John Danaher, Senior Lecturer in Law at NUI Galway, discusses his new book, Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World Without Work.   On the season finale of Technology & Prose, John Danaher joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about the meaning of work (1:13), the automatability and automation of work (2:36), why we should welcome automation — the case for technological unemployment (10:02), the gig economy, Uber, and the limits to improving the conditions of work (13:25), building a post-work future - the ‘cyborg utopia’ and the ‘virtual utopia’ (19:25), problems with cyborg ..read more

Sushma Raman, Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, discusses her new book, The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights (co-authored with Bill Schulz).     On this episode of Technology & Prose, Sushma Raman joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about the meaning and role of human rights in the Good Society (1:45), the tension between strengthening existing rights and recognising new rights (4:30), Big Data, surveillance and the right to privacy (5:54), intercultural perspectives on the right to privacy and human right ..read more

Aaron Roth, Professor of Computer Science at UPenn, discusses his recent book, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design.   On this episode of Technology & Prose, Aaron Roth joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about the importance of ethical algorithm design (1:34), differential privacy and designing privacy-preserving algorithms (6:09), the costs and trade-offs of designing for privacy (10:38), application of differential privacy by Apple, Google and the 2020 US Census (14:13), GANs and synthetic data (18:22), designing fair algorithms, the ProPublica COMPA ..read more

William Magnuson discusses his latest book, Blockchain Democracy: Technology, Law and the Rule of the Crowd   On this episode of Technology & Prose, William Magnuson, Associate Professor of Law at Texas A&M, joins host Nikita Aggarwal to discuss Satoshi Nakomoto and the genesis of bitcoin (1:40), the history of the internet, the Cypherpunk movement and early cryptocurrencies (4:00), the 2008 financial crisis and the socio-political drivers of bitcoin (9:57), bitcoin and blockchain as technologies of democracy, the role of miners and cryptocurrency exchanges (12:44), Mt. Gox and cr ..read more

Sam Woolley discusses his new book, The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth.   On this episode of Technology & Prose, Sam Woolley, Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism at UT Austin, joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about computational propaganda (comprop), mis- and disinformation (1:43) how the term ‘fake news’ has been weaponised by despots (4:46) the ‘Reality Game’ and how comprop has distorted the truth, increased polarisation and decreased trust in institutions (6:30) the key perpetrators of comprop (9:05) grassroots v astroturfing and t ..read more

Nick Diakopoulos discusses his latest book, Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media. On this episode of Technology & Prose, Nick Diakopoulos, Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Computer Science at Northwestern University, joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about how AI is being used in the news media (1:43) the use of AI for story discovery and the Lead Locator project (5:15) hybrid human-AI journalism (8:23) defining “newsworthiness” and the risk of selection bias in data-driven journalism (10:53) data science skills and the need for more interdisciplinar ..read more

Gary Marcus, Professor Emeritus at NYU and co-founder of Robust.ai, discusses his recent book Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust.   On this episode of Technology & Prose, Gary Marcus joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about the “AI chasm”— the gap between the goals and reality of artificial intelligence (1:40) GPT-3 and the limits of deep learning (4:38) how to build AI systems that have knowledge, reasoning and understanding (9:14) the politics of AI research (and more on the limits of GPT-3) (16:00) innate knowledge in machines and the need for a hybrid appr ..read more

Ben Green discusses The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim our Urban Future. On this episode of Technology & Prose, Ben Green joins host Nikita Aggarwal to discuss (1:17) tech solutionism and the dangers of viewing urban problems as technology problems (4:09) the shortcomings of Open Data initiatives (7:33) the unintended costs of self driving cars (12:35) the "smart city trap", and the role of technology companies in hyping up the idea of smart cities (16:49) the shelving of the Sidewalk Labs Toronto Waterfront project, public-private partnerships, privacy and p ..read more

Professor of law and medicine Ryan Abbott discusses The Reasonable Robot, a fascinating new book on artificial intelligence and the law. On this episode of Technology and Prose, Ryan Abbott joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about the principle of AI legal neutrality (1:23), AI inventions and patent law (2:23), the AI Inventor Project and AI patent cases (5:12), Uber's Arizona accident and liability for self-driving cars (12:52), the 'reasonable robot' standard of liability (14:58), the end of human drivers? (21:55), AI for healthcare and liability for harm (26:00), AI exceptionalism (28:46 ..read more

Lawyer, writer and researcher Tim Hwang discusses his provocative new book, Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet   On the first episode of Technology & Prose, Tim Hwang joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about the digital and programmatic advertising market (1:39), why the attention being sold for digital advertising is garbage (5:32), similarities with the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis (10:18), digital vs traditional advertising (12:32), the myth of online manipulation (15:36), digital advertising fraud (16:55), regulating digital adve ..read more