2020 Hindsight: The Radical AI Podcast New Years Spectacular!

Dec 30

What a year! Join us to review 2020 and to release a special surprise! You can watch our Radical AI video below:

Thank you for being here for our journey and for the growth of this podcast and project! We couldn’t do this without you.

Transcript

RAI Year in Review 2020_mixdown.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

RAI Year in Review 2020_mixdown.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

And.

Welcome to Radical A.I., a podcast about technology, power society and what it means to be human in the age of information, we are your hosts, Dylan and Jess, and welcome to our New Year's Spectacular, isn't that right?

Yes, that what we're calling it is what we're as of right now. This is our New Year's spectacular.

Welcome to our New Year Spectacular.

Our holiday episode, our end of year in review, which is which is weird because as we'll talk about, we started like nine months ago.

So it's like not like a full year, but it's our year in review because it's the end of the year.

True. We'll give another end of year review in April, which is the end of the year, really.

Every three months you can expect a special episode of some kind. But if we don't deliver on that, you know, don't hold me accountable.

But either way, this is our New Year's spectacular. I almost forgot the word that I used a second ago. Their our New Year's spectacular. Just what are we doing today on our New Year's Spectacular?

Well, we've got a whole host of things lined up for you all, which really is just like two or three things. But we're basically going to reflect on what this year has been and share a little bit of stats with all of you.

And we're going to share a special surprise, which we're not going to introduce quite yet. But stay tuned to hear that.

So first, we hope that all of you out there who are listening are happy and healthy during this new year.

And thank you for spending some of your quality time with us on this podcast.

Actually, I mean, it's probably a good reflection point to state that this podcast was a covid baby and it was born in the midst of the beginning of the pandemic and has existed throughout the entirety of the pandemic at this point. So a big part of the reason why we think that this podcast was so successful from the start was actually because of quarantine and because everybody at home was listening to us, and also because the pandemic and covid raised a lot of issues with EHI that were really information at the beginning of our project. So a big part of US things saying stay safe and stay healthy is also us reflecting on the fact that this project began in March, which is when covid began to do so.

Since that time, we have actually created 50 regular episodes.

So including our first episode, that's like fifty one episodes of content within nine months, which when we look at it again, we're like, that's crazy.

Why do you why do you think that was that actually strategic or was it just one?

It's just been a just a wild, wild ride, especially for us. As you know, we mentioned our students and that we're doing our own research on on the side and doing other things like taking four classes for our jobs.

And and then we do this and we spend a lot of time doing this.

And it's just been such an incredible journey so far. And we're really excited to see where this goes.

And twenty, twenty one. But for twenty twenty we have 50 episodes. So, you know, if there are any that you've missed, which we wouldn't blame you because that's a lot of episodes.

Please do go and check out that backlog because there's a lot of really wonderful conversations, even, you know, especially from folks who might not be regular household names. So like if you see someone on our feed that you're like, I don't know who that person is, but, you know, I really like that topic. You know, please do check it out, because there's just been a lot of a huge one of the things we're proudest about or most proud about this year.

It's proudest word, I think so proudest about is just the sheer diversity of stories and voices that have been able to be represented on the show this year. And so I know that's something that we're very grateful for. But also, as we look back, we're like, wow, this was part of the success of this year and those 50 episodes, you know, we're proud of each of them in their own way.

And also, if you run across names that you don't know or topics that seem interesting, but you might have not heard of, if you're in academia, consider using some of our episodes in your curriculum or in your syllabus. We've heard from a few professors at universities that they've actually used some of our episodes for case studies in technology ethics classes, and that the students responded really well to them. So that's also something that you can keep in your wheelhouse. Is that a correct expression? That is.

All right.

So well well, while you're doing that, the other things that we're excited about from this year, just in terms of like these raw stats, we had people from nearly 50 countries, maybe more than 50 countries some months listening to us on a weekly basis, which is just really out there for us to to think that we've actually impacted people's listening lives.

And the amount of feedback that we've heard from, like in different languages and from different places has just been like, really cool.

