The Good Robot
Join Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney as they ask the experts: what is good technology? Is ‘good’ technology even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? Each week, they invite scholars, industry practitioners, activists, and more to provide their unique perspective on what feminism can bring to the tech industry and the way that we think about technology. With each conversation, The Good Robot asks how feminism can provide new perspectives on technology’s biggest problems.
The Good Robot
AI Colonialism and Changing the Stories We Tell About Tech with Karen Hao
In this episode we chat to Karen Hao, a prominent tech journalist who focuses on the intersections of AI, data, politics and society. Right now she’s based in Hong Kong as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal on China, tech and society; before this, she conducted a number of high profile investigations for the MIT tech review. In our interview we chat about her series on AI colonialism and how tech companies reproduce older colonial patterns of violence and extraction; why both insiders and outside specialists in AI ethics struggle to make AI more ethical when they’re competing with Big Tech’s bottom line; why companies engaging user attitudes isn’t enough, since we can’t really ever ‘opt out’ of certain products and systems; and her hopes for changing up the stories we tell about the Chinese tech industry.