Godmothers of AI

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Godmothers of AI: The Unseen is a seven-part documentary podcast series from Godmothers exploring women of the past, present, and future whose contributions to technology, computing, and AI all interconnect. Each episode uses a different lens to view a single thematic thread: What does “unseen” mean in the current climate, and what should we be seeing? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 1

Godmothers of AI

In 1843, a young woman wrote what is widely recognised as the world’s first computer program, a century before the modern computer existed. Ada Lovelace saw something in Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine that even Babbage himself had not fully imagined: that a machine designed to calculate could potentially do far more than mathematics. It could manipulate symbols, compose music and, one day, perhaps create things that had nothing to do with numbers at all. She called this 'poetical science', a way of thinking that brought imagination and logic together. Yet after her death, Ada was largely written out of the history she had helped to shape. It would take decades for her contribution to computing to be properly recognised. Today, her name lives on in a programming language used by the US Department of Defense, the Ada Lovelace Institute, and Ada Lovelace Day, celebrated around the world. But beyond the mythology of the Victorian mathematical prodigy is a more interesting question: what did Ada actually see when she looked at the future of machines? In this episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with Julia Gray, author of I, Ada, who brings Ada's early life and imagination vividly into focus, and Octavia Field Reid, Associate Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, whose work asks a question that feels profoundly Ada-like today: not simply what can technology do, but what kind of society do we want technology to create? We also return to Meredith Whittaker’s Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers and Industrial Control to place this turning point in a wider context of labour, power and systems of control. Ada Lovelace saw, 183 years ago, that the capacity of machines would one day exceed the limits of the imagination that built them. We are living in that moment now. In this episode, we explore: Ada's leap beyond calculation and why her ability to imagine what the Analytical Engine might become was so far ahead of her time.The making of Ada Lovelace through Julia Gray's research into Ada's childhood, education, relationships and intellectual formation.Who gets remembered, and how including the portrait Ada disliked, the mother who loved it, and what this small story reveals about the ways women's histories are constructed.Why Ada disappeared from computing history for decades, while Babbage's contribution became increasingly celebrated.Poetical science, Ada's extraordinary idea that imagination and mathematics could belong to the same intellectual world.The Ada Lovelace Institute today and why asking what kind of society we want before asking what technology can do is a political act.The hidden histories of computing through Meredith Whittaker's Origin Stories and its examination of computation, industrial control, labour and power.Why Ada belongs in the story of AI as an early thinker about the possibilities and limits of machines.The founding idea behind Godmothers: that technology is never just about what machines can do; it is about the people, values and societies we choose to build around them.Further reading & resourcesBooks & essays I, Ada extracts, copyright (c) 2020 Julia Gray, published by Andersen Press Ltd. ThisisJuliaGray.com Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers and Industrial Control - Meredith Whittaker, Logic Magazine Organisations & archives: Ada Lovelace Institute English Heritage, Ada Lovelace blue plaque Discover Godmotherswww.godmothers.ai - culture, technology and the women shaping the future (membership, sign up) Issue Zero: The Invisible Revolution the first Godmothers print publication (available via website) Instagram: @godmothers.ai LinkedIn: Godmothers of AI This episode was produced by Godmothers Studio. Producers: Saskia Cookson and Gianluca Allaria. Presented by Claire Belhassine. Music by Tara Lily. Sound by Kit Proudfoot. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episode 2

