Episodes
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AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can't afford or can't access treatment, and even invent new psychiatric drugs. But the hype obscures an unnerving reality. In The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum (MIT Press, 2025), Daniel Oberhaus tells the inside story of how the quest to use AI in psychiatry has created the conditions to turn the world into an asylum. Most of these systems, he writes, have vanishingly little evidence that they improve patient outcomes, but the risks they pose have less to do with technological shortcomings than with the application of deeply flawed psychiatric models of mental disorder at unprecedented scale.
Oberhaus became interested in the subject of mental health after tragically losing his sister to suicide. In The Silicon Shrink, he argues that these new, ostensibly therapeutic technologies already pose significant risks to vulnerable people, and they won't stop there. These new breeds of AI systems are creating a psychiatric surveillance economy in which the emotions, behavior, and cognition of everyday people are subtly manipulated by psychologically savvy algorithms that have escaped the clinic. Oberhaus also introduces readers to the concept of “swipe psychology,” which is quickly establishing itself as the dominant mode of diagnosing and treating mental disorders.
It is not too late to change course, but to do so means we must reckon with the nature of mental illness, the limits of technology, and what it means to be human.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World (Verso, 2024) by Marijiam Did asks if videogames can achieve egalitarian goals instead of fuelling hyper-materialist, reactionary agendas. Combining cultural theory and materialist critiques with accessible language and personal anecdotes, industry insider Marijam Did engages both novices and seasoned connoisseurs. From the innovations of Pong and Doom to the intricate multiplayer or narrative-driven games, the author highlights the multifaceted stories of the gaming communities and the political actors who organise among them. Crucially, the focus also includes the people who make the games, shedding light on the brutal processes necessary to bring titles to the public.
The videogame industry, now larger than the film and music industries combined, has a proven ability to challenge the status quo. With a rich array of examples, Did argues for a nuanced understanding of gaming’s influence so that this extraordinary power can be harnessed for good.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are being championed as forces for good and as solutions to the complex challenges of the aid sector.
Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful (Polity, 2024) argues, however, that digital innovation engenders new forms of violence and entrenches power asymmetries between the global South and North. Dr. Madianou develops a new concept, technocolonialism, to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures, state power and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial legacies. The concept of technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that digital infrastructures, data and AI play in accentuating inequities between aid providers and people in need.
Drawing on ten years of research on the uses of digital technologies in humanitarian operations, Dr. Mirca Madianou examines a range of practices: from the normalization of biometric technologies and the datafication of humanitarian operations to experimentation in refugee camps, which are treated as laboratories for technological pilots. In so doing, the book opens new ground in the fields of humanitarianism and critical AI studies, and in the debates in postcolonial studies, by highlighting the fundamental role of digital technologies in reworking colonial genealogies.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these technologies don’t obey, or worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods. And yet, we also yearn for their convenience, see ourselves reflected in them, and treat them as something entirely new. But when we overestimate the automation of these tools, award-winning author Antonio A. Casilli argues, we fail to recognize how our fellow humans are essential to their efficiency. The danger is not that robots will take our jobs, but that humans will have to do theirs.
In this bracing and powerful book, Antonia A. Casilli uses up-to-the-minute research to show how today’s technologies, including AI, continue to exploit human labor—even ours. He connects the diverse activities of today’s tech laborers: platform workers, like Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts; “micro workers,” including those performing atomized tasks like data entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk; and the rest of us, as we evaluate text or images to show we’re not robots, react to Facebook posts, or approve or improve the output of generative AI. As Casilli shows us, algorithms, search engines, and voice assistants wouldn’t function without unpaid or underpaid human contributions. Further, he warns that if we fail to recognize this human work, we risk a dark future for all human labor.
Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation (U Chicago Press, 2025) urges us to move beyond the simplistic notion that machines are intelligent and autonomous. As the proverbial Godot, robots are the bearers of a messianic promise that is always postponed. Instead of bringing prosperity for all, they discipline the workforce, so we don’t dream of a world without drudgery and exploitation. Casilli’s eye-opening book makes clear that most “automation” requires human labor—and likely always will—shedding new light on today’s consequences and tomorrow’s threats of failing to recognize and compensate the “click workers” of today.
Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about the negotiation that humans make between oneself, identification of place, and the attachment/s they have to those places. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social),Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email ([email protected])
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What are numbers, and where do they come from? Based on her groundbreaking study of material devices used for counting in the Ancient Near East, Karenleigh Overmann proposes a novel answer to these timeless questions.
Tune in as we talk with Karenleigh Overmann about her book, The Material Origin of Numbers: Insights from the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (Gorgias Press, 2024).
Karenleigh Overmann earned a doctorate in archaeology from the University of Oxford, and is research fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway.
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This conversation includes James Boyle, Duke University; Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, UPR-M; Héctor José Huyke, UPR-M, and Natalia Bustos, UPR-M.
This is the first of two episodes about The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood. The second, in Spanish, will appear on the New Books Network en español. The series is sponsored by the Encuentros descoloniales focal group at Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at UPRM, a group of scholars who consider how decolonial approaches can provide nuance in scientific knowledge.
This episode and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at the UPRM have been supported by the Mellon Foundation. The conversation is part of the “STEM to STEAM” project of the “Cornerstone” initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, which stresses the importance of integrating humanistic perspectives in the sciences.
The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood is available online for free through the MIT website per the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License.
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Peoples and Things host, Lee Vinsel, is joined by guest host and Peoples & Things producer, Joe Forte, Media Projects Manager with Virginia Tech Publishing, in interviewing Marshall Poe, the founder and editor of the New Books Network, the largest academic podcasting platform in the world. The trio discuss how the New Books Network came to be; how digital technologies open up new tools for academic work; changing media landscapes, including the recent bursting of a podcasting bubble; and the future of academic communication and publishing.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology
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Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to turn modernity's wheels. Wars are fought over it. Some communities are displaced by its extraction, so that others may reap its benefits. But despite its heated history, few will ever see oil on the ground. Shrouded within a labyrinth of oil fields, pipelines, and manufacturies, it tends to be known only through its magical effects: the thrill of the road, the euphoria of flight, and the metamorphic allure of everything from vinyl records to celluloid film and synthetic clothing.
In Oil (Bloomsbury, 2024), Dr. Michael Tondre shows how hydrocarbon became today's pre-eminent power. How did oil come to structure selfhood and social relations? And to what extent is oil not only a commercial product but a cultural one-something shaped by widely imagined dreams and desires? Amid a warming world unleashed by fossil fuels, oil appears as a rich resource for thinking about histories of globalization and technology no less than the energetic underpinnings of literature, film, and art.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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If you walk into David Cecchetto‘s classroom, you might find people wearing audio devices that simulate hearing with a thousand-foot wide head. Or gadgets that swap their ears so that the left ear hears what the right should and vice versa. David is a media theorist who draws on his background as an artist/musician, to create what he calls “engagements,” strange sonic experiments that help him—and his students—understand the nature of our computer-driven lives.
In this episode, we feature an extended chat with David about his recent book, Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke University Press). It’s a book about the eternal impossibility of communication and the texture of that impossibility in our current computer-mediated age. David says we live in the afterlife of data, by which he means we know that our data-driven representations of the world don’t really capture the reality of our inner or outer lives, and we know that algorithms perpetuate injustices of all sorts—and yet, we still live our lives as if we do believe in the data. And this is where his engagements come in, the sonic experiments that confront the distortions and fallacies and textures of a data-driven life.
David Cecchetto is Professor of Critical Digital Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, he’s President of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. He wrote the book Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (2013) and he’s co-authored and edited several others.
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This special episode features a discussion between Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society substack newsletter and Executive Director of the Christian Studies Center of Gainesville, Florida. In the first part, Sacasas gives a presentation - riffing on the title of Martin Heidegger’s famous essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” - on the question of the human, which may be more interesting than endless debates about the definition of “technology.” Then Vinsel gives his own presentation before the pair discuss the similarities and differences of their views. The episode includes a live Q&A with audience members. This episode was recorded as a live event at the Bradley Study Center, a Christian studies center at Virginia Tech. Special thanks to Bradley Study Center for making the event possible, especially to its Executive Director Mike Weaver.
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Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562.
In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.
Elizabeth King, a sculptor and writer, is professor emerita of sculpture and extended media at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond. W. David Todd is associate curator emeritus and former conservator of timekeeping at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is also a collections management intern in the public sector.