So also, if you are from another country outside of the US and Europe, but or if you're just in the US and Europe, that's fine, too, you know, reach out to us and just let us know that you're. Listening and maybe what your favorite episode has been over the course of this year is we would love to hear from you and maybe how this podcast has impacted your thinking or your feeling or some other element.

And also along those lines, a part of our project is to create a platform that's accessible globally. And so even though we talk about some topics that might be a little bit US centric or Europe centric, sometimes we also care deeply about the ethics issues that impact or even just the tech issues that impact people all around the world. So if you think that there's a topic that's missing from our list of episodes that's impacting you in whatever country you reside in, reach out to us, too, because we want to hear those stories and we think those stories are almost more important to cover sometimes, especially because people in the US aren't always looking for stories that exist outside of our own country.

We're also very excited that we are quickly approaching 40000 downloads, which means if.

We do our math, right, which I don't always do that we're going to hit 50 before we turn one year old as a podcast and that's that's like really exciting for a podcast that in the beginning is just was seen as really niche.

And the fact that we're reaching so many folks on, again, on a weekly basis, not just from so many countries, but like people are listening to the whole thing, make them.

And there's there's a lot of you.

And that's just like we're incredibly grateful for all the time that you have given us our voices and also, more importantly, the stories and the voices of our guests on the show and all that they're doing to transform the world of AI and also just the world in general.

And speaking of math, if you divide forty thousand by the amount of weeks and episodes that we've been out, we have the raw numbers, but we won't bore you with those. This means that thousands of you are listening to our episodes and us and more importantly, our guests every single week. And for that, we can't thank you all enough. This project would not exist without an audience and without a community. And you've all shown us the most welcoming and warm arms and grace that any community we've ever been a part of has. So it has been incredible to experience so far and just these short nine months. And we just can't wait to keep growing this community more and more in the next few years. And who knows how long.

And so in the spirit of reflection, because I think for Jessamy, one of the biggest gifts of this time of year is to just slow down and take stock of what's going on in the world and what's going on in our lives and to set intentions for the coming year.

We want it to slow down and rewind to the story of how all of this started and where we're at now.

And this is all leading up to this gift or announcement at the end of this the end of this show in particular. Let's call it a surprise. Let's call it a surprise.

Well, that's a much better word, the announcement. GIF just feels so like Judeo-Christian centric in this time of year. Yeah, we'll call it a surprise.

That's good. That's good. That's good. So stay tuned for the surprise guarantee.

It will be very interesting and or worth your while. So let's, I guess, start at the beginning of this radical EHI podcast.

So in the story, if you have listened to, say, like our six month episode or a three month episode, I'm telling you, we do this every three months. We don't even plan like that.

You may have heard part of the story before, but it changes every time, and especially as we start talking with more colleagues, especially activists and people in this radical space, it helps us to reflect on our journey and on the ways that we can be better stewards to radically and what that is.

So with that said, from March until now, here is our story of how this project came to be and how it exists today as of the new year, as of the turn from twenty twenty to twenty twenty one.

The radical A.I. podcast was born in reaction to the premise that AI, as it is designed and deployed today, is often harmful. AI is regularly used as a tool to promote corrupt systems of power, with little after thought of its potential for harming the communities who have no say in its creation. AI is often used as a bandaid to cover the symptoms of a broken and discriminatory society. Or even worse, sometimes these systems cause the symptoms of inequity and they fail to consider the various needs of diverse sets of stakeholders. They also fail to acknowledge the systems of oppression that the technology is rooted in.

So we launched the radical AI podcast nine months ago in March of two thousand and twenty, and we chose to name a project Radical AI because we dreamt of creating a radical space to share the stories that tend to get left out of the conversation. We wanted to illuminate underrepresented stories in the A.I. and tech world, like systemic racism, ableism, sexism and other systems of unevenly distributed power that A.I. often perpetuates.

And because we knew that the word radical contained many histories and meanings and definitions in the space and beyond, the first goal of our project was to work in community to codifying what radical A.I. means in the present context, and then to figure out how we can use its vision to create a better future.

