The Technically Human Podcast

Deb Donig

Technically Human is a podcast about ethics and technology where I ask what it means to be human in the age of tech. Each week, I interview industry leaders, thinkers, writers, and technologists and I ask them about how they understand the relationship between humans and the technologies we create. We discuss how we can build a better vision for technology, one that represents the best of our human values.

  1. 1d ago

    When the Breach Hits the Fan: AI, Cybercrime, and the Crisis of Trust with Frank Riccardi

    Last week, the internet had one of its worst stretches in memory. Between October 19th and 22nd, dozens of serious security problems came to light within a few days. Online, people started calling it “Black October.” Much of the coverage has framed this as a story about AI-powered hackers. Frank Riccardi, who joins me today, has spent years making a less dramatic argument. He says most cyberattacks succeed because organizations neglect the basics, things like weak passwords and software that never gets patched.  Frank Riccardi is an attorney and cybersecurity and privacy expert who spent 25 years building compliance and privacy programs for large healthcare systems. As a Chief Compliance and Privacy Officer, he oversaw investigations into high-profile data breaches. His YouTube Channel is the go-to channel for all things Cybersecurity. He is the author of Mobilizing the C-Suite: Waging War Against Cyberattacks, released this fall in a revised edition that takes on the growing push to hold executives personally accountable for breaches. His newest book, CTRL+ALT+PWN: The Hacker’s Playbook (And How to Beat It), is written for everyone who has ever reused a password.  We recorded this conversation before Black October. Frank’s arguments hold up remarkably well, but you won’t hear him mention last week’s events in our main conversation. So stay tuned after it ends. Frank and I sat down again for a short follow-up to talk about Black October directly. One more thing. Frank’s author bio promises readers that he is a real human being and not a bot, which makes him an ideal guest for this show. This episode was produced by Jack Lucas Chang

  2. Oct 23

    The Open Internet Was a Choice - With the Mozilla Foundation's Nabiha Syed

    My guest today is Nabiha Syed, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, and one of the leading voices working at the intersection of technology, journalism, civil liberties, and the public interest. Nabiha has spent her career examining questions of information, power, and accountability: who controls information, who has access to it, and how powerful institutions can be held accountable. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Nabiha studied at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar before earning her law degree at Yale Law School, where she co-founded the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. She began her career as a First Amendment and media lawyer, serving as a fellow at The New York Times before joining BuzzFeed as its first newsroom lawyer. She eventually became Vice President and Associate General Counsel, overseeing legal issues involving press freedom, newsgathering, and defamation, including BuzzFeed's successful defense of litigation surrounding the publication of the Steele dossier. In 2019, she joined the founding leadership team of The Markup, an investigative journalism nonprofit dedicated to holding technology companies accountable through data-driven reporting. She subsequently became its CEO, leading an award-winning newsroom whose investigations helped shape public debate, regulatory scrutiny, and litigation concerning the technology industry. In 2024, Nabiha became Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, where she leads efforts to advance a more open, trustworthy, and human-centered technological future, with particular attention to artificial intelligence. Beyond her executive work, Nabiha serves on the boards of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian, the Mellon Foundation, and the Girl Scouts of the USA. Her contributions to journalism and civil liberties have earned numerous honors, including the 2023 NAACP–Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award. Across law, journalism, and philanthropy, Nabiha's career has been defined by a commitment to protecting the public interest in an increasingly technologically mediated world.

