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Welcome to Radical A.I., a podcast about radical ideas, radical people and radical stories at the intersection of ethics and artificial intelligence. We are your hosts, Dylan and Gests, just as a reminder for all of our episodes.

While we love interviewing people who fall far from the norm and interrogating radical ideas, we do not necessarily endorse the views of our guests on this show.

In this episode, we interview Karen Hao the artificial intelligence reporter for the M.I.T. Technology Review, Karen, covers the ethics and social impacts of technology, as well as its applications for social good. She also writes the AEI newsletter. The Algorithm, which thoughtfully examines the fields. Latest news and research. Previously, Karen was a reporter and data scientist at Quartz and an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Google X.

A few of the topics that we cover in this interview include How can journalism bridge the gap between technology and public policy? How do we effectively explain complex A.I. systems to policymakers? How are the fields of journalism and A.I. surprisingly similar? And how do we measure truth in journalism? It is our pleasure to share with you all this interview with Karen Howe.

Well, Karen, first, we just want to welcome you to the show and thank you for taking the time today to come and talk with us. Thank you so much for having me. And why don't you start us off by telling us a little bit more about you and not just as a researcher, but in life. And really, what makes you tick?

A little bit about me?

Well, I grew up in New Jersey and lived a very suburban childhood.

So I think I am naturally kind of introverted. And I like many of the activities that I do in my free time, involve small groups of people and lots of just reflection and quiet time.

I was I'm just a very philosophical person. So I think the things that make me take are like big hairy questions that I like to just sit and think about or talk with my friends about for long periods of time about like why is society the way that it is? How can we make it better? Is it possible to make it better? What kinds of systems should we be thinking about constructing to facilitate higher quality of life among human beings? So yeah, I that I guess like that's my personal background. And then in my actual day job, I am the senior artificial intelligence reporter at M.I.T. Technology Review. And one thing that I really love about my job is the fact that I get to A.I. is just such an expansive topic and it is actually quite a philosophical topic. And so I found my happy place and getting to think about these questions and also get paid for it.

One thing that I love about your journalism is.

It seems to be able to push some buttons like you really get to the heart of some matters. And I'm wondering. If you could just like talk about how you view your role as a journalist in the A.I. space and especially the A.I. ethics space.

Yeah, well, one of the things that inspired me to go into journalism in the first place, because so I actually studied mechanical engineering in college and journalism was a bit of a swerve for me. But the reason why it really attracted me is because I really care a lot about educating people about technology and the way that technology is shaping society in a way that prepares them, but also challenging the way that technology is made or created today and the way that tech companies operate today.

And I see my role as a person who bridges the conversations between like the Connors's that happen in ESA versus D.C.. I suppose it's like the shorthand way of saying it.

But like I think oftentimes when you're hearing conversations, it's there's like two different spheres of conversation that happen.

It's like the ones among technologists just talking about the technical details of how something is made and the ones among policymakers who don't necessarily always understand how technology works. And I just kind of mystified by it all. And my personal theory of change is that technology is a very powerful force, but neither for good nor for evil. It's very much based on the way that we use it and the way that we allow it to shape our lives.

And so in order to have it actually benefit lots of people, you need to have policymakers, regulators, citizens that are holding it accountable and holding companies who are creating it accountable to the things that we the outcomes that we actually want to see. And so I think that's probably why I am willing to kind of just say things the way that I feel they should be said in in when I cover ethics, because I just think it's so important to get it right, because it is it moves really fast. And it it the scale is so big that if you don't get it right, it's kind of hard to turn the ship around.

And one of the one of my favorite articles of yours is the Amazon is the invisible backbone of ISIS immigration crackdown. Article, which I just thought was an incredibly powerful piece. And it also, as you said, challenges some some assumptions depending on where you're sitting. But it connects the political to the technological.

And based on my experience on Twitter and other places that can kind of that can cause some blowback sometimes. And I'm wondering if you've experienced that some reactions to your work that you may not have been expecting.

Yeah, totally. I get blowback, actually.

I get less blowback than I expect. Which is probably a good thing.

One thing that's really amazing about I think my T technology review readers is the.

