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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 Jess.

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 Dr. Lily Irani, an associate professor of communication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is a co-founder and maintainer of digital labor activism tool Turk Opta Khan and author of the book Chasing Innovation Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. Dr. Iranis research broadly investigates the cultural politics of high tech work practices with a focus on how actors produce innovation cultures.

Some of the questions that we explore in this interview include when building and designing ethical A.I. systems. How can we make room for all of our emotions, including anger at injustice and hope for the future? What is Mechanical Turk, a tool that so many of us in the academy and industry use for our research? And how might it be exploiting labor? What is the intersection between labor justice movements and the A.I. technology industry? And what is the relationship between technology, power and liberation? And how do we address this relationship through our design practices? It was a pleasure to speak with Dr. Lily Irani, and we are so grateful not only for her coming on the show, but also for her mentorship as we continue to discern exactly what the future of this radical A.I. project holds.

Well, first and foremost, Lily, welcome to the show and thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today.

Thank you for doing. This is really great. We have a space to talk to each other.

Dylan and I are such big fans of your work, as are many other people in this community. But before we jump into your research, we actually want to start by asking you a question of what or why do you do the work that you do? And this is asking what motivates you, not just as a researcher, but also in life, in general, Interzone life in general, a sense of life in general and motivated me.

Was anger big for a lot of my career is seeing stuff that just pissed me off or seemed wrong. And of course, what pisses people off is really personal, that it's really shaped by their histories. And then trying to do something about it. I think that there are so many things to be angry about that gets really exhausting and it can burn you out. So now I think about it not just in her life. Well, here's something you're angry about, but was something where. Thank you for the love of one another. We're going to fight to change this together because we need it to survive and have the world that we need. But that's all very abstract. I think a lot of the weird. I study innovation and I kind of critique kids from a labor perspective, from gender perspective, as an Amazon Mechanical Turk projects that I do also come from this commitment to the fact that Mechanical Turk work is important and it's necessary and people who do it, you deserve just as much pay as anybody else.

And I think for one of the places that comes from for me is kind of seeing my mom growing up. She was in. My parents were from Iran. They came over here after the revolution. My mom was a secretary in Iran. She didn't go to college. She worked at IBM in the 70s. Secretaries were learning how to program computers. So, like, my mom was appropriate, basically a programmer in Iran as a secretary. So went about a ton of social status. And then we come over here and I'm growing up in the Clinton Bill Clinton's 90s. And it's all about computers are the future and programmers are amazing. And I'm like, wait, like my mom wasn't getting any of that credit.

I don't understand. I was also I was a computer science major in college. Like, I was really into computers in the 90s making Web pages. And it's like it's kind of see the contrast I could see that was like being pulled into like. Struggling to be a woman in computer science and taking one for society. And what was not really inviting culture? And then seeing that my mom, when she was doing the same work, she wasn't honored at all. So I think that's one place suddenly where it comes from and trying to figure out why I was being valued. My mom wasn't. It kind of opens you up to a lot of little mysteries about, well, what is skill? How is it valued? How is that shaped by gender history, geopolitical location? And, you know, how do we get recognition for what we do, even if it's not the things that people want to give us recognition for? Like housework. All of that's kind of. Those are some things that are in the mix for me.

I, I want to jump back to where you started this, which was about anger and. And I think sometimes when we have these conversations about technology, ethics and about justice. Anger almost gets. This is like bad rap. It's taboo in some way. Like, we're trying to make the world a better place. We're trying to all come together. And certainly that's part of it. That community aspect.

But I think this concept of, like, righteous anger is so important for motivating our way forward. And I'm wondering if you could talk more about that, about like is there an appropriate amount of anger or how do we use that emotion of anger in justice, work in technology?

This is an amazing question because this is like, oh, I don't know, let's talk about it and figure it out. That's really where the magic will be. Yeah, I used to get so upset with kind of design thinking, moral injunctions to only have positive feelings only have optimism in a rainstorm. There are no bad ideas for me as a designer. I was like, wait, critiquing how this works is like one of the ways that I generate ideas.

Why are you telling me the negative emotions are a problem?

And of course, like Sarah Ahmed says, feminist philosopher, and she's written tons about the mandates to be happy and how the person who names the problem in a room becomes the problem in the room. You and a lot of people don't have the luxury of not being angry. You know, black feminists have taught us a lot about that. And what happens when you say white feminists get uncomfortable with that anger? So, yeah, there's a lot to be said for the value of anger.

It's about being attached to there being something better. It's about kind of directing your energies at what needs to be changed. I think sometimes I get the sense, like people kind of like love a good rant because they can articulate something that they can't put their finger on.

