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. 2024-10-25

    Debugging Division: The Architecture of Bridge-Building Social Media

    Today we are bringing you a conversation featuring one technologist who is rethinking and reshaping social media—to build platforms that spark empathy and joy, not division and hate. Vardon Hamdiu is the co-founder and head of Sparkable, a young nonprofit organization that builds a social media platform aimed at bridging divides. Growing up immersed in diverse cultures, Vardon has always been a bridge-builder who navigates between worlds. His family history has exposed him to the devastating consequences of communication breakdowns between ethnic communities and the outbreak of war. These experiences have profoundly shaped his understanding of the importance of empathy and social cohesion. Over the past decade, Vardon has worked on the communications team of a Swiss President, studied to become a teacher, spent an exchange semester in South Africa, and engaged with refugees facing often traumatic circumstances. These experiences made him acutely aware of the enormous disconnect between the information we consume online and the lived realities of many people around the globe. He became deeply passionate about exploring why today’s social media platforms are often dysfunctional and how these powerful systems, which govern our collective attention, could be constructed differently. Driven by this vision, he made the pivotal decision to quit his job, drop out of his studies, and launch Sparkable, aiming to foster a healthier online environment.

  2. 2024-10-11

    Game On, Hate Off: Navigating the Virtual Frontier

    In this week's episode of the show, I speak with Daniel Kelley about the culture of online gaming, and the unique set of challenges in the gaming space, related to hate, harassment, and extremism. We talk about the possibilities, and limitations, of regulating that space, and what the landscape of gaming might foretell about the future of increasingly online lives that we live, as more and more of our social interactions take place virtually. We talk about how to make those spaces safer and more inclusive, and whether moderation is the right tack to take in developing that more inclusive future, as well as what other strategies for cultivating such spaces might be possible.   Daniel Kelley is the Director of Strategy and Operations of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center for Technology and Society (CTS). CTS works through research and advocacy to fight for justice and fair treatment for all in digital social spaces from social media to online games and beyond. For the last five years, Daniel has been the lead author of the first nationally representative survey of hate, harassment, and positive social experiences in online games. He is also the co-author of the Disruption and Harms in Online Games Framework, a resource to define harms in online multiplayer games together with members of the game industry coalition the Fair Play Alliance. He also leads CTS’ tech accountability research efforts, such as its Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial Report Card, which looks at ways to create research-grounded advocacy products to inform the public about the nature of hate and harassment online and to hold tech companies accountable.

  3. 2024-10-04

    Art, Tech, Self: Untangling the Human Algorithm

    Hi Technically Human listeners! Welcome back to another episode of the show. Today I'm sitting down with Alva Noë. We talk about his new book, The Entanglement, and the relationship between technology, philosophy, and art. In The Entanglement, Professor Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature. Neither biology, cognitive science, nor AI can tell a complete story of us, and we can no more pin ourselves down than we can fix or settle on the meaning of an artwork. Even more, art and philosophy are the means to set ourselves free, at least to some degree, from convention, habit, technology, culture, and even biology. Dr. Alva Noë is a philosopher of mind whose research and teaching focus is perception and consciousness, and the philosophy of art. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); Varieties of Presence (Harvard, 2012); Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2015), Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (Oxford, 2019) and, most recently, Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (Oxford 2021).  He holds a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Columbia University; a Bachelors of Philosophy. from University of Oxford;  and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He teaches in the philosophy department of UC Berkeley.

  4. 2024-09-27

    The QWERTY Keyboard and the Chinese Computer

    In this episode of the show, I speak with Dr. Thomas Mullaney about his new book, The Chinese Computer. In the book, Dr. Mullaney outlines the history and evolution of Chinese language computing technology, and explores how the technology of the QWERTY keyboard changed this history of computing. We talk about how the structure of language has shaped the history of digital technologies, and Dr. Mullaney explains how China and the non-Western world—because of the “hypographic” technologies they had to invent in order to join the personal computing revolution— helps us understand the relationship between the human mind and the technologies it creates. Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy, at Stanford University. He is also the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow.  He is the author or lead editor of 7 books, including The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, and The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing.  His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University.

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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.

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