For our sixth and final Wintermas podcast episode, in Episode 24 we end on an uplifting note by doing a deep dive into the book How to Live a Good Life: A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy.
For our fifth Wintermas podcast episode, in Episode 23 we explore the origins and mentality we have with the Internet and associated technologies–we do this by diving into the book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov.
For our fourth Wintermas podcast episode, in Episode 22 we critique the advice that we should specialize in one field or skill and dedicate as many hours as possible in training or work in order to achieve maximum success or performance. This topic is especially important in our techno-postmodern hyperspecialized world. We’ll explore these questions by doing a deep dive into the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, written by David Epstein.
For our third Wintermas podcast episode, in Episode 21 we’ll discuss examples of how we are building AI systems and what can and is going wrong with the AI systems being developed, sold, and used today. And, of course, true to the many examples we’ve covered in previous TechnoSlipstream podcast episodes, we’ll see that creating and designing technologies is not just a technical problem–it’s a human problem as well, and unfortunately that human element is often left out of technical and engineering designs and discussions. To motivate our look at AI and human values we’ll do a deep dive into the book The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values written by Brian Christian.
For our second Wintermas podcast episode, in Episode 20 I explore the unintended consequences of a technology you and I use every day – email. We’ll ground our discussions with Cal Newport’s new book, A World Without Email. In this episode we’ll see why email at first seemed like a good idea, but has really wreaked havoc with our productivity, time, and health. As a potential bright side, we’ll also look at a few things we can do to regain control of email and our lives.
In Episode 18 we take a retrospective look at stem cell research with an eye on scientific innovation, who benefits, who should, and how much is the science worth? For our grounding we dive into Ruha Benjamin’s book People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier.
Continue readingThe goal of the TechnoSlipstream Podcast is to help you navigate complex technologies and their impacts on society through analysis and critique. We take deep dives into research, books, news, and articles with a focus on exploring the complex and powerful technologies being developed and pushed into the world with sometimes beneficial but often unintended consequences.
Help us create technocritiques for a future worth wanting