And that's actually kind of empowering. Like, if you speak out and you help other people speak out and find words for stuff and other people do that for me. So that's all in the plus column. And one of the things that is happening to me with covered the first couple of weeks is it's like watching the news and freaking out because like all this debate at all, like UPI or are you going to like, wait means test and, you know, maybe you will go to an office and fill out a form to prove that they need the money.

And I was like, like offices are going to be able to handle that load.

And so I was just maybe it's I just anger is actually just being overwhelmed emotionally and not knowing how to proceed. And so I think one problem with any kind of emotional overwhelm is if you kind of. Exhausts you or keeps you from actually sustainably kind of pushing towards the things that need to change with anger specifically, I think a lot of the times that I was being angry because maybe I was coming out of a suburban upbringing and computer science life as I didn't have a sense like, you know, you need to be angry with like other people say, can we work together and organize? I going to learn anything about organizing. And so the anger wasn't maybe being.

It's being matched with the kind of joy that hope, the joy and hope that comes with working with other people. And then I guess sometimes I guess like sometimes what happens is when you're trying to work, get other people involved. Like, if they're kind of burned out on the negative emotions, too, because they're dealing with a lot of stuff. Also then. Having reasons to be excited about what you can do together and having it feel like the work is a good part of your day is important. And so something other than anger is necessary to keep movements building. There's a lot of people who know a lot more about this than I do. I just write Emergent Strategy by Adrian Marie Brown. And when I first read it, when I first bought it, I'll be real, like, you know, as I'm learning about. You're learning about a lot of a lot about different kinds of labor organizing and community organizing, and I couldn't really relate to the all the positive and healing and introspective work that that book introduces. And after doing a lot of organizing work more over the last year since my book got done. I wanted to turn my research into actual changes in the things you study. You're after having that long lived experience of kind of getting work much more deeply involved in the uncertainties of organizing and the hope and exhaustion, like building lots of relationships and trying to get us to do stuff together. Then the book made a lot more sense. So I know there's people who've been through this a lot longer and have a lot of amazing things to say. I mean, maybe you can interview some of them, too.

Jumping on a few phrases that you mentioned in your response there in terms of building movements, organizing and change making, you do a lot of this in your work. I'm wondering what has motivated you to become this person in your in the way that you utilize your research and how you go about doing that?

Well, I guess it kind of was when I first started doing research, when I was an undergrad, I started doing research because there is a problem that was, you know, I felt bad for me and my friends. I was in computer science. There weren't a lot of women. I felt dumb a lot. And then I started talking to friends around my junior year and they were like, I feel dumb too way. We all feel dumb, but they were not dumb. What? So we started these women in computer science guru, but we didn't want it to be kind of like a corporate H.R., you know, recruiting women into jobs, but not actually changing the conditions of exclusion in computer science culture. We were finding the words for those things, too. So. So I did my undergrad honors thesis on where women fall out of the CSR pipeline at my school. So research is always something that was meant to help organize in some sense. Even if I didn't have the language, just like, you know, we have a club doing so. And then with grad school sort of working on Amazon Mechanical Turk stuff. You know, I guess it was just always I always grew up being the kind of kid really participated in clubs or like knocked on doors for like getting out the vote or delivering directories for fundraisers. And so I think I came out of that kind of more just community service mindset. And then, as I learned as a child, to see changes and things like choking wages with the Amazon Mechanical Turk work as realizing like, oh, doing community service through software actually hasn't raised jerkers minimum wages like Tricorp took on this project I've worked on for ten years where workers can write reviews of their players.

Yeah. Workers definitely make a little bit more money because they avoid requesters who have bad reputations for wage theft. But. You know, we still have a set of laws that allow truckers to get paid whatever rock-bottom wage requesters want. And so I think, like I've I've actually only really started to learn about organizing and in some sense not doing community service or feminist software building. So I actually don't think a feminist software ability is organizing. And I don't mean that as a slam on feminist software builders like me. It's just like we built the software. We maintained it for 10 years is, you know, if you don't have a community that can bring labor and time and their relationships into helping maintain this offer, bringing new people in, like getting you're getting money from the community to help pay for servers, getting relationships. And so you say you can get people into a meeting, say how can we change the root cause of this thing like the law or the policy or Amazon's platform design? Like you can't do all that other stuff, like your our feminists offer building was kind of like running on a treadmill, making things better a little bit. And really labor intensive way organizing is like. Pointing to the horizon and saying, what are the relationships and resources that we need to get towards that horizon, not just with the thing that I know how to do, that I can kind of contribute and hope somehow magically make it to that horizon with no a broader strategy of other kinds of acts that I do with other people.