Godmothers of AI

Only 4% of secondary school girls in the UK consider a career in technology their first choice. In this episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine visits Goldsmiths, University of London, one of the world's most radical creative institutions, to speak with three computational artists whose work sits at the intersection of code, culture and ideas to inspire other young women to think differently about the tech sector. The next generation of women shaping the future of AI and computing are emerging with clear visions of the future they would like to inhabit. IN THIS EPISODE: What it feels like to be a young woman building at the intersection of art, technology and ideas in 2026, and why that intersection is where the most interesting questions live.How Esther Tokyo Bello is reworking history and cultural systems through technology, and what the Yoruba Ifá Divination System has to say about computation.How Julia Mascetti moved from the arts and media industries into game development and found that the distance between storytelling and code was smaller than imagined.How Federica Ciotti uses AI and sensor-based systems to question how meaning is made in real time, and why inclusion into what exactly is the most important question.Why there is more than one route into technology, and why the future belongs to people who refuse to stay in one lane.What these three women see that the industry cannot yet see, and why institutions like Goldsmiths matter because they nurture people who ask different questions. ABOUT THE GUESTS Esther Tokyo Bello is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher and a PhD candidate in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths, developing Reversioning, a creative practice-based methodology. Her work spans abstract painting, filmmaking and dataset creation, and she was an artist-in-residence at Tate Modern's Tech, Tea + Exchange programme in 2025. She lives and works in London. Julia Mascetti is a narrative game developer and the writer and co-developer of I Write Games Not Tragedies, a narrative-driven rhythm game paying homage to British emo and goth subcultures. She previously worked across the arts, media and tech industries before completing an MA in Game Design, and now runs the studio Studio Wife. She lives in London. Federica Ciotti is a London-based artist working across drawing and computational arts, with a background in semiotics and over twelve years of experience in graphic facilitation and live visual synthesis. Her studio practice extends drawing into sound, performance and sensor-based responsive systems, and she collaborates with organisations and research teams to translate complex conversations into visual and hand-drawn forms of knowledge. LINKS Esther Tokyo Bello: esthertokyobello.com Julia Mascetti - I Write Games Not Tragedies on Steam. Studio Wife: studiowife.com Federica Ciotti: federicaciotti.com MA Computational Arts, Goldsmiths University of London: gold.ac.uk ABOUT THE UNSEEN The Unseen is a podcast from Godmothers Studio exploring the women whose ideas, work and imagination shape technology, culture and the world we are building. Every Godmother starts by seeing something the rest of the world cannot yet see. godmothers.ai This episode was produced by Godmothers Studio. Producer Saskia Cookson and Gianluca Allaria Presented by Claire Belhassine. Music by Tara Lily. Sound by Kit Proudfoot. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episode 3

Godmothers of AI

Before there were algorithms, there were stars. The earliest mathematicians were also the earliest astronomers, and the earliest astronomers were also the earliest astrologers. In the 23rd century BCE, the Akkadian astronomer-priestess En Hedu-Anna mapped the night sky through mathematics and observation alone. For most of human history, looking at the sky to create meaning. In this episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir, holistic psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and astrologer, about what ancient wisdom traditions have to offer at this civilisational shift into the new paradigm. IN THIS EPISODE Why AI is like taking the internet and making it quantum, and what that means for human consciousness.How soul-based astrology grew out of Judy's psychoanalytic training, and what she calls a sacred blueprint of a person's strengths, vulnerabilities and life mission.The Saturn-Neptune conjunction at zero degrees Aries, a configuration unseen for 6,000 years, and what the dissolution of structures actually feels like from the inside.Why French astrologer André Barbault predicted the 2020 pandemic and called this current moment 'a flowering of humankind'.The rare 2026 planetary configuration, what Judy calls its AI signatureThe patriarchal legacy of gendering the planets, and what gets lost when we dismiss ancient ways of knowing.What happens to human psychology and intuition as AI reshapes the way we think and relate to each other.Why choice is the thing we always have, even now. ABOUT JUDY TSAFRIR Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir is a board certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance. After a spiritual awakening in her late forties, she began integrating astrology, shamanism and functional medicine into her practice. She is the author of Sacred Psychiatry: Bridging the Personal and Transpersonal to Transform Health and Consciousness, published by Greenleaf Book Group in 2024. She has a private holistic psychiatry practice in the Boston area. FURTHER READING Sacred Psychiatry by Judy Tsafrir judytsafrirmd.com André Barbault on planetary cycles and the flowering of humankind En Hedu-Anna, world's first known woman astronomer ABOUT THE UNSEEN The Unseen is a podcast from Godmothers Studio exploring the women whose ideas, work and imagination shape technology, culture and the world we are building. Every Godmother starts by seeing something the rest of the world cannot yet see. Newsletter sign up: www.godmothers.ai Instagram: @godmothers.ai LinkedIn: Godmothers of AI Issue Zero of the Godmothers Zine, The Invisible Revolution (purchase via website) www.godmothers.ai This episode was produced by Godmothers Studio and Gianluca Allaria. Presented by Claire Belhassine. Music by Tara Lily. Sound by Kit Proudfoot. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episode 4

