18 Pieces of Advice from the Guests of Our First 18 Interviews
The Radical AI Podcast launched on April 10th, 2020 as a pipedream of two PhD students in the middle of the US State of Colorado looking to create a space of collaboration, inclusivity, and vision for what AI ethics could look like outside of traditional narratives. In the three months since that launch the pipedream has evolved into an organization, platform, and podcast that has reached thousands around the world and has strived to fulfill its mission to actively define what ‘Radical AI’ can look like by centering people, ideas, and stories that often get left out of the conversation. The core tenets that have thus far grounded the project have been liberation, justice, and curiosity.
We (Dylan and Jess) are so grateful to this great community for your support, trust, challenge, and love during these first three months. As students, this has been a journey of humility, discernment of our individual and collective roles in a space that existed long before we arrived, and personal and professional growth. We cannot say enough about the kindness our listeners, mentors, and colleagues have shown us during the short time we have been around.
Every episode we ask our guests for advice that they might share with the greater community. In the spirit of curiosity and as a thank you to the time and energy our listeners, guests, and community members have shown to us, we wanted to (at the invitation of friend of the show Emily M. Bender) compile those pieces of advice in one blogpost to celebrate all we have learned and all that we have been a part of these three whirlwind months.
This blogpost is the beginning of a larger project: a “What Next?” page on the website that acts as a living document in which we will update monthly the latest advice guests of the show have given during episodes. Stay tuned for the official launch of that page. For now, please join us in reflecting on the following pieces of advice that have emerged in our first 18 interviews. We hope they spurn on your own sense of liberation, justice, and curiosity and nourish you as they have nourished us.
With love, gratitude, and joy, Happy Three Months of The Radical AI Podcast,
Dylan Doyle-Burke & Jessie J. Smith
Note: As we discuss in the Accompanying Minisode: “Advice, Love, and Gratitude: Happy Three Months From Radical AI”, the guests included below do not include episodes we produced in partnership with other organizations. Also, because of space restrictions and readability, we have only been able to include one piece of advice per guest. If you would like to hear more of the incredible advice our guests have shared we invite you to listen to their episode and support their scholarship.
Advice From Our First 18 Interviews:
1. Tom Williams: Advice For Students (his own and in general)
Links To Tom’s Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“Make sure you sleep and spend time on things that are not work and make sure you have creative outlets. make sure you read and read as broadly as possible. One of the challenges of working in a really interdisciplinary area— whether it's human robot interaction or cognitive science or any of these areas that are that are really at the intersection of a bunch of different fields— is that there's always going to be more to read than can ever be read.”
2. Kandrea Wade: Advice To Everyday People in the Time of Coronavirus
Links To Kandrea's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“Protect your data - all of us are kind of in a position now where we only have the option to work remotely for work or school or other typically in-person activities. And so more time online leads to more data on each user. This is prime for all sorts of interesting invested entities who want all of that delicious data and they're going to pay top dollar for it. So just be careful about what you're doing while you're sitting at home doing it.”
3. Morgan Klaus Schuerman: Advice To Listeners Looking to Separate the Hype From the Reality for AI and Machine Learning
Links To Morgan's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“Have caution around perfection. If something is claiming to be perfect, it's probably not perfect, because our technology is not that advanced—believe it or not. I think a lot of news and movies portray technology as far more advanced than it is. But a lot of our particularly A.I. based technology is very specific for very specific tasks. And I think on the dystopian side it's similar: the technology is not necessarily that advanced.”
4. Seda Gurses: General Advice About Contact Tracing Apps And What We Can Do About Technology In The Age of COVID
Links To Seda's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“We can't go back to a 'before time' - But I think what's really important is to [think] what is it that we need right now to imagine the other society that will come after COVID-19 and not the one that we can go back to. The whole idea of the tracing app and the vaccines is that once we have those things, we can go back to what we had before. But we are far away from what we were before.”
5. Shamika Goddard: Advice for Everyone (Especially Those Disempowered by Technology During the Pandemic)
Links To Shamika's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“Encourage people to be kind to themselves, to their technology, and to each other. When it comes to empowering yourself around technology, I think the ingredients are twofold. One is to actually learn how to use the technology itself. But then also you have to have that kindness for yourself to say I may not always get it right, but I'm going to keep trying. And so when you when you are that gentle with yourself, then that frees you up to be able to make mistakes and not let that stop you from moving forward. So being kind is always a good idea in the context of empowering yourself around technology.”
6. Sarah Myers West: Advice To Younger Women in AI/ML/AI Ethics
Links To Sarah's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“Hold tight to a set of core values and principles to develop that that core sense of self and what you believe in. Don’t ever be held back, particularly if you have an interest in working in science and technology. Don’t ever be held back by the policing around expertise, because we know historically—particularly for women, particularly for people of color—that expertise is defined against identity. It's shaped more by the identity of the worker than about the content of the of the work. Really read widely and broadly as a means of experiencing the wider scope of humanity around you as much as possible.”
7. Ruha Benjamin: Advice For Everyone in AI/ML And Anyone Doing Radical Work
Links To Ruha's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“Love - an essential ingredient to anything that purports to and claims to be radical. In part because it runs against our training as enlightenment intellectuals, that's a whole different sphere of life. It has nothing to do with the work on the life of the mind. And that grows out of a very specific trajectory and genealogy that does not serve the vast majority of human beings. The fact that we amputate how we feel about things from what we think about things. And so for me, love is an essential ingredient to everything that I do, especially teaching…
Sometimes and it's not a kind of saccharine love like a Valentine's Day love. It's a love often that's intertwined with anger precisely because I love people and I love especially those who have been so harmed by systems of oppression. And I'm so angry about it. The fact that they're being mistreated. Anger and love go hand in hand.”