I know for for me, before I got back into academia, I had no idea what the Amazon Mechanical Turk was in the first place. And it might be the case for some of our viewer listeners as well. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about just very basically what that system is and why it exists in the first place. And then maybe talk a little bit about the work that you're doing with your competition and why it's so important.

So Amazon Mechanical Turk is kind of like Uber and Lyft for a data processing in the sense that what it is, it's a platform, it's a marketplace.

It's a workplace where programmers or companies or academic researchers who they have a bunch of audio they need transcribed or they have a stream of user generated content like pictures people are uploading to Facebook and they need someone to look at it and be like, is this porn is is not porn or they have like surveys or research experiments, like cognitive experiments like for you, like that stuff all goes into the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. The people who need that work done, they can put a price per task and then put workers all over the world. But more than half of them are in the United States can come and take those tasks and do them as a kind of cognitive piecework. Some of that is the reason why I say it's like Uber for data processing is that workers are positioned as independent contractors in Amazon's terms and conditions.

Now, workers here in California could be recognized as employees under the new law B five, but they would be employees of the requesters, the employers, the people have a transcription task, for example, and it's a little more confusing as to whether they thought it was not a perfect analogy. Amazon's not clear that they would be an employer and a of the cases, the workers have no minimum wage because they're independent contractors and they, you know, because they don't show up at a central workplace where they can actually talk to each other. It's like really hard for them to share information and engage in mutual aid or get organized around things that they want to improve. And so this year, Kofta Con Project started in 2009 out of a tactical media art project class. And we was asking workers, you know, what do you like about this work? What do you like about this work? And then I also asked if you could have a trickers Bill of Rights, what would it be? And a lot of workers said, you know, it's not fair that employers can just take they could take our work and then decide whether it counts as good work or not and then decide not to pay. Amazon gives the player the requestor and that isn't that right. So there is a lot of stuff they didn't agree on. But like, that was one of the things they did agree on. So you built sarcoptic on as a way of helping create a reputation for employers. Amazon's platform has a reputation system for workers, but not for employers. It really privileges the needs of the employers because the employers are the ones who are using Amazon's Web services. And that's a core business area for Amazon.

They can get workers to come work because the workers need the money because they have this ability or they can't find other job where they live because they need the extra money on top of their second or third job. The workers will come work for Amazon, say meetings, Amazon privileges, people they're chasing, which are the employers.

And when I first heard about it, I actually heard of the Mechanical Turk as this kind of the paramount of innovation.

Right. As like this next step of how we and this was this is a little while ago. Right. So and this I can see your face right now. So this is different. But it's like it's like, oh, OK.

So now, you know, people can control their own destiny and it's a way for data to advance in that way. So that was the first argument that I heard kind of pro and I know you do a lot of work in innovation, and I think this is a great kind of case study for what what should we be thinking about like innovation and how does that relate to labor organizing?

Ok, gotcha. Yeah. So what is innovation mean for labor organizing and why did mechanical trick seem like magic to a lot of people? So, yeah, what I found out about Mechanical Turk, it was because I knew people from when I was working before grad school, I worked at Google and I knew people who'd worked at Yahoo! And had search engine kind of search engine startups. And they were using Mechanical Turk to do. Kind of testing whether the algorithm is returning better search results, for example. And they were and also the field of HCI, if you were saying like this is going to enable whole new kinds of technologies to have humans in the loop. That kind of cover the ground that I can't cover. And let us big build bigger and more powerful information systems. I mean, there's like so many things about innovation that Mechanical Turk kind of lays bare that if you kind of start going down the rabbit hole like one is the artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence. It.

His name, we have four algorithms that produce kind of court, produce correlations or outputs, given an input that seems sensible to human beings, like something looks artificially intelligent. If it responds to Justin Bieber by associating with pop star as opposed to person or something like something really culturally obvious to us. But culture always changes. Language always changes. Haircuts. Change what clothes are cool with. Clothes are cool change. Slang changes. So artificial intelligence will always need a human layer of input to tell it. These are the correlations that are sort of culturally valid right now to calibrate the A.I. to culture as this shifts.