Godmothers of AI

Between two and three percent of women internationally receive venture capital funding, this does not mean young female founders should stop building. In this episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with Ava Oppenheimer, founder of TryIto and Godmothers cover star, about the mathematical foundation AI forgot, the buried history of women in computing, and why the most important way to talk about AI right now is through a philosophical lens. IN THIS EPISODE: How Ava emailed NASA at eleven, got a response, and stayed in touch.What happens when you give a computer too much physics to deal with.How aerospace engineering and fashion styling led to the problem her company sets out to solve.Why computers were women before computers existed, and what the history of the NASA computing rooms reveals about who gets written out of the story.How ENIAC, one of the first electronic computers, was operated by six women.Why neural networks replicate the brain, why the brain remains so profoundly misunderstood, and what that means for AI.How hallucinations in AI go back to intuition, the way a child learns by saying something back and being corrected, and why that is so hard to encode in a machine.Why between two and three percent of women internationally receive VC fundingWhy more and more technologists are converting to philosophy, and what that shift tells us about where AI is actually heading.What embodiment offers that AI cannot replicate, and why remembering we have bodies matters more than ever.Ava's favourite fictional robot, and what an enabler has to do with the future of technology. ABOUT AVA OPPENHEIMER Ava Oppenheimer studied aerospace engineering, worked as a fashion stylist on music videos, and joined Synthesia to work on volumetric capture research before founding TryIto. What started as a fashion-tech company solving fit-accurate virtual try-ons became something larger: a mission to fix the mathematical and physical foundations that AI is built on. She describes TryIto as building the missing compute layer AI needs to scale into real-world systems, making physical simulation stable and computationally efficient at scale. She is also the cover star of Issue Zero of the Godmothers zine, The Invisible Revolution. She lives and works in London. If you are an investor and Ava's work resonates, find her at tryito.io. FURTHER READING AND VIEWING TryIto: tryito.io Godmothers Zine Issue Zero, The Invisible Revolution, featuring Ava's cover story: www.godmothers.ai Hidden Figures, dir. Theodore Melfi ABOUT THE UNSEEN The Unseen is a podcast from Godmothers Studio exploring the women whose ideas, work and imagination shape technology, culture and the world we are building. Every Godmother starts by seeing something the rest of the world cannot yet see. www.godmothers.ai This episode was produced by Godmothers Studio. Co-Producers: Saskia Cookson and Gianluca Allaria. Presented by Claire Belhassine. Music by Tara Lily. Sound by Kit Proudfoot. Newsletter sign up: www.godmothers.ai Instagram: @godmothers.ai LinkedIn: Godmothers of AI Issue Zero of the Godmothers Zine, The Invisible Revolution (purchase via website) www.godmothers.ai Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episode 5

