120: The Robopod With Meredith Whittaker
Night Call
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 564 Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2020
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Emily returns with tales of a haunted hotel she stayed at in Mobile, Alabama. Then it's the #babywitches who hexed the moon, followed by a listener email about the queer Sapphic aesthetics of cottagecore. This of course leads into some discussion of Taylor Swift's new album Folklore, and how in a way it's always fall right now. We read a listener email about the struggles of international students right now, and another about working in a plastic surgery clinic during the pandemic. Then the girls are joined by Meredith Whittaker - Research Professor and Co-founder of the AI Now Institute at NYU. After working at Google for over thirteen years Meredith helped lead the Google Walkouts to end AI contracts with the Department Of Defense. We talk to Meredith about racism in tech, the biased badness of algorithms, and the human beings behind most "artificial intelligence." And, of course, Robocop. How can we organize to prevent tech companies from say, building war machines for the government? Plus one hot but easy tip for avoiding facial recognition software at protests. All this on the all new Night Call!
Footnotes:
- Haunted Malaga Inn
- Moon hex explained
- Marianne Williamson moon hex tweet
- Why are people angry at witches on tik tok?
- Paper Mag on cottagecore
- Correction: Sean Penn's COVID test is CORE, not Curative
- Meredith and the Google walkout
- Facial recognition/surveillance in schools
- Meredith testifying before Congress
- The AI Now Institute
- Meredith Whittaker on Twitter
- Tech Workers Coalition
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.3 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.4 | It's 9.18 p.m. at the Malaga Inn. |
| 0:08.4 | And you're listening to Nightcall. |
| 0:14.3 | Hello and welcome to Nightcall, a call-in show for our dystopian reality. |
| 0:24.1 | My name is Emily Ishida and with me on the other line are Molly Lambert and |
| 0:30.6 | Tess Lynch. Also stay tuned because later in the show we have Meredith Whitaker, the research |
| 0:35.2 | professor and co-founder of the AI Now Institute at NYU. |
| 0:39.1 | She was also involved in the Google walkouts. She's awesome. So please stick around to hear her come by |
| 0:43.8 | later. Hi guys. But first, I'm back. I'm back from my trek across the country. Thank you |
| 0:51.0 | both for holding down the fort while I communed with the hereafter. |
| 0:57.0 | The hereafter highway. |
| 1:00.0 | Yeah, I did a six-day trip across the country and it wouldn't have been complete if I didn't stay at a ghost hotel my last night in Mobile, Alabama. |
| 1:15.6 | So I actually, I mean, I wish that I had a more colorful story to share with you because you guys are like, call us from the hotel. |
| 1:23.8 | Like, you know, tell us what it's like. |
| 1:25.6 | It was like, it was actually just like nice. |
| 1:27.4 | It was like a nice was actually just, like, nice. |
| 1:37.0 | It was like a nice kind of very southern style old hotel that was surprisingly affordable, which is why I went there. |
| 1:39.0 | I was like, there's got to be a scam. |
| 1:41.7 | That's the benefit of a ghost being present. I know. |
| 1:41.9 | I was like, what's the catch? |
| 1:44.0 | Because it's so nice. It was like one of the |
... |
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