And that's what Amazon Mechanical Turk workers do. They basically automate culture by training algorithms to see it like they do. So, you know, when we talk about programmers being the source of all of this amazing value that tech companies create by creating artificial intelligence like those programmers are getting massive amounts of Helbig without Amazon Mechanical Turk workers being there, really, they're a I would not look intelligent at all. I mean, another thing that I thought a lot about is how one programmer is kind of when programmers frame what they do is just an act of coding, you know, that they get to look like. You know, they're they're the ones innovating. But what we don't see under the hood is it systems like Amazon, Mechanical Turk workers are constantly trying to get in touch with employers, programmers and tell them, hey, you like your task, is design wrong? Or like, hey, this question they're asking actually doesn't really make sense. They're like, give Veasley free management consulting to these to these requesters and help them work on their tasks with the requesters, know how to listen. They don't get any credit for being part of that kind of process by which we kind of get new things. And then also like. Would labor organizing, you know, Sulston, I mean, highlighting the ways that all kinds of workers are essential to the process of innovation is crucial because, you know, listen, we all hear those stories about how programmers are more important than the rest of us.

They're more important than teachers. So we can have automated teaching systems or mook's that make platforms that make individual teaching leave very less arduous. Them jerkers hear those stories, too. And so you showing how all of our work matters, the communicative work, the non automatable stuff is the first way we're going to have a chance of.

Believing in ourselves enough to ask for what we deserve.

I want to latch onto a comment that you made about the computer scientists that are making these platforms like Mechanical Turk coming from computer science myself. This is a question that I ask a lot. How do you think that design decisions in technological systems play into societal harm and positions of power?

Now, we're just talking about this because I love yesterday because a UCSD, because we're trying to create a curriculum for specialization. I yeah, I think we were talking about ethics and we were talking whether you want to be teaching all designers about ethics or whether you want to teach them about marginalization and power. And then you actually want to teach them about both. But I was taught eight. I was trying to think about the difference between a designer and a doctor. Is that a doctor who sees a patient and talks to the patient has to make judgments about ethical ways to avoid harm. And make a judgment how to act in that moment. But a designer. Creates a system that's going to then be deployed in mass in some way. Like the history of the word designer is, it is actually out of the industrial revolution when artisans went to the factory. The artisan who used to be the designer and the maker laborer, and they can make the vaisse or the plate. However, they felt like in that time you became a kind of division between the designer who plans how the plate should look. And they tool up the assembly line to do that. And then the worker has to go to the assembly line and make the plate look how to design.

It makes it look right. So designers and kind of designers make the rules and arrangements that kind of scale out. And so in that sense, I think designers actually have the capacity to do huge amounts of harm. And you designers get taught that our job is to advocate for the user. I was a U. Designer at Google, but we get taught nothing about what happens when you're advocacy for the user isn't getting anywhere in the organization. You don't learn about how power works in organizations. I didn't learn anything about how capitalism use. Stock structures like who owns the company, what, how they're trying to grow into new markets, like how all that's actually going to affect what kind of agency I have to advocate for these or we need to learn anything about how we is being trained as professional designers are being placed into a kind of privileged class position that makes a lot of the things that we even know makes us unable to even ask a lot of the questions about what would cause harm to the users. Like, how do you check that kind of privilege? How do you create spaces where you not only listen, but are accountable to ask new kinds of questions?

And we need a kind of design where designers, we we keep the kernel of what got us into design, which is we wanted to make technology and the companies that build them accountable to people at large. But we also need to learn the limits of doing that through kind of the professional expertise. That is what counts as human centered design. Now we need to learn to work with movements, work with organizers and amplify their efforts. Use our ability to kind of imagine possible future configurations for technology to like help those movements, like make demands on the technologies that they're trying to shape. We like this aggregate design and re aggregated is something that's a better Conrad.

I was recently as in today. So I'm in my doctoral program and one of the things that we're learning is how to teach ourselves. And so I was instructed as an assignment to make a teaching philosophy statement. And I started writing and I came to this word liberation and that being core to my teaching philosophy. And then my professor asked me to be more specific about what that meant. And I'm still in the process of rewriting that statement.

But I'm wondering for you and your teaching philosophy and your design philosophy, what role that concept liberation or maybe another word that might resonate more with you, like a B power or something like that. What role does that play in design? Or should that play?

Yeah. When he said you asked me more specific about liberation and I still in the process of rewriting that statement, I feel like that actually is probably how I think about what fighting for liberation is. Liberation language is not a language I was familiar with, you know, coming through being computer science. So, kid. It's a word that I've heard, you know, black feminists use.