Caliber of engagement from readers, which is not necessarily the case of other places that I've worked at before, where the blowback is much more superficial and much more vitriolic. But a tech review most of the time when people are pushing back on my stuff, they actually have like really legitimate critiques that I think are important for me to read and understand and respond to. And I find it helpful when I receive these types of comments, too. It's a way for me to get keep a pulse on how people are thinking about things and what are like the common arguments against my arguments so that I can refine my own and put out to do better work to strengthen my position, essentially based off of your history in journalism.

And now that you've really started to bring some of these stories to light, what is the relationship and really the intersection between A.I. really A.I. ethics and storytelling and how can they help each other out?

I think ethics is all about storytelling and that.

You need a wall.

I guess this goes back to another theory or philosophy of mine, which is I think everything fundamentally is storytelling. In order to have an idea gained traction. You have to build a narrative around it and everything that we understand as people and the way that we make sense.

The world is all through narratives as well. Whether that's happens consciously or subconsciously. I just firmly believe, like that's how we understand the world is through narrative.

So if you in in the epic space, if you are trying to have a particular idea or value system, take hold or if you're if you're trying to communicate a value system.

It's all about storytelling in the right way. Like picking the right characters to really bring to life the ideas that you're. You're trying to communicate. I don't know if that makes sense, but but yeah, like I think storytelling is just core to any kind of communication. And with ethics, communication is so crucial that storytelling is inherently just part of that.

Absolutely. And this based on my own experience, I guess storytelling is also how we shape the world and how we shape who we are. And so for me, why I started getting into justice work in general was a very particular experience I had in India, added in a resettlement colony. And I'm wondering for you if there was a particular Catalyst's moment that set you on this path, not ethics in particular.

But I think the Catalist moment that really made me realize how important storytelling is.

I was when I was at the first company I ever worked out. It was a startup in San Francisco that had it was actually the first started to spin out of Google X.

And I was there as an engineer and in a sort of environment, you get to wear lots of different hats and you're always trying to like I was technically an engineer, but then I was like writing blog posts and like managing the social media and like doing all this stuff.

And I think one of the things that really struck me was the CEO was such an amazing storyteller that the founder, CEO, he just like had such a way with communicating what the startup was about that he could raise like tons of money and get people to care about it and then get people to work for him and all these things.

And at the same time, also, like me managing the social media accounts, managing the blog and all of that made me also realize how important that work was like without that work. No one cares what you're building because they can't relate to it. They don't know about it and they won't therefore attach value to it. And so that was like a pivotal moment for me in realizing, oh, actually, like I think if I really want to make an impact on the world, maybe I should mean more into the storytelling aspect of things, because that is what actually changes hearts.

Now that we've sufficiently all said storytelling probably 100 times in the last fifteen minutes, I've got to say a lot more time.

Do you have a favorite story that you have told or come across while you've been part of this word?

I don't know. It's hard to pick like a favorite, but I think a story that I am particularly proud of is I did this interactive in, I think, October of last year that took me over or almost a year to put together.

But it's about the criminal justice system and algorithmic bias through through this particular case study of algorithms used in the criminal justice system.

And for me, it was kind of like the epitome of a lot of the things that I care about, like synthesising how technical details can then lead to impacts on people's lives and not just the individual, but like create systemic injustices. And it was doing it in an engaging way that allowed people to kind of work through pretty complicated topics like algorithmic bias is a thing that has become like really hot these days. But it's there's a lot of nuance behind it.

And I was proud of actually doing that piece and giving people a way into this complexity and into understanding, like all of the ways that different things in the system work together.

So I also coming from a technical computer science background and something that I've been really passionate in my work is finding a way to take really technical ideas, especially ones like machine learning and artificial intelligence and trying to make them translatable to people who don't have that technical background. I know that face off of looking at some of the projects you've done on your website. You have also done work in this space as well. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about how that's translated. And then also what motivated you to do that?

