Computer Says Maybe

We have a special episode for you this week: we brought in Hanna Mccloskey and Rubie Clarke from Fearless Futures to talk about the recent announcement from Mark Zuckerberg which signalled, very strongly, that he doesn’t care about marginalised groups on his platforms — or within the company itself.We hear from Rubie and Hanna in the first half of the episode — and they will be back with us over the next couple of weeks for a two-parter on DEI! The rest of the episode will feature Alex Kotran discussing the future of Education.What does the term ‘AI literacy’ invoke for you? A proficiency in AI tooling? For Alex Kotran, founder of The AI Education Project, it’s about preparing students to enter a rapidly changing workforce. It’s not about just learning how to use AI, but understanding how to build durable skills around it, and get on a career path that won’t disappear in five years.Alex has some great perspectives on how AI tools will significantly narrow career paths for young people. This is an urgent issue that spans beyond basic AI literacy. It's about preparing students for a workforce that might look very different in five years to what it does today, and thinking holistically about how issues of tech procurement and efficiency intersect with times of economic downturn, such as a recession.Further Reading:The AI Education ProjectThe AIEDU’s AI Readiness FrameworkAlex Kotran, CEO of The AI Education Project (aiEDU), has nearly a decade of AI expertise and more than a decade of political experience, as a community organizer. He founded aiEDU in 2019 after he discovered that the Akron Public Schools, where his mom has taught for 30+ years, did not offer courses in AI use.Previously, as Director of AI Ethics at H5, Alex partnered with NYU Law School and the National Judicial College to create a judicial training program that is now used around the world. He also established H5's first CSR function, incubating nonprofits like The Future Society, a leading AI governance institute.

Welcome back! Let us know what you think of the show and what you want to see more of in 2025 by writing in here, or rambling into a microphone here.In this episode Alix is joined by Tawana Petty, who shares her experiences coming up as a political community activist in Detroit. Tawana studied the history of radical black movements under Grace Lee Boggs, and has taken these learnings into her work today.Listen to learn about how places like Detroit are used as testing grounds for new ‘innovations’ — especially within marginalised neighbourhoods. Tawana explains in detail how surveillance and safety are often mistakenly conflated, and how we have to work to unlearn this conflation.Further reading:Our Data Bodies project: https://www.odbproject.org/James and Grace Lee Boggs Center: https://www.boggscenter.org/The Detroit Community and Technology Project: https://detroitcommunitytech.org/ who ran the digital stewards programDetroit Digital Justice Coalition: https://alliedmedia.org/projects/detroit-digital-justice-coalitionWe The People of Detroit: https://www.wethepeopleofdetroit.com/Tawana Petty is a mother, social justice organizer, poet, author, and facilitator. She is the founding Executive Director of Petty Propolis, Inc., an artist incubator which teaches poetry, policy literacy and advocacy, and interrogates negative pervasive narratives, in pursuit of racial and environmental justice. Petty is a 2023-2025 Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council, a 2024 Rockwood National LIO Alum, and she currently serves on the CS (computer science) for Detroit Steering Committee. In 2021, Petty was named one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. In 2023, she was honored with the AI Policy Leader in Civil Society Award by the Center for AI and Digital Policy, the Ava Jo Silent Shero Award by the Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion, and with a Racial Justice Leadership Award by the Detroit People's Platform. In 2024, Petty was listed on Business Insider’s AI Power List for Policy and Ethics.