Activists use. And I guess part of. Maybe part of the magic of the word liberation is that it lets people just find that for themselves. Was that kind of autonomy with their community would actually mean to them? And so liberation is not a thing. A horizon to which we hold each other accountable in the work that we do and in the society that we're fighting for. And so I would say that if I would like to work towards a teaching philosophy and a design philosophy that figures out strategies for doing that. When you're wrangling chairs in a classroom, you don't get to pick how big your classes or when you're wrangling a bunch of code that's going to crash sometimes. And you not you know, very few people know how to kind of change change the code because not everyone gets to learn how to code or gets those educational resources invested in them. So, so. So it'll look different. The tactics will look different. And I think we have a lot of work to do in the kind of computing science design rules of figuring out what those tactics are, because like all of our tactics and methods are, so many of our tactics and methods that we learn institutionally are coming out of how do we go become good employees for technology companies. But communities also build technologies like words, pencils and silicon. They are all ways of doing things.

Yeah. This is definitely a relatively recurring theme stubbornly in my research, but also in these interviews as we talk to people about A.I. and ethics, this notion of trying to incorporate things from the humanities and the social sciences into classrooms where people are learning computer science and design. And from your experience teaching, I'm I'm curious what it's been like and what your experience has been trying to teach some of these concepts that are really important in design, such as liberation and power and the consequences of your design decisions and what the response really has been from students who might come from a humanities background versus a technical background and how you can deal with some of those potential mismatches.

Yeah, so Crystal Sims is in my department, UCSD, and I designed the class called Critical Design Practice. And we wanted to we didn't want to have a class or students would come in and go try to save other people by doing good. And so the core task you have in that class is to choose an issue on the campus that affects you and then you choose one that your group is all kind of behind working on and figure out how you're going to design something that intervenes in public understanding, awareness, interaction around that issue and gets you more allies. And so we actually teach them organizing tools like the spectrum of allies, like how do you get some from neutral to more on your side or how do you activate someone to really, like, do something with you? We teach about kind of ethics. We use the yes men and some of the work that they've done and also some of the criticism that they get to talk about the ethics of, you know, when you're trying to do activism kind of on your own behalf, but you go in and start talking about other communities that you want to bring into the fold, like are you really accountable to those communities or how do you make sure you're not doing harm to the people that you want to be an alliance with?

And we tend to get students. We tend to get like a subset of STEM students who've heard about this, and they kind of get the sense that something is off in the classes that they've had, like they have these always technical classes and is not really speaking to them in some way. And so when they come to our class and they start to find some language for Beal, the contrast like what's missing in those other spaces, because I had this experience too, is like something is wrong, but I think is probably if I can put my finger on it and computer science in an HCI, it sounds like it's just me like this research is not interesting. If I have found the right topic or I'm not reading the right thing like I'm not you.

So we want to say it's not you. It's that these practices, these practices were not set up to actually allow you to have your full voice. They stem the humanities then where humanities students who come in, you know, they don't often know how to build stuff in code, but they can use amazing tools on the web to build all kinds of stuff like Mark-Up Web sites. Somebody made like alternative rate, my professor, whereas I reading how easy or high your professor was, it would get people to reflect on classes five years down the line and say, what did you remember from this class? So you're kind of critiquing like how we think about your classroom. It's like one of my favorite projects and one of the group of students designed the alternative syllabus for our class. So we challenged our power as teachers, students. You have a lot more savvy than I do about how to make. VS and so we also open up. Design beyond the kind of computational bias we have, like we think we privilege. So, like, this is stuff I research in my book, chasing innovations that we privileged design as a field post, sort of like 2004, because design is linked to creating intellectual property and particularly creating intellectual property in, you know, in industries like tech or industries that create cultural products like Nike, you know, where you want to create kind of copy written content that there's a lot of. But if design if you stripped design away from this kind of brand or coding design thing like and it just becomes about making things that poque social interactions and provoke them in a different direction than the humanities. Students have a lot to say. But it's been an interesting challenge because it's harder to find teaching materials that talk about design without kind of assuming it's about computation or it's about making objects.

It somebody in a factory is going to make for you after you design it. So so we use we use movies'. We use activist projects as examples. We teach you how to think critically about the design objects in their world. And we just let them take it from there.

For me and my experience coming from the humanity is one of the gifts that the humanities can bring is the transformative power of telling stories.

And that being able to impact the world. And I know you as an ethnographer and someone who uses ethnography. There's a lot of storytelling in that and in your research. And I'm actually wondering if there is a particular story, either from your research or from your life that's on your heart right now in talking about these topics or more.