So I think I actually. So I haven't been in a for very long. Like, I've only been covering it for one and a half years. And before that I was not covering at all or following the space. And that actually came to my advantage when I first started because I was coming to it with a technical backgrounds, but not in with the expertise. And so I had like a completely beginners mind in understanding the subject and when. So there's two pieces that I've that I've done that have been like the most resonant to audiences. And they were just flowcharts like me drawing out what different concept concepts meant. And I actually drew those like only a month into covering the space as a way for me to help understand what I was about to get myself into, essentially.

And in that way, I still had the experience of, like, my own confusion to help guide me in thinking, like, how do I actually explain this to someone else who is maybe just a month behind and trying to enter this as well.

So so it was kind of actually by accident that I was able to strike the right balance between between communicating enough of the technical detail, but also being helping, like the lay person understand things. Yeah. So that.

It's funny. It's kind of funny. Like how something that you spend very little time on end up being like beeping that blows up. But that's kind of like the back story behind those two articles.

One of the things I think is particularly powerful and also unique in a lot of ways about your journalism is that you are unafraid to bring in questions of race and gender and identity. And I'm curious about how you navigate your own identity in this space.

Yeah, well, I yeah. So I think one of the reasons why bring race and identity into my work all the time is because the these are things that I think about constantly, like as an Asian woman.

When I was in tech there, I was one of a few women, when I'm in journalism, I'm one of the few Asians.

So like I'm always thinking about, like it's just part of my day to day experience that like this my identity just.

It is I don't know, it's it's like pervasive and like everything that I do. And so that that's kind of. I don't know. I don't know if I even subconsciously or I don't. I don't know if I consciously put this into my work. I think it's subconscious because it is my own lived experience. And so it.

In the end, this is, I guess, also informs a lot of like how I think about A.I. because I guess one of the conversations that's now really happening in A.I. is like the fact that people who are building it their own identities automatically are embedded in the work that they do as well.

And for me, that's kind of like an obvious thing, because I guess maybe like growing up as someone who always had the outsider's perspective, I was like dull, like as the outsider.

Of course, I'm going to think differently from you and make different things from you. And so I guess that's one of the things that I also care about highlighting a lot when I write about A.I. is the importance of people recognizing that we have identities that we bring into our work. One of the things that also like I think about a lot is there's actually a lot of parallel between journalism and A.I. in that like journalism for a very long time was a pretty white male dominated field.

And the overarching narrative of journalism was that you were objective and like I have never believed this myth. Like, I don't think anyone can be objective and seeing a I kind of like the field starting to grapple with the same questions of like, oh, we thought algorithms were objective and we thought, like, the people who were building it were just writing objective code is kind of entertaining to me.

Like, look, journalists kind of went through this and we're the journalism industry is still kind of like messed up and we're still trying to figure things out. But like now the industry is going through this and like at some hopefully some day people will realize that there's no such thing as objectivity and everything.

Everything that you produce as a human is processed through. You have lived experience.

What do you think that the role that. Objectivity and this idea that things are neutral can play in harmful consequences on society, both in journalism and the spread of misinformation, for example, and A.I. and the spread of technologies that we think are neutral but are actually harming people. Yeah.

I think I mean, the harmful, but in both instances, I think the harmful thing is that.

If you if people genuinely believe in, like, the objectivity myth, you end up not scrutinizing things as much.

So like in journalism, I people talk about how winners always get to write history.

And if you if you actually believed that, like, the record of a particular event were objective, you wouldn't scrutinize all the gaps in it. You wouldn't look to see what's missing or how things are portrayed. I falsely perhaps like and I think that one is like journalists are always about like finding truth or whatever, like truth as consensus formation, it's it's not there's no, like, inherent universal truth that we're all like trying to, like, wipe the dusty windshield off to peer into.

It's about like how I guess like the majority of people agree on like a particular sequence of events or whatever. So is that's journalism. And then with a I it's the same thing.

Like if you believe an algorithm is objective, you don't scrutinize or challenge its decisions when they're made.

And like in the criminal justice example, this is actually happening a lot where a lot of precincts are starting to turn to these tools believing that it is more objective than a human judge, which it's not really.