We’re wrapped for the year, and will be back on the 10th of Jan. In the meantime, listen to Alix, Prathm, and Georgia discuss their biggest learnings from the pod this year from some of their favourite episodes.**We want to hear from YOU about the podcast — what do you want to hear more of in 2025? Share your ideas with us here: https://tally.so/r/3E860B**Or if you’d rather ramble into a microphone (just like we do…) use this link instead!We pull out clips from the following episodes:The Age of Noise w/ Eryk SalvaggioThe Happy Few: Open Source AI pt1Big Dirty Data Centres w/ Boxi Wu and Jenna RuddockUS Election Special w/ Spencer OvertonChasing Away Sidewalk Labs w/ Bianca WylieThe Human in the LoopThe Stories we Tell Ourselves About AIFurther reading:Learn more about what ex TikTok moderator Mojez has been up to this year via this BBC TikTok

Google has finally been judged to be a monopoly by a federal court — while this was strikingly obvious already, what does this judgement mean? Is this too little too late?This week Alix and Prathm were joined by Michelle Meagher, an antitrust lawyer who shared a brief history of how antitrust started as a tool for governments to stop the consolidation of corporate power, and over time has morphed to focus on issues of competition and consumer protection — which has allowed monopolies to thrive.Michelle discusses the details and her thinking on the ongoing cases against Google, and more generally on how monopolies are basically like a big octopus arm-wrestling itself.Further reading:US Said to Consider a Breakup of Google to Address Search Monopoly — NY TimesGoogle’s second antitrust suit brought by US begins, over online ads — GuardianBig Tech on Trial — Matt StollerHow the EU’s DMA is changing Big Tech — The VergeUK set to clear Microsoft’s deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard — GuardianSign up to the Computer Says Maybe newsletter to get invites to our events and receive other juicy resources straight to your inboxMichelle is a competition lawyer and co-founder of the Balanced Economy Project, Europe’s first anti-monopoly organisation. She is author of Competition is Killing Us: How Big Business is Harming Our Society and Planet - and What to Do About It (Penguin, 2020), a Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year. She is a Senior Policy Fellow at the University College London Centre for Law, Economics and Society. She is a Senior Fellow working on Monopoly and Corporate Governance at the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO).

What happens if you ask a generative AI image model to show you what Picasso’s work would have looked like if he lived in Japan in the 16th century? Would it produce something totally new, or just mash together stereotypical aesthetics from Picasso’s work, and 16th century Japan?This week, Alix interviewed Eryk Salvaggio, who shares his ideas around how we are moving away from ‘the age of information’ and into an age of noise, where we’ve progressed so far into a paradigm of easy and frictionless information sharing, that information has transformed into an overwhelming wall of noise.So if everything is just noise, what do we filter out and keep in — and what systems do we use to do that?Further reading:Visit Eryk’s WebsiteCybernetic Forests — Eryk’s newsletter on tech and cultureOur upcoming event: Insight Session: The politics, power, and responsibility of AI procurement with Bianca WylieOur newsletter, which shares invites to events like the above, and other interesting bitsEryk Salvaggio has been making tech-critical art since the dawn of the Internet. Now he’s a blend of artist, tech policy researcher, and writer focused on a critical approach to AI. He is the Emerging Technologies Research Advisor at the Siegel Family Endowment, an instructor in Responsible AI at Elisava Barcelona School of Design, a researcher at the metaLab (at) Harvard University’s AI Pedagogy Project, one of the top contributors to Tech Policy Press, and an artist whose work has been shown at festivals including SXSW, DEFCON, and Unsound.