This is a beautiful question. I think I was late to the transformative power of stories because in computer science, I so learned to privilege you pushing bits around to push the world around you. But I kind of came to the power of stories through writing my book. Because one of the ways that I started to think about writing my book is I kind of worked harder and harder and like, why am I spending 10 years telling these stories? Am I telling them just to get tenure? No, I'm telling the stories in that book because I'm writing for people who are like the designer that I was when I was 24, 25, 26. And I had things that I thought were wrong in the world. And I wanted to kind of have agency to change it. And I was told that design is the language that had to do that. And so I you know, each of my book chapters is organized around a story. So even if you don't care about academic theory, which I like, there's lots of reasons why a lot of people don't at different points in their life. I find it helpful sometimes you like this story illustrates the problem. And so when you ask the story that's on my heart, there's the story that I found myself telling a lot while I was working on my dissertation around.

So my dissertation and the book are about designers in India. We're trying to make the world a better place and kind of build up India by doing design and social entrepreneurship, because that's what that's what they're told. Is the main way that she should challenge the energies. It also so happens by channeling their energies in that direction. They repeatedly, over the years that I was working with them, ended up applying their efforts to projects where, you know, they would do fieldwork. So this one particular story, like they were doing fieldwork in rural Andhra Pradesh, are for a project on clean water. And they would go, you know, two hundred kilometers over several weeks, like getting up at five a.m., getting in the car, like bringing translators to you because they speak Hindi or maybe on different regional languages, but not the languages spoken under. They're working so hard to get people's stories out, what they need from clean water. And one of the things they hear over and over is we have too much fluoride in the water industry in this area. And it can cause fluorosis, which can cause paralysis. But to the Thunder and to the NGO that hired the studio, clean water to cement bacterial filtration, because that's what that's what the World Health Organization prioritized, because that's what met seem like a global in scale.

Enough problem fluorosis was seen as worries like a China India problem. That's like a huge part of the world's population, but funded and prioritize it. And so then the designers really working well. Everyone's asking us for a fluoride water filter. But the funder's is dedicated to learning what they can to get these people to buy a bacterial water filter anyways, because in some sense, development rights and on the assumption that the end of the day, people have ideas about what they could want. But the funder knows with the really important thing is, a, use people's ideas about what they want to make the appealing thing that still accomplishes, like the Gates Foundation gold. So that story haunted me because when I started my dissertation, I didn't think it was going to be a big critique of innovation. I was just interested in how do you make design methods relevant? Do you work in India when they've come out of Europe? And the US is the post-colonial computing work that I've done.

But that story kind of made me go. Everything I learned in the U.S. was a lie. Well, I just as it go outis as a listen to people, that is the build the thing that the people are asking you to do. Way that works like that is not what happened. And I have to embark now on understanding why that is not happening.

So you're one part of that story was about spending the next long while learning about kind of political science and anthropology.

You said why that happened to me and what other designers need to know to understand why that stuff happens to them.

One part of it was about like recognizing that as a designer on that team and the other designers who were on that team, none of us asked, hey, OK, are there other movements in the area that are trying to work on this issue? Can we help them? We tell them about some of the stuff that we learned in our ethnography. We go like tell journalists we're hearing about this and we think it should be a story. Like none of that even occurred to us because, you know, like I I learned my civic education in the US and I get out the vote or who they tell you that you have the option of voting for and make the world a better place through tech. So so in some ways, like the book became a way of.

Amplifying the things that I had to learn to understand why this thing that really violated my hopes for design had happened, and then my hope was that people who read the book can kind of shortcut that process and not have to take 10 years to figure out why, you know. So I ended up China as well. I'm hoping that the story is something that resonates not just with scholars of critical information studies, but also with actual designers who deal with this stuff in their daily life.

Thank you so much for that story. I can imagine myself there in that five a.m. setting in the morning.

Can I just add something super quickly to that? Like, I just want to give credit to the designers that I was working with, like you say, up to like five a.m. sometimes talking about this stuff themselves, like ranting. Being like, why is the founder being like this? So it's not like they don't notice and they don't care. But one of my friends who is at that studio and she read my book, The History Chapter, she when she read like the history of how design has been set up kind of in general, but also in India. She was like, oh, I didn't actually know any of that history like that.

History kind of explains how is not just about me, like advocating to the client better.

It's actually about a lot of the assumptions that are built into like how we do our work and how we do it. And so I don't want to say I take credit. I saw some things just like I had like, okay, I'm going to put my time to helping out my fellow design co-workers by working on this part of the movement, which is like excavating why this craft keeps happening to us. Definitely, yeah.