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The surprising history of the Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer of the 1980s—the machine that taught the world that computing should be fun.
The Commodore 64 (C64) is officially the best-selling desktop computer model of all time, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. It was also, from 1985 to 1993, the platform for which most video games were made. But although it sold at least twice as many units as other home computers of its time, such as the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, or Commodore Amiga, it is strangely forgotten in many computer histories. In Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer (MIT Press, 2024), Jesper Juul argues that the C64 was so popular because it was so versatile, a machine developers and users would reinvent again and again over the course of 40 years.
First it was a serious computer, next a game computer, then a computer for showcasing technical brilliance (graphical demos using the machine in seemingly impossible ways), then a struggling competitor, and finally a retro device whose limitations are now charming. The C64, Juul shows, has been ignored by history because it was too much fun. Richly illustrated in full color, this book is the first in-depth examination of the C64's design and history, and the first to integrate US and European histories. Containing interviews with Commodore engineers as well as an insightful look at C64 games, music, and software, Too Much Fun will appeal to those who used a Commodore 64, those interested in the history of computing and video games and computational literacy, or just those who wish their technological devices would last longer.
Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.
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An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself.
In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine (MIT Press, 2024) takes a novel critical platform studies approach, raising deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how does that relationship in part determine what “counts” as the platform itself? Malazita also offers a forward-looking critique of the platform studies framework itself.
The Unreal platform serves as a kind of technical and political archive of the games industry, highlighting how the techniques and concerns of games have shifted and accreted over the past 30 years. Today, Unreal is also used in contexts far beyond games, including in public communication, biomedical research, civil engineering, and military simulation and training. The author's depth of technical analysis, combined with new archival findings, contributes to discussions of topics rarely covered in games studies (such as the politics of graphical rendering algorithms), as well as new readings of previously “closed” case studies (such as the engine's entanglement with the US military and American masculinity in America's Army). Culture, Malazita writes, is not “built into” software but emerges through human practices with code.
Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Titel kulturmagazin, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.
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It’s the UConn Popcast, and Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 sci fi movie, is a provocative examination of what an updated Turing test for a super-capable AI might look like, if the designer of the test was a megalomaniacal tech-mogul / genius. The movie, starring Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander, is a rich and often confounding text, which seems to posit a horrifying possibility: what if the real alignment problem is teaching AI the worst of humanity’s manipulative and instrumental traits?
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How can states use military force to achieve their political aims without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war? Among the states facing this dilemma of fighting limited wars, only China has given information-age weapons such a prominent role. While other countries have preferred the traditional options of threatening to use nuclear weapons or fielding capabilities for decisive conventional military victories, China has instead chosen to rely on offensive cyber operations, counter-space capabilities, and precision conventional missiles to coerce its adversaries.
In Under the Nuclear Shadow: China's Information-Age Weapons in International Security (Princeton UP, 2024), Fiona Cunningham examines this distinctive aspect of China’s post–Cold War deterrence strategy, developing an original theory of “strategic substitution.” When crises with the United States highlighted the inadequacy of China’s existing military capabilities, Cunningham argues, China pursued information-age weapons that promised to provide credible leverage against adversaries rapidly.
Drawing on hundreds of original Chinese-language sources and interviews with security experts in China, Cunningham provides a rare and candid glimpse from Beijing into the information-age technologies that are reshaping how states gain leverage in the twenty-first century. She offers unprecedented insights into China’s military modernization trajectory as she details the strengths and weaknesses of China’s strategic substitution approach. Under the Nuclear Shadow also looks ahead at the uncertain future of China’s strategic substitution approach and briefly explores too how other states might seize upon the promise of emerging technologies to address weaknesses in their own military strategies.
Our guest today is Fiona S. Cunningham, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Sue Ollerhead. Dr. Ollerhead is currently a Senior Lecturer in Languages and Literacy Education and the Director of the Secondary Education Program at Macquarie University. Her expertise lies in English language and literacy learning and teaching in multicultural and multilingual education contexts. Her research interests include translanguaging, multilingual pedagogies, literacy across the curriculum and oracy development in schools.
Dr. Ollerhead is currently editor of TESOL in Context, the peer reviewed journal of the Australian Council of TESOL Associations. She serves on the executive board of the English as a Medium of Instruction Centre (EMI) at Macquarie University.
