Data is the most valuable resource on our planet, and the data economy impacts everything from mental health to human rights. On Season 2 of Technically Optimistic, host Raffi Krikorian engages engineers, activists, professors, and more to ask big questions about our data-driven era. How and why is our data being collected? How is it affecting our daily lives, our decision-making, our political systems? Perhaps most importantly, what does the future of data look like, and what can we do to help shape it? This season of Technically Optimistic is all about your data, and how you can gain back some...
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Digital surveillance is becoming increasingly threatening to the reproductive rights of women and pregnant people in America after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Behavioral data collected from apps can be used to catalog — and criminalize — our health care choices. In this “wild west” surveillance economy, who is responsible for safeguarding our privacy? Could more and more of our data be weaponized against us in this same way? How can technology be harnessed to help protect privacy, rather than further jeopardize it?
Host Raffi Krikorian talks to people working to protect reproductive freedom in an ever-changing landscape. Guests in...
Episode 4 • 15 May 2024 • 56m and 47s
Modern political campaigning has become a massive data operation. In the US, candidates from both parties frequently use data to try and better understand voters, in hopes of swaying them on election day. But how, exactly, is voter information being acquired, analyzed, and employed to influence voters? Do modeling and targeting really move the needle? And how are political campaigns a microcosm of the data economy, illuminating how data can transform society?
In this episode, Raffi talks to election veterans, data specialists, and former colleagues from his time as CTO at the Democratic National Committee, to talk a...
Episode 3 • 8 May 2024 • 1h, 55s
When social media is at its best, we get genuine human connection, built-in audiences, and exciting avenues for creativity and exchange. But our current social platforms are built on a surveillance model, where our data is used to predict our behavior, show us ads, and train the algorithms that keep us perpetually on the platform. It’s time to explore a new vision for social media, where we don’t have to give up on privacy in order to connect.
In this episode, Raffi talks to prominent critics of existing social media — and the people actively reimagining it, wit...
Episode 2 • 1 May 2024 • 1h, 31s
How has our data become the world’s most valuable resource? What privacy tradeoffs are we making when we engage with personalized apps, recommendations, and always-connected smart devices? Is our personal data being used to make things better, or to make tech giants even more powerful? And what do “cookies” have to do with all this?
Host Raffi Krikorian chats with experts about data’s role in AI, “big data” and the data economy, surveillance capitalism, and much more. Guests include AI researcher Amba Kak, executive director of the AI Now Institute; data scientist Chris Wiggins, co-author of How Data Ha...
Episode 1 • 24 April 2024 • 50m and 50s
The second season of Technically Optimistic is all about your data. Who’s taking it? What are they doing with it? And how can you gain back some control?
Join host Raffi Krikorian, CTO of Emerson Collective, down this road. It’s going to lead to some predictable places — like AI and social media — but also to stories about health care, political campaigning, and criminal justice reform.
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Episode • 10 March 2024 • 4m and 27s
On Monday, October 30th, Biden signed a landmark executive order on artificial intelligence safety and security. It was timed strategically, released the same week as VP Harris gave a speech at a UK AI summit. And, in the absence of any Congressional action, Biden’s document represents the most comprehensive and official policy of the United States on AI at the moment.
So, what’s in the executive order? Host Raffi Krikorian speaks with journalist Courtney Rozen, who covers the White House and tech policy for Bloomberg, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a Brown University computer science professor who co-w...
Episode • 3 November 2023 • 40m and 4s
As AI rapidly advances, how do we balance speed and safety? Justin Hendrix is the CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press, a nonprofit media and community venture covering the intersection of technology and democracy. Through his reporting and research, he’s got a lot to say about the global developments in AI regulation, including the AI Act in the EU, emerging efforts in the US, and the implications for the future of US-China relations.
On September 8th, Hendrix sat down with host Raffi Krikorian for a live Fellows Friday virtual event hosted by Emerson Collective. This ep...
Episode • 29 September 2023 • 47m and 59s
Timnit Gebru is a co-author of one of the most influential research papers on AI from this decade, which coined the term “stochastic parrots” to describe large language models. Following her very public departure from Google in 2020, Gebru founded the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute, an organization that describes itself as doing independent, community-rooted work, free from the pervasive influence of Big Tech. She’s now DAIR’s executive director. And recently, she was selected as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI — like several other guests you hear from in season one of this show.
Gebru sat...
Episode • 15 September 2023 • 42m and 8s
In episode 6 of our first season on AI, we heard from Kyunghyun Cho, a professor of computer science and data science at New York University, about how artificial intelligence research in academia so often resembles corporate product development.
But in his initial talk with host Raffi Krikorian, Kyunghyun had a lot of other interesting things to say — for instance, about how AI models affect marginalized languages, on whether generative AI could produce something of cultural significance, and about the connection between AI “hallucinations” and creativity.
Here's Kyunghyun’s blog post on AI and compression (which referenc...
Episode • 8 September 2023 • 29m and 52s
Ian Bremmer is a political scientist, risk consultant, and the author of “The AI Power Paradox,” a new essay in the Sept./Oct. 2023 issue of Foreign Affairs, co-written along with Mustafa Suleyman (co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI). In this essay, Bremmer lays out a plan for AI governance that aims to take into account a fundamental shift in the nature of political power that he says has been brought about by AI. He imagines a framework where nation-states, tech companies, and proposed newly created technocratic agencies all would join forces to try and mitigate the risks posed by AI.<...
Episode • 1 September 2023 • 27m and 31s
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