It's just automating a particular perspective. So whereas a judge might have different feelings on different days that affect their decisions, the algorithm like what whoever made the algorithm, that perspective at that moment is like fossilized. And then it just keeps automating that particular perspective again and again. And whereas you as a defendant might understand how to challenge a human judge and understand that they are subjective and that there is like room for disagreement, you might not have the same transparency into an algorithm and might not know how to actually challenge its decision if you wanted to.

So you lose that sense of like agency and transparency in the process. So I think that's how it harms people. Like the narrative of objectivity is how that harms peoples, is that you just lose the ability to actually shape things or disagree with things.

So we're living in an era where.

Also out in the media world, there's this narrative that perhaps we're living in a post truth world or we're inundated with fake news. And I'm wondering because, you know, I'm a philosophy nerd. This concept of truth is really interesting to me. And I'm wondering if you could address that critique that we're living in a post truth world.

So, again, like if in if there were such a thing as a post truth world, that means that there was also at one point a thing where truth existed, which is not true. Like what what is actually happened is before there were a lot more gatekeepers who got to say what they wanted about like what was happening in the world.

Journalists included, like journalism is like the media is like a huge gatekeeper. And there used to be.

Much more stringent. There, who got. Who got access to media companies was like a whole thing. And the gatekeepers were a lot less diverse. And therefore there was this perception that there was a truth because most people agreed with one another. And now what's happening is there's more of a democratic. Hopefully more democracy online. There's like more people that are writing opinions that they're putting on social media or like on their blogs or whatever. There's more like content and more noise. And suddenly it feels like like we can't have consensus on anything anymore.

But it's it's just because there's more diversity, more diverse voices that are being elevated into the public sphere. And there are less of these gatekeeping mechanisms that we traditionally had. They've been replaced by new ones.

But it just creates this effect of like there's so much more. Yeah, there's just like so many more opinions out in the open that used to exist but just didn't have access to those platforms.

And actually on that exact note of diverse voices in the public sphere, part of this project of the radical A.I. podcasts is to try to uplift those diverse voices and make them a little bit more normalized and well known. So it would be great for us if you could actually tell us a little bit about, first, what you think the word radical means to you and then how you situate yourself in that definition of radical with the work that you do.

I think radical to me is always questioning your assumptions.

Yeah, and.

And I think I'm trying to find examples of how I do this in my professional life. I do this a lot in my personal life.

So maybe I'll just, like, draw a metaphor or whatever from my personal life. But like, one thing that I as at the age I am at, like all my friends are getting married and like, one of the things that I love doing is just like questioning why marriage as a as an institution exists.

And like, why do people still cheat? Like, why is it that the man always still proposes to the woman in most in most straight marriages? And like, why is it that, like, the bride is the one that walks down the aisle? And then, like, she has her bridesmaids and she's the only one that wears the engagement ring.

And like for me, radical is like not just taking things that I've always been to to be like true or like not always just accepting what the past is to be like the way forward and ends like starting from scratch, like. Like what? What does marriage actually mean?

If you want to, like, have some kind of nice ritual to signify a bond between you and your partner, like, does it actually require like a forty thousand dollars ceremony where you wear a white gown and like, do all these things no luck.

And I think in my work, I guess like what I'm always thinking about is.

I got, I guess, an example of how our medical and my job is like. We also have, for example, a really entrenched narrative that technical people do technical things and human needs.

People do like human new things. And if you're good at one, you can't be good at the other. And like it. And it starts really young where like you're told as a kid. Like, oh, you're a math kid. Or like you're an English kid.

And like I. So I also speak Mandarin. And this is also in Mandarin language where people will ask you, oh, like, are you humanities person or a tech person when they're trying to get to know you better and, like, learn about your career. And that the way that I am, I guess I approach that narrative radically, is to just refer to it like I think it's total bogus that you can't be both. And I try to occupy that space of both. And constantly challenge the fact that you can't. Do that.

Yeah. That was like a. Goodbye bottom, like my philosophy on marriage. I had my philosophy on interdisciplinarity.

But, you know, hey, that was I mean, that was our real goal was to get your philosophy on marriage.