And as two PhD students rooted in values of curiosity, humility and hope for a better world, we began to interview dozens of scholars and the responsible tech community about what radical A.I. as a concept meant to them and what radical work might look like in A.I.. And thanks to the input of various leaders and the ethics and activist community, specifically the leadership in the radical A.I. project, our questions and goals for this project began to both broaden and sharpen. Our goal with this project became to resist harmful technologies and how they are created today through community building and collective storytelling and to continue to code define radical A.I..

And so this project in some ways began out of a certain level of ignorance, so we knew that there were these stories out there.

There were these experiences that colleagues or people that we looked up to were having out there. And besides certain, we're coming out of like the MIT Tech Review or some other more niche places. There wasn't really a central space for these stories to exist and for there to be a community around them or so we thought.

We started this.

We quickly learned as we began to speak to people that there were actually a lot of people out there who were telling these stories already. And these stories were continuing to grow and to change and transform communities. And there are there were so many activists and so many academics and people in industry who were already kind of doing this work that that we weren't aware of. And so our job became less, you know, less.

Create the activism ourselves, like be the activism at the center of anything, but more so to tell the stories of the awesome activism that's already happening, which is a way for us also to name that like radical and radical as a concept, has been around for a long time.

And so we are stepping into that shadow, but we are not necessarily driving that shadow. Right? We are we're stepping into that tradition and we want to be a part of it.

But we don't we're not naming ourselves as any sort of center within it.

So really, I think that last part that just you were saying is is right on that. Like our goal at this point, especially as students, is that we are trying to tell the stories of resistance to harmful technologies and to tell the stories of how those technologies are created today through community building and collective storytelling.

And so the core of what we're doing right now is the educational component.

And in a sense, that is the root of this project as PhD students and emerging academics, this is an academic pursuit. And I think originally our intention might have been, I don't want to say less academic, but I think our intention was to build a platform, build a community. And we soon realized that we didn't need to do that because the community was already there. But what we needed to do was tap into the community and become a part of it and to figure out and explore what this community really is, who the key players are and what everyone stands for. And that's something that we are still in active pursuit of. But it's, as academics, a really interesting pursuit for us because we no longer have to try to say that we have defined what this space is. And we no longer have to say that we have the solutions and we are no longer seeking to get the solutions for the community or to be, as Dylan was saying, the activists doing the on the ground work in this space. But our form of activism is this storytelling and education of radical AI and of ethics and responsible tech to the community at large. And I think our mission, at least I can speak for myself and maybe for both of us as academics. Part of our mission is to really just learn. And that's so much of what we do on this podcast, in these interviews with guests on this show throughout the last nine months is just learn and to see who the people in this community are and to see what this project can teach us. And so far, it's been a lot.

Yeah, I mean, I think we come from the premise that education isn't passive and it's not a political right to educate.

We're making a statement about about values and about the stories that need to be told. And our value statement is that the stories that need to be told are generally the ones that are not being told, the generally the ones that that are happening or being silenced in that.

And and I think that what personally, for us, like one of the biggest gifts that this project has given us, besides amazing conversations with wonderful leaders in the space, is that it's really forced us to hold up a mirror to ourselves as academics and as white academics, specifically to see the great privilege that we do wield and to ask ourselves, well, how what do we do with that responsibly?

And so I think for us, we don't always hit the mark. Right.

But I think for us that that's part of the personal element of this project, is us trying to wield that platform of academic privilege that we do have to tell the stories that are not being told. And I think, again, that's an ongoing it's an ongoing discernment of how of how to do academia well and how to do activism well and how to how to do this radical I project well, especially because we are stepping into that tradition that's been laid out by, you know, hundreds upon hundreds of people through decades. Yeah.

And one of the biggest goals for our project when we began was to find a way to disinter ourselves, which is, you know, a bit ironic and incredibly challenging and a project where we are literally at times the center of the project just based off of the nature of how a podcast works. You know, like we are we're hosting a podcast and we are creating a platform here. And we co-founded this organization together.

And yet we aren't necessarily the people who should be at the center of these conversations that we are hosting for our audience. And so how as hosts and as academics and as interrogators and interviewers, do we ask the questions that we want answers for?