Godmothers of AI

The discipline of translating, is the compute. Before Carole Egerton built one of Europe's largest online retailers, she wrote her dissertation on the development of the internet in France. She understood what was coming through the lens of language and communication rather than engineering, and has been building with this in mind ever since. In this episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with Carole Egerton about what it means to build technology that translates, what pre-linguistic intelligence has to do with AI, and why after twenty-five years of building things that did not yet exist, she remains optimistic about what comes next. IN THIS EPISODE Why a French degree from Cardiff University, and a dissertation on the development of the internet in France, became the foundation for twenty-five years of technology entrepreneurship.How reading Gide and Molière helps a tech CEO, and what francophone culture has to do with building the future.How Carole helped build one of the first online shopping experiences in the UK What it took to scale Glasses Direct to a major exit and what she learned about vision, literally and otherwise, along the way.How partnering with a NASA optical physicist led to Clear Rx, the world's first standalone virtual eye test, and what it reveals about which systems are long overdue for reimagining.What Solm Systems is building at the signal layer beneath languageThe pre-linguistic knowing that comes from raising humans who cannot yet communicate their needs in words, and what that intelligence has to do with building AI at this particular moment.What twenty-five years in mostly male teams taught Carole about authenticity, and why she stopped translating herself to fit the room.How you know if a system is going in the right directionWhy Carole is optimistic, and what it would mean to hand the next generation something worth having. ABOUT CAROLE EGERTON Carole Egerton is a visionary entrepreneur and product leader with over twenty-five years of experience building things that did not yet exist. She co-founded Glasses Direct, scaling it from a startup to a major exit as Europe's largest online eyewear retailer. She co-founded Clear Eye Test, partnering with a NASA optical physicist to build the world's first standalone clinically accurate virtual eye test. She is now CEO and founder of Solm Systems, a UK deep-tech company building foundation model architecture for the signal layer beneath language. She began with a French degree from Cardiff University and a dissertation on the development of the internet in France. FURTHER READING AND LINKS Solm Systems: solmsystems.com The next frontier is not machines. It is humanity: solmsystems.com/perspective/the-next-frontier Clear Eye Test: cleareyetest.com Carole Egerton on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/caroleegerton ABOUT THE UNSEEN The Unseen is a podcast from Godmothers Studio exploring the women whose ideas, work and imagination shape technology, culture and the world we are building. Every Godmother starts by seeing something the rest of the world cannot yet see. This episode was produced by Godmothers Studio and Gianluca Allaria. Presented by Claire Belhassine. Music by Tara Lily. Sound by Kit Proudfoot. Newsletter sign up: www.godmothers.ai Instagram: @godmothers.ai LinkedIn: Godmothers of AI Issue Zero of the Godmothers Zine, The Invisible Revolution (purchase via website) www.godmothers.ai Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episode 6

Godmothers of AI

What if the story we have been told about AI is a false narrative? In episode six of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with filmmaker Valerie Veatch, whose Sundance documentary 'Ghost in the Machine' traces the buried history of artificial intelligence and the structures of power that shaped it. Ghost in the Machine navigates the torrential rapids of artificial intelligence with a mind-expanding investigative essay documentary that excavates the philosophical, cultural and political forces driving the global AI boom. The film follows a line from the history of eugenics and ideas about intelligence through the development of computing and into the systems being built today. It asks who gets to define intelligence, whose labour becomes invisible, who benefits from the systems being built, and what happens when the values of the people who build technology become embedded in the technology itself. There is a reason we do not find Godmothers in AI, Valerie says. Because if we did, it probably would not be called AI and would work much better. IN THIS EPISODE The buried history of artificial intelligence and the structures of power that shaped it from the beginning.What Valerie found when she joined an OpenAI artist group, what happened when she reported the racism in their outputs to the company, and how that experience became a film.Why the term artificial intelligence was invented as a marketing term in 1955, what John McCarthy actually believed about women and mathematicsThe historic connections between AI, eugenics and white supremacy, traced through primary sources across a century of archive.Why automating and erasing female labour has always been, in Valerie's words, the project of compute.Why the promises of superintelligence evaporate into pseudoscience the moment you push on them, and what the inevitability narrative is actually designed to accomplish.The NOT AI motif in the film, why she labelled every single frame, and how she frames it in the tradition of feminist video art that used the aesthetic of the patriarchy to critique the patriarchy.Where to locate maternal patterns of compute, what mycelium has to do with it, and why centring care might be the place to start.Valerie's Godmother: Gwen Mansfield, high school speech and drama teacher in Seattle, who modelled what it looks like to lead with gentle clarity and unapologetic integrity WATCH GHOST IN THE MACHINE Ghost in the Machine is Valerie Veatch's documentary exploring the history, politics and power structures behind artificial intelligence. notaidoc.com FURTHER VIEWING Coded Bias, directed by Shalini Kantayya Poet of Code, the documentary about Joy Buolamwini FURTHER READING Meredith Whittaker, Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers and Industrial Control, Logic Magazine: logicmag.io Emily M. Bender et al., On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI AI Snake Oil Kara Swisher on technology and proximity to power John McCarthy and the origins of artificial intelligence - Stanford Press The Unseen is a podcast from Godmothers Studio exploring the women whose ideas, work and imagination shape technology, culture and the world we are building. Across the series, we connect women from the past, present and future, tracing the ideas and patterns that link them across time. Every Godmother starts by seeing something the rest of the world cannot yet see. www.godmothers.ai This episode was produced by Godmothers Studio. Producer Gianluca Allaria. Presented by Claire Belhassine. Music by Tara Lily. Sound by Kit Proudfoot. Newsletter sign up: www.godmothers.ai Instagram: @godmothers.ai LinkedIn: Godmothers of AI Issue Zero of the Godmothers Zine, The Invisible Revolution (purchase via website) www.godmothers.ai Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episode 7