So I bet back back in the day, back in my my college days, years ago, I wanted to be an aspiring I was an aspiring journalist. Not great at my job. There's a reason why I didn't end up doing that. But I think there are a lot of other people that really look up to you in the work that you're doing in a high ethics and in journalism.

And I'm wondering if you had one other piece of advice or something that you would like to share with those folks or maybe just pretend that I'm one of those folks back in my college days.

I think the advice that this this has nothing to that.

I but I think just in general, what if my guiding philosophies in life is to always be willing to experiment and not be afraid of being a beginner?

Because like, I took like a very Securitas path to where I am now, where I studied engineering and then I was in software. And then I was a data scientist for awhile and then a journalist. And all of that led me to where I am today. But I couldn't have gotten here. I don't think if I had been willing to just, like, blow everything up and start again.

And maybe that's it. That's a broader metaphor for how we should how our world should be or something.

I don't know.

But just I guess that's my advice for how how I would suggest people to navigate their lives is is to be willing to reset and try something new.

Maybe it's a good piece of advice for marriage as well. Who knows?

Blow it all up and start.

Well, Karen, thank you so much for coming on the show today. For our listeners, if there is a place that they could go to engage with some of the awesome visualizations and stories that you've worked on. Where's the best place for them to do that?

You can go to my Web site at Karran D d as in dog. How dot com. You can also follow me on Twitter at Underscore. Karen, how great.

Thank you so much, Karen. Thank you.

We want to thank Karen Howe again for coming on the show today and for a wonderful conversation. I'm feeling pretty jazzed after our conversation. Just how are you feeling?

Yeah, I'm feeling really similar. I was actually going to use the word excited. I just absolutely love all the projects that Karen is doing. And even just looking at her Web site briefly. It just makes me so stoked to see this kind of work happening. I'm really, really passionate about trying to explain technical and really like complex AI and machine learning systems to people who don't come from a technical or coding background. And she does it in such a cool way. She just does such a great job of combining media and journalism and storytelling and giving these honestly these topics that are not really fun to dig into. She makes them just so interesting and entertaining to any kind of audience. And I think that is such an awesome superpower. So I am a very big fan of her work.

I just I think it's really inspirational for us to listen to what Karen's doing, because in a way, that's the work that we're trying to do with this radically AI podcast, which is to take these complex ideas and systems and narratives of artificial intelligence and to try to boil it down into these ethical principles and to figure out, you know, what do we do with this soup of ethics that we've been given and how do we how do we really make it accessible to folks from all sorts of backgrounds and not just the people from the hypertechnical areas?

And as someone who does not come from a technical background, I really appreciated Karen's take on how she does her job as a journalist. And I just had so much respect for both her and for the M.I.T. technology review, for the journalism that they're continuing to do at that intersection between ethics and, well, specifically about race and gender and policy and politics and bringing all that together with in the A.I. sphere. I just think they're doing an incredible job. It was great to hear from the other side of the curtain because I've read some of Karen's articles before about how she thinks about her task as a journalist. And specifically, I mean, something I think a lot about in moral philosophy is this concept of truth. And her take on truth being consensus information.

I just find that fascinating because I don't know if everyone out in the journalistic sphere would agree.

And I'm curious if we get another journalist on the show to to ask and see if we get different concepts of truth and the role of journalism in regards to truth. I think the other takeaway that I had was Karen's reflection on technology being neither good nor evil, but more that moral element is in how it's used and how it's promoted and the social system that it's systems that it's embedded in.

And of course, we'll give more of a debrief in our monthly mini soad. But in the meantime, we want to hear from you. And this week, we have a question that was inspired by our colleague Karen, who we just interviewed. What do you think the role of journalism is in promoting and reporting on ethics? Please share your thoughts with us on Twitter or via e-mail. And for more information on today's show, please visit the episode page at Radical A I dot org.

If you enjoyed this episode, we invite you to subscribe rate and review the show on iTunes or your favorite pod catcher. Join our conversation on Twitter at radical A.I. Pod.

And as always, say radical.

If you had any, I think, super.

Fairness and accountability, ethics and transparency.

But I'd put I'd put onions, soup in truth, Sue, Sue.

Yeah, possibly some carrots. Yeah.

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