Without introducing our own biases and introducing our own privilege and without censoring ourselves, really. And so I think I mean, you hit it right on Dylan. It starts with acknowledging where we come from and who we are and how that plays a role in what we do, but also with acknowledging that. We aren't the center of this project and we never seek to be, and we hope that we never will be. So I share the story now, right?

Like why at the end of the year, beginning of the next year? Well, you know, why should the story why talk about these different struggles that we're having personally and things like that with this project? And that's because I think that one of the gifts that.

Each of us can give to whatever space we inhabit is that gift of intentionality, and so our hope is that by some of our, you know, appropriate vulnerability around some of the struggles that we've had in this project and some of the ways that this project has evolved and we've evolved within it, that it's also can be an invitation for you wherever you are to, you know, take stock of of where you are, perhaps the privileges that you do have, and to join us in being even more intentional about how to navigate that privilege for the betterment of all and to make this this world better. And that can happen in the world, but it can also happen in any world that that you might inhabit. So to be clear, we are still in active exploration to define what radical work is in A.I. But now it's time for the surprise, just the best part of the holiday New Year's special, the spectacular spectacular extravaganza festival in Cannes.

But the highlight, the there's the Star spectacular part of the spectacular is to share a little bit about what we've learned so far.

And we thought about different ways of doing this.

You know, we thought about sharing different like lists. We thought about different like fun, end of the ranking things. But we decided to share this video. So we have prepared a video with selected audio from some of our first 50 interviews.

And we share these stories and ideas in this video with all of you. Not to say that we have agreed upon a definition of radical A.I., but to say that radically, AI is this rich tapestry of diverse beliefs and stories and dreams and actions and so much more.

And in many ways, our research over the course of this year has shown that perhaps it is that exact multiplicity of meanings that gives radically AI the enduring power to enact, change and transform status quo notions of justice and liberation. Maybe it's the fact that we don't have a common definition or don't mean we don't even want to get to a common definition of the real power is in radically AI as a concept and radical A.I. will always be a community led effort.

So as we close our New Year's spectacular episode, we want to share our gratitude for the wisdom and vision of the community members that have impacted the podcast, this project and our lives this year. So in a moment, you will hear the audio recording of podcast guests as they answer the question on our show.

What is radical A.I.? And following this episode, we invite you to view the show notes for a link to the video version of this project. Please share it as you feel called to.

Thank you, everyone, so much for such an amazing year of the radical A.I. podcast, we wish each and every one of you a happy and healthy New Year.

And as always. Stay radical.

How do I how do I define the word radical and transfer some something that's transformative, maybe honestly, like many times radical does not mean like different.

So different or or extraordinary. It just means bringing back, like, ideas is that, you know, things that are that are actually very ordinary. And for some reason, we have been brainwashed to think that they're not.

So I think radical is one of those double edged, like a double edged sword type of term. So on one hand, it can imply to people like kind of this unrealistic or extremist view. It's so but what I'm thinking about maybe radical, I'm just thinking about changing the status quo of a field or at least maybe insidiously putting certain ideas in the minds of people who might not otherwise be exposed to it.

I think for me, radical means looking at the world as it is and saying this could be different. An idea or a person is radical. If they can look at the status quo and say, hold on, that's not set in stone, that's not given.

That can be changed. Radical is foundationally about social transformation. It's about creating the conditions for foundational social and political change.

Is a black female researcher, I feel like my existence in the field is radical in and of itself. You know, there are not a lot of us in, though we're growing in numbers and visibility. There's still a huge deficit in the amount of people who look like me in the field.

But of course, radical also means a far reaching or on the fringes, a sort of a different perspective.

I would like to see sort of a version of I where from beginning to end there's opportunity or inclusion of the perspectives of the people outside of the traditional authority figures within the space. What would it actually look like to create a version of this technology where different people can kind of be involved? I guess people outside of the traditional locus of control are kind of invited in to get to participate and to define what that system actually does.