Godmothers of AI

"Whenever you hear inevitability language, take a very close look at who benefits. And often that speaks to a more old fashioned type of power grab. There is nothing new here." In the final episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with Baroness Beeban Kidron about Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back, her book on the political economy of Big Tech, written from her position as a crossbench peer in the House of Lords and through the lens of her life as a film director. Baroness Kidron traces her own path from directing feature films to campaigning for children's digital rights, describing how a moment of watching kids silently absorbed in their phones led her, layer by layer, to understand the commercial and political forces shaping the modern internet. She reflects on parliamentary battles fought and won, including one to criminalise AI models built to generate child sexual abuse material, and the campaign joined by figures across the arts to stop the government from giving away creative copyright to AI companies. She closes by naming her own Godmother: the photographer Eve Arnold, the first woman admitted to the Magnum photo agency, who taught her that the job is never done until you decide it is. IN THIS EPISODE The dinner at Google in May 2015, celebrating Tim Berners-Lee on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the World Wide Web, the moment Beeban looked around the room and understood what was coming.Why the system is not failing. It is working exactly as designed. And who it was designed to serve.How children have become, in effect, the unpaid data workers keeping these systems profitable.The crisp packet argument: why a crisp packet carries more legal protection than the products being fed into the minds of children twenty-four hours a day.What the transfer of wealth to a handful of tech companies, now holding more capital than the entire global manufacturing sector, actually means for the rest of us.Why the promises of superintelligence are a cover story, and what the infrastructure being built in their name is actually for.The Five Rights framework for children in the digital world.The parliamentary battle to criminalise AI models built to generate child sexual abuse material, and the campaign to protect creative copyright from AI companies.The twelve-point programme for governments that closes the book, and why technology itself is not the enemy but the social and economic conditions allowed to control it are.Why whenever you hear inevitability language around technology, you should look very carefully at who benefits. ABOUT BARONESS BEEBAN KIDRON Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE is a member of the House of Lords, a former award-winning film director, a leading voice on children's rights in the digital environment and a global authority on digital regulation. She sits as a crossbench peer in the House of Lords. She is Honorary President, founder and former Chair of the 5Rights Foundation, a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics where she chairs the Digital Futures for Children research centre. She holds several roles at the University of Oxford, including as an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI. Until 2024 she was an expert consultant to the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence. Before entering the Lords she was awarded an OBE for services to drama in 2012. Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back by Baroness Beeban Kidron. Published by Penguin, June 2026. Available now at penguin.co.uk and wherever books are sold. Links: beeban.com | 5rightsfoundation.com This episode was produced and presented by Claire Belhassine for Godmothers Studio. Co-produced with Qays iNsaanja. Sound mix by Kit Proudfoot and music composed by Tara Lily. If you have enjoyed this series, go to our website: godmothers.ai, where you can sign up for our newsletter, buy the first issue of the magazine or become a member of the Godmothers community. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Godmothers of AI: The Unseen is a seven-part documentary podcast series from Godmothers exploring women of the past, present, and future whose contributions to technology, computing, and AI all interconnect. Each episode uses a different lens to view a single thematic thread: What does “unseen” mean in the current climate, and what should we be seeing? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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