  3. Oct 16

    The Humanitarian Case for AI -- With the IRC's Jeannie Annan

    Last week, the International Rescue Committee published an article titled “I’m a Humanitarian Leader Who’s All In on AI. Here’s Why,” written by its Senior Vice President and Chief Research and Innovation Officer, Jeannie Annan. Annan argues that humanitarian organizations have a moral obligation to become some of its most ambitious users, reasoning that the decision not to explore technologies that could help organizations reach more people, more effectively, is itself an ethical choice—with potentially devastating consequences. So what does responsible innovation look like when the stakes are literally life and death? How do we balance the risks of deploying imperfect technologies against the risks of failing to deploy them? And what might the technology industry learn from humanitarian organizations that have spent decades making consequential decisions under conditions of uncertainty, scarcity, and profound human vulnerability? Jeannie Annan is Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation, AI, and People at the International Rescue Committee, one of the world's largest humanitarian organizations, working in around 40 countries. She co-founded and leads the Airbel Impact Lab, IRC's research and innovation engine, where researchers, designers and technologists build, adapt and test solutions for people caught in conflict and disaster, from getting vaccines to children to predicting climate disasters and responding before they strike. She also leads IRC's AI strategy, and recently launched Airbel Ventures, a first-of-its-kind humanitarian impact investing fund. Jeannie began her career running programs in Kosovo, northern Uganda and South Sudan. She holds a PhD in psychology. Her research on preventing violence against women and children has been published in leading academic journals and her work on AI in humanitarian response has been featured in Fast Company and Fortune. This episode was produced by Jack Lucas Chang.

  4. Sep 25

    Math Problems -- What Is a Mathematician For in the Age of AI? With Noah Giansiracusa

    What happens to mathematics when doing mathematics is no longer an exclusively human activity? For years, we've watched artificial intelligence get progressively better at math: solving equations, passing exams, succeeding at mathematical competitions, and generating proofs. But recent developments seem to cross a different kind of threshold. This month, OpenAI announced that an internal AI system had produced a solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem—one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, designed to represent some of the most difficult unsolved questions in mathematics. The announcement has generated excitement, skepticism, and controversy. But it also raises a much larger set of questions. What does it actually mean to do mathematics? Is mathematics about arriving at a correct answer, or understanding why that answer is true? What happens to ideas like discovery, creativity, and authorship when machines can participate in producing new mathematical knowledge? And what does that tell us about artificial intelligence—and about ourselves? My guest today is Dr. Noah Giansiracusa, a math professor at Bentley University and a faculty associate at Harvard, with a PhD in algebraic geometry from Brown University. Noah is cohost of the podcasts Breaking Math and AI in Academia, and his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Scientific American, TIME, Wired, Slate, and The Boston Globe, among others. His first book, How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News, examined the mathematics and technology underlying our information ecosystem. His latest, Robin Hood Math, asks how people from all backgrounds can use mathematics to navigate—and reclaim some control over—a world increasingly governed by algorithms. Today, we're talking about what happens when those algorithms begin doing mathematics themselves.

  5. Sep 18

    Who Controls the Open Web? — with Shane Evans, CEO of Zyte

    What does it mean for the web to be open—and open to whom? For most of the web’s history, we’ve operated on a fairly simple assumption: if you put something on a public website, people could find it, search engines could index it, and information could move relatively freely across the internet. But as AI systems increasingly crawl, extract, learn from, and act on information from the web, that bargain is beginning to change. My guest today is Shane Evans, co-founder and CEO of Zyte, a company that builds technology for extracting data from the public web for use in AI, analytics, and other applications. Shane has been working on the web since the late 1990s. He was a lead engineer at lastminute.com during the dot-com era, later created Scrapy, the widely used open-source web-scraping framework, and founded Zyte in 2010. Today, we’re talking about Zyte’s new research suggesting that the Open Web is increasingly becoming a “Controlled Web”—and what that means for publishers, AI companies, web users, and the future of access to information online.