8. Lilly Irani: Advice on Movement Building
Links To Lilly's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“Treat research as a movement — be relevant — Changing your research agenda to be more relevant to a struggle that's currently unfolding.”
9. Karen Hao: Advice For New Journalists and People New to AI Ethics
Links To Karen's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“[Ask yourself] — what if my guiding philosophy in life was to always be willing to experiment and not be afraid of being a beginner?”
10. Abeba Birhane: Advice For a Vision of Coming Together as a Community in AI Ethics Work
Links To Abeba's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“[This] vision for me is a system where radical work or work that empowers the least powerful is incentivized. Where we create a discourse or where it becomes the norm for doing AI work—it might give you very little profit or no profit at all. Because at the moment AI is based on profit and efficiency, so let’s make objective of gaining as much profit and greater efficiency aside and [instead make the objective] something that strives to empower the least privileged and the most vulnerable. It's not that we are lacking—there are various people working on that. But we don't have a system that incentivize and encourages that. So my hope and my vision is for creating awareness and creating a system that makes that sort of work possible and rewarded. I don't know if it's possible, but that's my hope.”
11. Eun Seo Jo: Advice To Learners in the Archives and Women in STEM
Links To Eun Seo's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“My advice for women in the field in STEM would be to persevere and to support each other. And then for historians and other humans I would say I think it's very important when we do research to try to find its relevance to the present world and to read the news. And, because sometimes I think when I first started in my program, I was so razor focused on historical questions that I wasn't paying attention to how this could be relevant to modern issues. And I think this is potentially a problem more for historians and other [people from the] humanities… So I think it's important to try to find how we can use our knowledge for social good.”
12. Timnit Gebru: Advice To Herself in 8 Years
Links To Timnit's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“Allow people to evolve… Human beings have to be allowed to evolve.”
13. Yeshi Milner: Advice On The Iterative Process of Movement Building Following The Murder of George Floyd
Links To Yeshi's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“How do we meet people where they're at? How do we make sure that whoever we are— [as we] come into these spaces— that we're being plugged into in a way that's meaningful? That really depends on a lot of factors. I think that's part of organizing and movement building. It's an iterative process and it's most importantly about relationship building.”
14. Miriam Sweeney: Advice From The End of a Semester to Students
Links To Miriam's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“It's okay to be critical because being critical doesn't have to mean you're just negative. It can mean that you're asking questions… We have to critique, especially the things that we love and use… It's definitely incumbent on us to then hold ourselves accountable and hold those systems accountable. Hold those companies accountable. Hold our politicians accountable. In pursuit of systems that we can not be exploited by, systems that we can connect with others without that layer of extraction happening. And that's what really motivates me. So students— stay critical. It doesn't mean you have to give up the thing that you're criticizing. It just means that you're holding it to a new accountable standard.”
15. Deb Raji: Advice For People Who Want To Do Something About Technological Systems of Oppression But Don’t Know Where To Start
Links To Deb's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“My suggestion… is just to keep looking… If I feel like I'm not connected in the right way or I don't have enough resources to make this stance on my own, what can I do with what is available to me? What are the investigations that I can begin to think about? Who else is trying to do this?”
16. Emily M. Bender: Advice For Linguists, Other Domain Experts, and Machine Learning Engineers For a Healthy Relationship
Links To Emily's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“People who are domain experts—have some patience around the way the discourse comes out of machine learning and computer science, because there is a lot of powerful technology there. And by being someone with a domain expertise, you're in a position to direct that power in positive directions. And so engaging is worthwhile. And it's okay to laugh when someone claims they've solved your whole field and roll your eyes and stuff, but don't don't take that as a reason to walk away… engaging is useful and powerful and the domain experts have a lot to contribute.
To people who are coming at it from machine learning point of view…then it's really important to work with domain experts so that you can actually show that your machine has learned something… If you're building something… that's going to go into the world and affect people's lives—that means that you have responsibility to engage in the dialogue around that as well. Now, you can't predict everything. It could possibly go wrong. You can't ensure that you're only making things that are positive, but you do have a responsibility. Be part of the conversation.”
17. Beth Singler: Advice To Screenwriters and Storytellers
Links To Beth's Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“Make space for dystopia and utopia narratives. As I said, Terminator Dark Fate did some interesting things I wasn't expecting. So I think there's certainly space for speculative futures that turn the audience's expectations on themself. Let’s not always see the terrible robot war—but also, have a space for that. Just keep writing. There's so many stories that can be told. I'd love to read and see them all.”
18. Calvin Liang: Advice To Designers
Links To Calvin, Jevan, and Os' Episode, Show Notes, and Transcript
“It's important to just recognize that design has a lot of power and it's really easy to invalidate this work and the things that we're challenging here [in our paper]. I just so strongly believe that design has the ability to reproduce social norms. But then it also has the ability to challenge reality and reshape how we think about HIV or dating…Designers just have this responsibility to factor in the law and histories of oppression into these design decisions, because ultimately they have these real lived experience-related consequences for people. I think it's easy to forget that design has individual effects on people. Don't forget that.”
