The Good Robot Dr Kerry McInerney and Dr Eleanor Drage

From using computers to process the work of Thomas Aquinas to using facial recognition to compare portraits of Shakespeare, computational techniques have long been applied to humanities research. These projects are now called the digital humanities, and today we’re interviewing two major figures in this discipline. We talk to Dr Sharon Webb, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex, History Department and a Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab, and Caroline Bassett, Professor of Digital Humanities in the Faculty of English and the Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge. They tell us about full stack feminism, hidden histories of women's involvement in computing, and what it means to bring feminism into the study of technology.  

Welcome to our new format: The Good Robot Hot Takes! In these fun, lively, conversational episodes, we (Eleanor and Kerry) discuss some of the biggest issues in tech, from ChatGPT, and the sexy fembot problem in Hollywood film, to why predictive policing is a scam and why gender recognition is garbage.

This week we're talking about the Future of Life Institute's open letter calling for an AI 'pause' in the wake of ChatGPT. We explore framing large language models as 'foundational' and therefore inevitable, the dangers of AI 'race' rhetoric, why AI's long term harms are given way more attention than its more immediate ones, and how race and gender shape what 'counts' as existential risk.

EDIT - This episode has been re-uploaded to make a correction. Bostrom is associated with the Future of Life Institute, but he is not the Founder or a Founding member, as we originally stated. 

In this episode we chat to Laura Forlano, Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology. This is a special episode because Laura reads us some of her work on life as a Type 1 diabetic, or in her words, a disabled cyborg calibrated to an insulin pump. Laura’s writing gives us a different kind of insight into good technology, tech that in her case literally keeps her alive, but can also let you down in alarming ways. 

This special bonus episode was recorded at the AI Anarchies conference in Berlin. We held a workshop exploring with participants what good technology means for them, and why thinking in terms of ‘good technology’ actually limits us. Two amazing participants offered to be interviewed by us, Christina Lu, who at the time was a software engineer at DeepMind and is now a researcher on the Antikythera program and Grace Turtle, a designer, artist, and researcher that uses experimentation and play, like Table Top Games, LARPing, and simulation design to encourage us to transition to more just and sustainable futures. 

In this episode we chat to Louise Hickman, an activist and scholar based at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. Louise talks to us about stenography, the process of  transcribing speech into shorthand. You may be familiar with this from having seen court reporters write a transcription of a tribunal or case, but many stenographers also do crucial access work to create live captions of someone speaking. Stenographers create their own online dictionaries and then access words really quickly using keyboard shortcuts. We explore the political decision making process of captioning and why this matters. 

In this episode we discuss the new generation of Chinese science fiction with two of the genres most brilliant translators, editors, writers and researchers. They’ve just published The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, an anthology of science fiction written by Chinese women and non-binary writers that aims to overwrite stereotypes about who Chinese sf writers are and what they write about. Regina is a SF writer who works for the Co-Futures project at the University of Oslo and Emily is a writer and translator doing a PhD at Yale in East Asian Languages and Literature.