself as a remote sensing object and highlights that aspect to the user. It is not a drone that is good just because it is being used by a startup for some socio-political benefit while making money for the company.”
Designers and AI ethics
An episode entitled The role of designers in AI ethics features Dr Tomasz Hollanek, Assistant Research Professor at CFI and is focusing on design and AI ethics. Dr Hollanek discusses what role designers should play in AI ethics, the significance of AI literacy, and the responsibility of journalists in reporting on AI technologies.
“I work at the intersection of AI ethics and critical design, primarily thinking about critical approaches to human AI interaction design,” Tomasz said.
When asked what a good technology is, Tomasz said it makes him think about people and how they’re interacting with the technology. “Good technology is critical. And this means both that it’s designed critically, but also that it has to incite critique. It has to make the user think.”
All the episodes can be be found here: The Good Robot | Podcasts