  6. Sep 11

    Technology in an Emergency — with Watch Duty's Dave Merritt

    My guest today is Dave Merritt, cofounder and Chief Technology Officer of Watch Duty. Founded in 2021, Watch Duty is a nonprofit emergency-information platform that provides real-time, verified intelligence about wildfires and floods across all 50 states. Its network of active and retired firefighters, dispatchers, first responders, and reporters monitors radio traffic, satellites, cameras, weather data, and official sources to give people information they can act on—often in the critical period before traditional emergency communications catch up. Today, Watch Duty serves more than 16 million active users annually. Building technology people rely on during a disaster raises profound questions about trust: How do you move information quickly without sacrificing accuracy? How much uncertainty should you expose to the public? What should we automate—and what decisions still require human judgment? And what happens when a nonprofit technology platform begins functioning as critical public infrastructure? Dave Merritt has spent roughly fifteen years building software and scalable technology systems, and today leads the technical architecture behind Watch Duty.   In our conversation, we talk about what technological infrastructure looks like when wildfire risk has increasingly become part of the background condition of everyday life. When a fire does start, one of the most consequential questions is also one of the simplest: What is actually happening, and what do I need to do? Watch Duty was built to answer that question. Watch Duty is a nonprofit organization that relies on donations and volunteers. To support Watch Duty as a donor or. volunteer, please visit watchdutz.org.

  7. Aug 27

    Social Media’s Big Tobacco Moment — with Yaël Eisenstat

    In the wake of this week’s landmark $18 billion settlement with Meta, we’re bringing you an episode with Yaël Eisenstat, one of the leading thinkers on the issues at the heart of that case — and the many other recent legal challenges that may be fundamentally changing how we think about the power and responsibility of technology platforms. In recent months, courts and juries across the country have been confronting questions that technology policy has wrestled with for years: When should platforms be held responsible for harms facilitated by their products? Where is the line between regulating speech and regulating product design? And what does it look like to build the legal cases that hold Big Tech accountable? And after decades in which Section 230 and other legal protections often prevented these questions from reaching juries at all, are we witnessing the beginning of what we’re calling tech’s Big Tobacco moment? In the episode, I speak with Yaël Eisenstat about the recent cases against Meta and other platforms, the years of research, journalism, whistleblowing, advocacy, and litigation that made this moment possible, and what happens when evidence about the consequences of technological design finally reaches ordinary jurors. We also ask what these cases can—and cannot—accomplish. Can litigation succeed where legislation and regulation have struggled? Can social media actually be redesigned to serve the public interest, or are its harms inseparable from its underlying business model? And as our technological landscape shifts from social media toward increasingly personalized and intimate AI systems, are we building an accountability framework for the last technological era just as the next one arrives? Yaël Eisenstat is the Director of Policy and Impact at the CyberSafety Research Center, where she works on policy approaches to holding online platforms accountable for their effects on public safety and democracy. She previously served as Vice President of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology & Society and, in 2018, joined Facebook as its Global Head of Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising. Before entering technology policy, Eisenstat spent 14 years in public service as an intelligence officer, diplomat, and White House adviser. She has since become a prominent advocate for greater transparency and accountability in the technology industry.

  8. Aug 21

    How to build a protopian future -- With Monika Bielskyte

    My conversation today is with Monika Bielskyte, a futurist, foresight strategist, speculative designer and founder of Protopia Futures. She developed the Protopia World Stack, a science-informed, life-centric foresight methodology. Protopia is an Inclusive future vision based on evolved values, informed by bleeding edge scientific research and supported by advanced technological tools. She was Nike's first Futurist in Residence, is an EY Luminary, and has consulted across entertainment, technology, science, and government – including Disney and Marvel's Black Panther franchise. Her technical expertise spans AI, spatial computing, XR, and synthetic media, with particular attention to how these systems can expand human agency or be weaponized for behavioral manipulation and disinformation. Monika bridges the worlds of entertainment and real future-making by prototyping culturally expansive, socially and environmentally engaged future visions that combine the best of creativity and science, delivering energizing vision, lasting value and resilience to disruptions. What connects all of it is a commitment to futures literacy - the belief that rendering better futures compelling, curiosity-inducing, and inhabitable is the mechanism by which transformation happens.

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About

Technically Human is a podcast about ethics and technology where I ask what it means to be human in the age of tech. Each week, I interview industry leaders, thinkers, writers, and technologists and I ask them about how they understand the relationship between humans and the technologies we create. We discuss how we can build a better vision for technology, one that represents the best of our human values.

Information

  • Creator
    Deb Donig
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    154
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2020 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    The Technically Human Podcast

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