And it really it speaks to the interdisciplinary nature of this kind of work. So much to like understanding the history and the cultural aspects and the social sciences and then also the design aspects of everything. And I know your background is also very colorful and interdisciplinary computer science and anthropology and a little bit of feminist studies and informatics and something that we like to do on this show in a way to uplift and hopefully normalize greater diversity in this field is to ask you two questions, as the name of our show is radical A.I., we would love to know first what the word radical means to you and how you might situate yourself and your work in that radical space.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, like my first emotional reaction to the word radical was this little tinge of sadness where radical to me sometimes means marginal. And when people use radical amenities, they often use it in a disparaging way. Oh, that's too radical. Oh, that's a radical. And so I had this reaction as like, I, I don't I don't want to be I don't identify as a radical. I identify as someone who wants to.

Clearly identify the things that are actually happening in the world. And even if it involves having to be if it involves being kind of collaborative or was that being adversarial? You know, I'm not OK with a world in which there is not room for all of us to thrive.

And so that's kind of if that's what being a radical means, then, you know, I think people, as I think all people should like radicals. There is a maybe in that sense, a radical is also a challenge to kind of think harder about it.

Am I including you?

Am I including everybody's liberation and the vision, the liberation that I'm working for? How can I challenge myself to do better about that? And so it can be something we can kind of also use to push ourselves to learn and listen to histories that are not don't tend to be given over to us by default.

One of the things that we've been talking about amongst ourselves and with guests is that there are actually a lot of people who in these tech spaces, including yourself, who are working for liberation for all or at least trying to trying to navigate these spaces.

And the question seems to be how how we bring all these divergent paths that we're taking together into a singular movement. And we're drawing a lot from, you know, key community organizing and labor organizing, as well as this concept of a movement and bringing us together from disparate places. And I'm wondering, from your perspective, do you have advice on how we might do that?

Do you think so? Is is the vision that you have about creating a movement around radical A.I.? Because we've had it bringing us together a singular movement, that kind of. It surprised me because I don't think of. I don't think of myself as trying to create a singular movement. I think of myself as participating in different movements and then try to think about what could be the connections and coalitions between those movements.

I think it's still very life. So even when I use that kind of terminology, it's still trying to, like, actively define whether it is as a single movement or multiple movements. And then again, that like, how do we how are we even defining movement? Is that even the right language that we should be using for this?

I guess I think of the language thing as does the language do something that's helpful for you at the time. And so I started thinking about what I was thinking about my research and the ways that academia tries to get us to make powerful brands and compete with each other and feel bad. When somebody publishes something that you kind of wish that you'd written was like, this is actually really bad for making the kinds of changes we say that we want to see in the world. And so I was actually trying I was talking to some of my students and even just to myself. What does it look like if I treat research like a social movement instead? If I treat the people who are doing research around like, say, labor as a social movement that is, you know, is a high five. If other people publish on stuff that resonates with the stuff that I'm publishing, like we should be collaborating with each other to see, hey, you can we, like, organize ourselves better to be more useful to some of the communities that you'll have stakes in the issues that we're writing about. It kind of changes to think of ourselves as participating in a movement. It changes the actions that we take and are not often the actions that academic institutions want us to take, like they want us to publish stuff or something, as we like community engage where it is the individual. Or if you are a team that goes out and engages the community as opposed to getting organized into something that's already happening. Changing your research agenda to be more relevant to a struggle that's currently unfolding.

So that is I do find movement to be helpful because it at least within could damage research. It opens up the possibilities of what we do. But I don't really answer your question, like, how do you do it the other way? The way I always think about it is like start where you are. If you're really involved in something and you think that's something that's happening is not right, then, you know, go find out who else agrees with you and then talk about. Okay. It's like I'll give an example for the tech work, for example, a tech worker coalition. So one of the things that tech world, the coalition does is they'll host ethics lunches at the companies that they're in is you know, there's a lot of debate as to whether ethics is a language that gets us to think more about individual judgment rather than social justice. But at the end of the day, like there's a lot of people in tech workplaces who think a lot about am I being ethical right now? Because that's the language that they have to think about, that dissonance between their values and what it is they're being asked to do. And so if ethics is the language that gets them to the lunch table, then you can work together to build out an analysis of like, well, why are we being forced to do stuff where it just is dissonant with our values? And you can open up the conversation to some of the real causes of that. You know, that's what the Google maven people did. So I think you just use a language that brings people to the table and then find the language that we need to actually see and work on the thing we're trying to change.

And we start where we are because where we are is where we're being asked to produce value, whether it's those renters or as workers or as teachers or as researchers and push and kind of push from there, because that's where we have strong footing and deep practical insight into like the mechanisms that we're trying to change.

There's clearly so much more we could talk about in this realm and in your research in general.

But unfortunately, we are out of time with this interview. So we just want to close by saying thank you so much again, Lily, for coming on the show today.