Brynn and Sue chat about an article that Sue has recently written for the Australian Association for Research in Education entitled “Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn. Does AI?”. They discuss the emergence of AI platforms like ChatGPT and how these platforms are affecting teacher training.
A wonderful companion read to this episode is Distinguished Ingrid Piller’s Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building.
If you liked this episode, check out more resources on technology and language: Will technology make language rights obsolete?; the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us; and Are language technologies counterproductive to learning?
If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.
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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Joshua Brinkman, Assistant Teaching Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at North Carolina State University, about his book, American Farming Culture and the History of Technology (Routledge, 2024). The book provides a fascinating exploration about how American farmers–contrary to their image as backwards and even anti-technology–have prided and put forward images of themselves as existing on the technological cutting-edge of modernity. Brinkman examines how different ideologies of farming have developed over time in the United States and how these ideologies have shaped the adoption of and ideas around new agricultural technologies. In addition to his academic work, Brinkman is also an accomplished saxophonist and jazz musician, and you can find recordings from two of his current bands, the Fabulous Nite-Life Boogie and Les Trois Chats, online.
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As Twitter enters its own adolescence, both the users and the creators of this famous social media platform find themselves engaging with a tool that certainly could not have been imagined at its inception. In their engaging book Twitter: A Biography (NYU Press, 2020), Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym (@nancybaym) tell the fascinating and surprising story of how this platform developed from a quirky SMS tool for publicly sharing intimate details of personal life to a major source of late-breaking news, political activism, and even governmental communication. This story explores how many of Twitter's most ubiquitous and iconic conventions were not systematically rolled out from a centralized corporate strategy, but so often driven by users who continued to innovate within the limitations of the platform they had to democratically create the platform they desired. Yet this story highlights the tensions along the way as Twitter has adapted to new and unforeseen challenges, business models, and social consequences as the experiments of social media have become increasingly powerful, influential, and contested. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the wild and changing landscape of internet communication and communities.
Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.
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This episode is based upon three readings:
Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence aka The Turing Test paper. Turing starts his paper by asking “can machines think?” before deciding that’s a meaningless question. Instead, he invents something he calls “the imitation game” - a text conversation where the player has to guess whether they are chatting with another person or with an AI. ChatGPT was such a bombshell because it easily and consistently passes this “Turing Test” by giving human-like responses to questions. Here’s the issue: the Turing Test is based upon AI deception, not thinking. Turing set out to ask Can Machines Think? and ended up showing how easily AI can deceive us.
Karel Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. This is the first AI Takeover story. It’s a play written in 1920 about a factory manufacturing artificial persons. Čapek introduced the word Robot to the English language - it’s derived from robota, a Czech word meaning forced labor. Čapek’s robots are supposed to be the ultimate workers, free from distracting human needs and desires. Yet, they mysteriously start to glitch, gnashing their teeth, freezing up. When they are given guns and asked to fight humanity’s wars, they become super soldiers as well as perfect workers. Anyone who has seen Blade Runner, The Terminator, or Battlestar Galactica - all inspired by Čapek’s play - knows what happens next. Rossum’s Universal Robots is the original AI takeover story, as well as being a dead-on satire of twentieth century ideas like Fordism and nationalism.
Joanna Bryson’s Robots Should be Slaves. Bryson, a computer scientist, makes a provocative intervention into AI ethics. She argues that as AI becomes more advanced, and robots more lifelike, we are going to get dangerously confused: we’ll want to give robots rights that they cannot and should not have. Bryson argues that robots are owned by us and should be seen and used as property. She wants to avoid conflating the human and the mechanical, yet, by using the terminology of slavery, she introduces into the AI debate the very thing she seeks to deny - the concept of human rights.
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As part of our informal series on artificial intelligence, Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Beane, Assistant Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, about his book The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in the Age of Intelligent Machines (HarperCollins, 2024).
Beane outlines the fascinating forms of research he did - both his own ethnographic work and reanalyzing the data of other ethnographers - to better understand how automating technologies are being adopted in organizational settings and how such adoption may threaten traditional mentor-mentee relationships through which junior workers learn crucial skills. Beane also discusses ways in which the worst negative skill-learning outcomes may be avoided and his own work trying to create new training systems to improve our current situation.
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