Episoder
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This week Tom Ascott talks to Max Beverton-Palmer,
Director at the Internet Policy Unit at Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. The pair discuss the idea of an open internet and how cooperation can secure its future as well as how tech companies should regulate hostile governments and organisations online and finally end up discussing is Twitter should be subsidised! -
Welcome back to Season Two of Synthetic Society! To kick us off host Tom Ascott speaks with Nona Willis Aronowitz about femcels.
FemCels, short for female incels, are women unable or unwilling to have relationships due to a mix of societal pressures and misogyny.
The conversation draws on Nona's article 'The Femcel Revolution'.
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Manglende episoder?
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Kerryn Gammie and Tom Ascott discuss how archaic, colonial power structures have survived and turned into neo-colonialism, and how those structures continue to be pervasive online.
The pair reflect on ideas of justice, identity and equality and how we can bring these ideas to the world of business to make our work lives more equitable.
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Ben Decker, Founder and CEO of Memetica, talks to host Tom Ascott about the perils of misinformation on social media, if the Taliban should be allowed to have a Twitter account, and what the future of content moderation looks like.
Episode Resources:
https://www.twitterandteargas.org/
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Tom Ascott speaks to Giedrimas Jeglinskas, NATO Assistant Secretary General, and former Vice-Minister of Defence of Lithuania.
The pair discuss what role NATO plays in information ecosystems and how NATO can help combat disinformation, as well as how diversity and inclusion can generate new and creative solutions and the importance of diversity in supply chains.
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Can we make our data stronger, safer, and more secure by pooling it together? This week Tom Ascott speaks to Astha Kapoor, Co-Founder and Director of the AAPTI Institute in India.
They discuss how new ideas of data unions, data co-ops and data stewardship are providing a model for how citizens can come together and collectively bargain with the state and with private companies in order to get better services.
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What is time? This week Tom talks to Emily Thomas, a philosopher of time and travel, about how time and technology interact. They discuss how the timeline affects how we perceive time, if going on Twitter is like going on holiday, and the different ways technology might let us have experiences outside of time.
The pair also give an overview of the philosophy of C.D. Broad and the ideas of eternalism versus growing block theory and the idea of substantivalism and relationism.
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This week Tom explores how robotics and AI is changing our moral beliefs and practices with John Danaher.
John is a Senior Lecturer at NUI Galway School of Law, and philosopher behind Philosophical Disquisitions, a blog, and a podcast that focuses on the ethical and legal nexus of technology and philosophy.
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This episode Tom speaks to Areeq Chowdhury, the founder and director of WebRoots Democracy. WebRoots was a think tank focused on progressive and inclusive technology policy which ran for almost seven years.
The pair discuss digital voting, facial recognition software and if social media companies should pay a user-based tax to fund digital literacy and anti-discrimination initiatives.
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As the ways in which we can interact virtually increase, so do the ways that we can become victims of harassment. In video games, we need to design systems that help fight problematic and toxic behavior while still supporting a competitive atmosphere.
In this episode, Tom Ascott talks to Lucy Sparrow, a Ph.D. candidate with the Human-Computer Interaction Group (HCIG) at the University of Melbourne.
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Should we treat characters in games the same way we treat real people? Is it ethical to run over someone over in Grand Theft Auto? And what about us, does it say something about our moral character if we spend all day in our underwear playing games?
This week Tom Ascott speaks to Sebastian Ostritsch, Assistant Professor at Stuttgart University, about ethics in video games.
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What would a world look like if it was made by AI?
This week Mitchell Baxter, Director at Lazy Monday Games, explains how AI helps in designing video games. He and host Tom Ascott talk about where the technology is now, the challenges in balancing unique and bespoke art with generative assets, and the assistance that new technology offers to artists and designers.
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This week Tom Ascott speaks to Jacob Williamson about the business of AI.
The pair talk through the emerging markets for AI in different fields, boutique uses for AI, and if the market for AI is overheating!
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This week Tom Ascott talks with Kate Devlin a Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence at King's College London and author of Turned On.
The pair discusses the ethics and morality around sex robots and they touch on artificial intimacy, algorithmic attraction, and tackles the thorny question of should you say thank you to Alexa.
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Platforms could replace their metrics based on engagement and growth with metrics based on happiness, community strength and wellbeing. In this episode, Tom Ascott talks to Christine Jakobson, a tech ethics researcher, and consultant, about how platforms can respond to the growing issues of disinformation and online hate to create a more friendly timeline.
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Islamophobia has been wielded as a weapon to draw support from right wing actors as well as to disenfranchise Muslim populations.
In this episode Zahed Amanullah, a Resident Senior Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, explains how Islamophobia has been refined, amplified and duplicated into a process that is being used globally.
He and host Tom Ascott also touch on how governments can build trust in minority communities, conspiracy theories and if social media platforms are directly profiting off of hate speech.
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It’s taken us ten weeks but it’s finally time to address the elephant in the room: cryptocurrency!
This week Erica Stanford, founder of the Crypto Curry Club and author ‘Crypto Wars: Faked Deaths, Missing Billions and Industry Disruption’, talks Tom Ascott through everything crypto.
The episode starts with the basics of Bitcoin and ramps up to complex crypto issues!
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The internet has been a platform for creating new tools and engaging platforms. But these innovations are also being used by those who would seek to perpetrate violence against women.
In this episode Vaibhav Sahgal, a Senior Manager at The Economist Intelligence Unit, explains the problems that women face online and what solutions are on the horizon in the fight against online misogyny.
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Dr. Greenstein’s Memory, Affect, Decision-making (MAD) lab examines how emotions affect memory and decision-making, and this week he walks Tom Ascott through how anger online can increase our susceptibility to misinformation.
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In a future where it is increasingly difficult to tell authentic from synthetic, Anna Bulakh, Policy Advisor at Reface, gives a thoughtful roadmap to upcoming digital policy. She highlights the importance of baking safety and security into apps to future proof against any malicious use.
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