Thank you for asking such interesting questions and thanks for making Espace or more of us can share knowledge with each other and find new questions and find better ways of working in improvement.

We want to thank Dr. Lily Irania again for joining us today for this wonderful conversation. And Dylan, what is your first initial reaction to this interview that we had?

For me, I think the most impactful moment was when we started talking about the power of stories and the transformative power of stories specifically. And that's something for me.

I know I play the minister card all the time, but it's something for me that's that's really important because I truly believe that telling stories is how we change the world and how we change lives. And some of the stories that Dr. Hourani shared with us, especially from her own background, were there were really inspirational to me. Was there a particular part of Dr. Iranis story that resonated with you?

Yes, all of it. I was just really excited to hear that so much of her history and background played into her motivation for the research that she does, especially two things in particular that really stood out to me. The first one was the fact that her mom was also a computer scientist, but wasn't being valued in the same way that she is a computer scientist in the U.S. was versus in Iran. And then also the fact that she was seeing in her computer science classroom and college that women needed a group. And so she wanted to create that group. And that sort of propelled her interest in this change making space. And I think both of those seem to play really deeply into a lot of the work that she does. It it was just really it's great to know someone for their research, but it's almost better to get a deeper sense of who they are as a person and what drives that research to.

You know, I like what you said about the change making space, too. Because I feel like that's a lot of what we spent this interview talking about, was that concept of change making and how we do it and what impedes it. And then this concept of innovation, which is something that Lilly spent a lot of time on, even, you know, in her book, which is called Chasing Innovation. And this term innovation is something that I've been trying to think a lot about. And I don't. I don't know. Always know what to do with, like similar to to that word liberation, which we talked about and did some definition exploration during the interview. But this concept of innovation and what are the limits of innovation? When does innovation get in its own way? Is everyone using the same word, the same meaning behind it when they say the word innovation? Is it always like unbridled capitalism or can there be intentional innovation? There was this very particular quote that I wanted to pull out from our interview where Lily said words, pencils and silicon. They are all ways of doing things.

And for me, that was such a gut punch. Oh, most of the ways that I might value certain forms of innovation, maybe certain shiny forms of innovation.

You know, the smaller the chip. Right. Or the faster the processor or, you know, Elon Musk going to space.

All of these things, I'm like, oh, that's that's cool. That's cool.

But is it really getting to the heart of this, you know, liberated message? Is it really getting to the heart of the problems that we're trying to solve in community? Or is it distracting and getting in the way?

And it's interesting to talking about these ideas and something that we were asking Lily about. Yes. It's it's important to bring these ideas up and to think through the the relationship between liberation and power and technology and design. But then if we as you know, HCI researchers and teach these students are thinking about it, how do we get everyone thinking about it? Everyone in this space, in the technology, space and computer sciences and in design. And I'm just still so curious about that.

I don't think there's a one off answer to this question yet, but hopefully we're slowly trying to to build our way towards that solution.

I think that part of our way towards that solution is laying bare or laying more transparent.

These systems of production that we talked about with Lilly, especially with the work that she's doing with Took Off Dickon and looking specifically at the Mechanical Turk project because Lilly is asking us to do is to ask, you know, who gets credit for the work that's really being done. And let's really shine a light on the companies that are doing this exploitative work really for for profit margins. All right. And let's try to build a better system that allows people to really get credit for the work that they are doing in a way that's equitable.

Yeah, and all of this really just brings to light this idea that design is super powerful and that power can be great. It can be dangerous. It can be harmful. It can be so many things. And this is actually another thing that I was feeling immediately during and after the interview, a sense of empowerment which can be both good and bad. Coming from a computer science perspective and background and also a little bit of design as well. I feel a lot of privilege as a computer scientists, and I also feel really powerful. I think that the ability to code and design and make tools, even ones like Mechanical Turk, that is such a powerful skill to have and that can be obviously used in very, very harmful ways.

But if we give the right tools to computer scientists and to designers and to thinkers and educators, then maybe we can turn that potentially harmful future into empowerment in the sense that these people have the ability to make positive change.

So what you're saying just is that really this is all just Spider-Man, right? This is all just with great power comes great responsibility.

So real instead of these interviews that Spider-Man or was that one of them might have been?

I think it was absolutely Spider-Man, which I think I think is the right place to to end this particular episode of the radical podcast is with maybe one day we'll get a chance to interview Spider-Man. But again, we want to thank Dr. Lily or Andy for joining us today on this episode.

And for more information on today's show, please visit the episode page at Radical. 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 iPod. And as always, stay radical like Spike.

Churchill.

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