But often when people claim to be doing something radical, you know, if people are claiming too hard that what they're doing is radical, I think it often isn't. It's one of those words with big hype, like disruptive, right? Like in industry, everything is disruptive all the time to the point where I feel like it's sort of lost its meaning.

The word kindness is the word I'm going to use for the one word for radical.

I think radical to me is always questioning your assumptions, changing or transforming the way that we think about our social world and the way that our social world functions, such that we prioritize the lives and the needs of the most vulnerable and the historically marginalized and oppressed.

A change of system like an overhaul of system or a changing system outside of the system out a framework. So we're not working within the rules. We're trying to break that and, you know, and find something else. So for me, in that process, I think of like the radical as an expression of like potential. You know, like there's a potential for more outside.

I think how I'd like to define radical is non algorithmic thinking.

I did mentioned that I was a child, a teenager in the 80s. Right. So, I mean, so, so radical is something that was radical media. It's like it's like a slang for it's cool.

The first thing that comes to mind is the notion of free radicals, which I learned about years ago as a Mary Kay consultant that has something to do with skin care and whatnot. I think in this context, the concept of radical is something that deviates from the norm, something that is over the top off center, something that is above and beyond the term radical really evades kind of a fixed definition.

I think of it more as like a process or a verb.

I would define it as shoring up or finding unlikely connections, fundamental reimagining of our constructed reality because it is constructed based on critical inquiry, both internal and external.

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 MDAs, they often use it in a disparaging way, like, oh, that's too radical. Oh, that's a radical. And so I had this reaction when I was 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 is. Volz having to be if it involves being kind of collaborative or being adversarial, you know, I'm not OK with a world in which there's not room for all of us to thrive. And so that's kind of if that's what being a radical means, then I think all people should like radicals. Maybe in that sense, the radicals also a challenge to kind of think harder about. Am I including you? Am I including everybody's liberation in the vision of liberation that I'm working for? How can I challenge myself to do better about that?

And I think a radical political actor carries the banner, perhaps sometimes quite a bit of friction and anger to to call out what is not happening.

Radical means starting with people first valuing people over profit. That takes it could take a lot of different forms that that could take the form of questioning whose voices are involved in designing technology and system, specifically how historically marginalized groups of people might contribute to to shaping those systems.

Yeah, I mean, radical is such an energizing word for me, right? Like radical is sharply deviating from the norm, like not just deviated sharply.

Doing radical work begins with a shared understanding that there is a root problem. Society distributes power evenly growing from these roots to radical. I examines how I rearrange power and how to engage with the radical hope that our communities can dream up different human systems that help put power back in the hands of the people.

Yeah, I love the word radical, you know, because although it gets a bad rap to me at the most fundamental level, it's about drawing our attention to the root issues, the root causes, what often lies beneath everything else that we're talking around, like what are the fundamental issues that we should return to? And I like thinking about my work and in terms of a radical framing, because it's about questioning what we most take for granted. You know, like part of being social beings and being socialized is that you have to buy in to an agreement that, OK, we're not going to question X, Y and Z so we can get along so we can interact with each other. And so a radical conversation or a radical approach to something says, well, you know, we've been doing it like this for a while, maybe we should question it. Maybe it's not working for everyone. And it's disruptive in the sense that people don't like to question their long held beliefs and norms and and practices. But I think on a routine basis, it leads to a much healthier just world when we return to those starting principles and think, OK, is this still what are we still living up to our ideals? Are we still you know? And so as a sociologist that studies technology, part of it is to really push back against a technical fix for many of these problems that fail to address the root causes.

Right. And so it's not that technology inevitably remains at the surface or the superficial or the symptoms. It's not inevitable. But too often we get so enamored with the techno technical fix that we stop there and we don't dig deeper into what is actually giving rise to this problem that we're trying to fix. And so for me, radical A.I. is an A.I. that dissenters itself as part of any movement, as part of any solution. If we look to the A.I. to guide us or to the way that that mathematician did, or we look to the AI as like our, you know, our beacon, what we're trying to do is make it better rather than putting it in its place in terms of a larger social transformation, then it's not radical. Right, because what we need to think about is how to foster more just and loving human relationships.