In part two of our episode on open source AI, we delve deeper into we can use openness and participation for sustainable AI governance. It’s clear that everyone agrees that things like the proliferation of harmful content is a huge risk — but what we cannot seem to agree on is how to eliminate this risk.Alix is joined again by Mark Surman, and this time they both take a closer look at the work Audrey Tang did as Taiwan’s first digital minister, where she successfully built and implemented a participatory framework that allowed the people of Taiwan to directly inform AI policy.We also hear more from Merouane Debbah, who built the first LLM trained in Arabic, and highlights the importance of developing AI systems that don’t follow rigid western benchmarks.Mark Surman has spent three decades building a better internet, from the advent of the web to the rise of artificial intelligence. As President of Mozilla, a global nonprofit backed technology company that does everything from making Firefox to advocating for a more open, equitable internet, Mark’s current focus is ensuring the various Mozilla organizations work in concert to make trustworthy AI a reality. Mark led the creation of Mozilla.ai (a commercial AI R+D lab) and Mozilla Ventures (an impact venture fund with a strong focus on AI). Before joining Mozilla, Mark spent 15 years leading organizations and projects that promoted the use of the internet and open source as tools for social and economic development.More about our guests:Audrey Tang, Cyber Ambassador of Taiwan, served as Taiwan’s 1st digital minister (2016-2024) and the world’s 1st nonbinary cabinet minister. Tang played a crucial role in shaping g0v (gov-zero), one of the most prominent civic tech movements worldwide. In 2014, Tang helped broadcast the demands of Sunflower Movement activists, and worked to resolve conflicts during a three-week occupation of Taiwan’s legislature. Tang became a reverse mentor to the minister in charge of digital participation, before assuming the role in 2016 after the government changed hands. Tang helped develop participatory democracy platforms such as vTaiwan and Join, bringing civic innovation into the public sector through initiatives like the Presidential Hackathon and Ideathon.Sayash Kapoor is a Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow in the University Center for Human Values and a computer science Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. He is a coauthor of AI Snake Oil, a book that provides a critical analysis of artificial intelligence, separating the hype from the true advances. His research examines the societal impacts of AI, with a focus on reproducibility, transparency, and accountability in AI systems. He was included in TIME Magazine’s inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in AI.Mérouane Debbah is a researcher, educator and technology entrepreneur. He has founded several public and industrial research centers, start-ups and held executive positions in ICT companies. He is professor at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, and founding director of the Khalifa University 6G Research Center. He has been working at the interface of AI and telecommunication and pioneered in 2021 the development of NOOR, the first Arabic LLM.Further reading & resourcesPolis — a real-time participation platformRecursive Public by vTaiwanNoor — the first LLM trained on the Arabic languageFalcon FoundationBuy AI Snake Oil by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan

In the context of AI, what do we mean when we say ‘open source’? An AI model is not something you can straightforwardly open up like a piece of software; there are huge technical and social considerations to be made.Is it risky to open-source highly capable foundation models? What guardrails do we need to think about when it comes to the proliferation of harmful content? And, can you really call it ‘open’ if the barrier for accessing compute is so high? Is model alignment really the only thing we have to protect us?In this two-parter, Alix is joined by Mozilla president Mark Surman to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of open and closed models. Our guests are Alondra Nelson, Merouane Debbah, Audrey Tang, and Sayash Kapoor.Listen to learn about the early years of the free software movement, the ecosystem lock-in of the closed-source environment, and what kinds of things are possible with a more open approach to AI.Mark Surman has spent three decades building a better internet, from the advent of the web to the rise of artificial intelligence. As President of Mozilla, a global nonprofit backed technology company that does everything from making Firefox to advocating for a more open, equitable internet, Mark’s current focus is ensuring the various Mozilla organizations work in concert to make trustworthy AI a reality. Mark led the creation of Mozilla.ai (a commercial AI R+D lab) and Mozilla Ventures (an impact venture fund with a strong focus on AI). Before joining Mozilla, Mark spent 15 years leading organizations and projects that promoted the use of the internet and open source as tools for social and economic development.More about our guests:Audrey Tang, Cyber Ambassador of Taiwan, served as Taiwan’s 1st digital minister (2016-2024) and the world’s 1st nonbinary cabinet minister. Tang played a crucial role in shaping g0v (gov-zero), one of the most prominent civic tech movements worldwide. In 2014, Tang helped broadcast the demands of Sunflower Movement activists, and worked to resolve conflicts during a three-week occupation of Taiwan’s legislature. Tang became a reverse mentor to the minister in charge of digital participation, before assuming the role in 2016 after the government changed hands. Tang helped develop participatory democracy platforms such as vTaiwan and Join, bringing civic innovation into the public sector through initiatives like the Presidential Hackathon and Ideathon.Alondra Nelson is s scholar of the intersections of science, technology, policy, and society, and the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent research center in Princeton, New Jersey. Dr. Nelson was formerly deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). In this role, she spearheaded the development of the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, and was the first African American and first woman of color to lead US science and technology policy.Sayash Kapoor is a Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow in the University Center for Human Values and a computer science Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. He is a coauthor of AI Snake Oil, a book that provides a critical analysis of artificial intelligence, separating the hype from the true advances. His research examines the societal impacts of AI, with a focus on reproducibility, transparency, and accountability in AI systems. He was included in TIME Magazine’s inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in AI.Mérouane Debbah is a researcher, educator and technology entrepreneur. He has founded several public and industrial research centers, start-ups and held executive positions in ICT companies. He is professor at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, and founding director of the Khalifa University 6G Research Center. He has been working at the interface of AI and telecommunication and pioneered in 2021 the development of NOOR, the first Arabic LLM.Further reading & resourcesPolis — a real-time participation platformRecursive Public by vTaiwanNoor — the first LLM trained on the Arabic languageFalcon FoundationBuy AI Snake Oil by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan

This week Alix was joined by Kevin De Liban, who just launched Techntonic Justice, an organisation designed to support and fight for those harmed by AI systems.In this episode Kevin describes his experiences litigating on behalf of people in Arkansas who found their in-home care hours cut aggressively by an algorithm administered by the state. This is a story about taking care away from individuals in the name of ‘efficiency’, and the particular levers for justice that Kevin and his team managed to take advantage of to eventually ban the use of this algorithm in Arkansas.CW: This episode contains descriptions of people being denied care and left in undignified situations at around 08.17- 08.40 and 27.12-28.07Further reading & resources:Techtonic JusticeKevin De Liban is the founder of Techtonic Justice, and the Director of Advocacy at Legal Aid of Arkansas, nurturing multi-dimensional efforts to improve the lives of low-income Arkansans in matters of health, workers' rights, safety net benefits, housing, consumer rights, and domestic violence. With Legal Aid, he has led a successful litigation campaign in federal and state courts challenging Arkansas's use of an algorithm to cut vital Medicaid home-care benefits to individuals who have disabilities or are elderly.

In a reflective post-election discussion, the hosts tackle the role of tech giants like Elon Musk in shaping political dynamics. They advocate for a politics rooted in love and empathy, critiquing current misanthropic trends. The conversation stretches to polling inaccuracies and the impact of social media on young male voters, highlighting shifts in political engagement. Furthermore, they stress the necessity for the left to craft compelling narratives, while addressing the implications of big tech in the new political landscape.

For this pre-election special, Prathm spoke with law professor Spencer Overton about how this election has — and hasn’t — be impacted by AI systems. Misinformation and deepfakes appear to be top of the agenda for a lot politicians and commentators, but there’s a lot more to think about…Spencer discusses the USA’s transition into a multiracial democracy, and describes the ongoing cultural anxiety that comes with that — and how that filters down into the politicisation of AI tools, both as fuel for moral panics, as well as being used to suppress voters of colour.Further reading:Artificial Intelligence for Electoral Management | International IDEAOvercoming Racial Harms to Democracy from Artificial Intelligence by Spencer Overton :: SSRNAI’s impact on elections is being overblown | MIT Technology ReviewEffects of Shelby County v. Holder on the Voting Rights Act | Brennan Center for JusticeSpencer Overton is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor at GW Law School. As the Director of the Multiracial Democracy Project at the GW Equity Institute, he focuses on producing and supporting research that grapples with challenges to a well-functioning multiracial democracy. He is currently working on research projects related to the regulation of AI to facilitate a well-functioning multiracial democracy and the implications of alternative voting systems for multiracial democracy.