Did you miss FAccT? We interviewed some of our favourite session organisers! More like this: Part One of our FAccT roundup: Materiality and Militarisation . Georgia, Soizic, and Hanna from The Maybe team just went to FAccT. Georgia and Soizic interviewed a bunch of amazing researchers, practitioners, and artists to give you a taste of what the conference was like if you didn’t get to go. Alix missed it too — you’ll learn along with her! In part two we look into how AI is used to misrepresent peo...
Jul 25, 2025•51 min•Ep. 66
In May, Grok couldn’t stop talking about white genocide. This injection of right-wing South African politics triggered a conversation with a Musk contemporary, Nic Dawes. In this short Nic shares his perspective on how post-apartheid white communities have dealt with apartheid’s end. And how Musk is basically seeking out an information environment that can recreate the apartheid information system: Grok is just an extension of a media ecosystem designed to soothe guilt and stoke resentment. Comp...
Jul 23, 2025•14 min•Ep. 65
Georgia, Soizic, and Hanna from The Maybe team just went to FAccT. Georgia and Soizic interviewed a bunch of amazing researchers, practitioners, and artists to give you a taste of what the conference was like if you didn’t get to go. Alix missed it too — you’ll learn along with her! In part one we explore the depth of AI’s hidden material impacts, including its use in military applications and to aid genocide. One of our interviewees talked about why they spoke up at the town hall — questioning ...
Jul 18, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 64
AI Now have just released their 2025 AI Landscape report — Artificial Power . Alix sat down with two of it’s authors, Amba Kak and Sarah Myers-West for a light unpacking of the themes within. This report isn’t a boring survey of what AI Now have been doing this year; it’s a comprehensive view of the state of AI, and the concentrated powers that prop it up. What are the latest AI-shaped solutions that the hype guys are trying to convince us are real? And how can we reclaim a positive agenda for i...
Jul 11, 2025•38 min•Ep. 63
Felienne Hermans calls herself an ‘involuntary ethnographer of computer science’. She studies the culture behind programming, and challenges the dominant idea that learning to program has to be painful. Alix and Felienne chat about the history of programming and how it went from multidisciplinary and inclusive, to masochistic and exclusive. They also dig into all the ways it excludes women and people who do not speak English. Further reading & resources: Scratch — a high level programming la...
Jul 04, 2025•55 min•Ep. 62
Smart people focused on technology politics issues get it. We trade high level helpful concepts like surveillance capitalism, automated inequality, and enshittification. And even as some of these ideas are making it more mainstream, normies aren’t getting the message. We need stories for that. But how? How do we take the technical jargon and high-level concepts that dominate tech narratives and instead create stories that are personal, relatable, and powerful? And how do we combat the amazing he...
Jun 27, 2025•46 min•Ep. 61
There has been an intentional and systematic narrative push that tells governments they are not good enough to provide their own public infrastructure or regulate tech companies that provide it for them. Shocking: these narratives stem from large tech companies, and this represents what Marietje Schaake refers to as a Tech Coup — which is the title of her book (which you should buy!). The Tech Coup refers to the inability of democratic policymakers to provide oversight, regulation, and even visi...
Jun 20, 2025•38 min•Ep. 60
This episode contains some descriptions of torture methods, automated human targeting by machines, and psychological warfare throughout Last week Alix hosted a live show in Mexico City right after REAL ML . Four panellists discussed a huge important topic, which has been wrongfully deemed as taboo by other conferences: the use of AI and other technologies to support the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Here’s a preview of what the four speakers shared: Karen Palacio AKA kardaver gave us an overvie...
Jun 13, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 59
Adele Walton’s new book *Logging Off: The Human Cost of our Digital World * is out NOW — for this week’s episode Alix sat down with her to discuss the book, and what pushed her to write it. Adele shares her experiences of using social media from age ten, and growing up only ever feeling ‘understood’ by her followers. And now, the constant ‘how can I make content out of this??’ mindset has followed her into adult life. Adele has been severely effected by online harms through the loss of her siste...
Jun 06, 2025•44 min•Ep. 58
Sam Altman is doing another big infrastructure push with World (previously Worldcoin) — the universal human verification system. We had journalist Billy Perrigo on to chat what’s what with World. Is Sam Altman just providing a solution to a problem that he himself caused with OpenAI? Do we really need human verification, or is this just a way to side-step the AI content watermarking issue? Further reading & resources: The Orb Will See You Now by Billy Perrigo The ethical implications of AI a...
Jun 04, 2025•21 min•Ep. 57
Most of the time we interview people who say No to AI. In this interview, Georgia and Alix talk to two people who look at AI and ask How and For What. And lots of other questions too. Divya Siddarth and Zarinah Agnew from the Collective Intelligence Project share CIP’s work using AI systems to explore more consultative democratic governance, how to reframe the social and relational of knowledge, to pull our thinking out of the individual frame and into collective and communal applications. In Za...
May 30, 2025•55 min•Ep. 56
We’re excited to finally share our report on data center expansion and resistance around the world. It’s been a labor of love, but also showcases the amazing work of many organisations, activists, and journalists around the world that are working to create space for meaningful consultation about hugely consequential decisions. Download it here . In short, the report includes five case studies on data centre development across the globe. We were focused on understanding how companies approach pol...
May 23, 2025•54 min•Ep. 55
Last year, Elon Musk’s xAI built a data centre in Memphis in 19 days — and the local government only found out about it on the 20th day. How? Julie McCarthy and her team at NatureFinance have just released a report about the nature-related impacts of data center development globally. There are some pretty dire statistics in there: 55% of data centers are developed in areas that are already at risk of drought. So why do they get built there? Julie also shares the longer arc of her career, which b...
May 16, 2025•53 min•Ep. 54
This is another Computer Says Maybe short, this time with Marietje Schaake (author of The Tech Coup ), to discuss OpenAI’s recent announcement : they want to partner with governments all around the world to build ‘democratic AI rails’ — sounds bad! Computer Says Maybe Shorts bring in experts to give their ten-minute take on recent news. If there’s ever a news story you think we should bring in expertise on for the show, please email pod@saysmaybe.com Marietje Schaake is a non-resident Fellow at ...
May 15, 2025•14 min•Ep. 53
Personalised genotyping company 23andMe just went bankrupt — what’s gonna happen to all that genetic data? We brought back genomics professor Jenny Reardon to discuss the crushing void that was 23andMe’s business model — and that many companies like it have failed before. This is a Computer Says Maybe Short, where we bring in an expert to give their take on recent news. If there’s ever a news story you think we should bring in expertise on for the show, please email pod@saysmaybe.com Further rea...
May 13, 2025•15 min•Ep. 52
This is our second Terra Nullius episode. As a reminder this means ‘Nobody’s Land’ — an infamous legal fiction from the age of Empire. In this episode we ask: who owns the skies? We get into it with law professor Julia Powles, who shares her research and perspective on the accelerating prospect of drone delivery companies taking over the skies. What? Yeah we had the same reaction. In the future a drone could deliver your morning coffee to you in minutes, neighbors be damned. As ever, tech bros a...
May 09, 2025•53 min•Ep. 51
This is our first in a series called Terra Nullius. Huh? It’s Latin for ‘Nobody’s Land’. We will be exploring how rules are made for contested territory. If a land belongs to no one, does that mean it’s just up for grabs? This week we’re starting with outer space, speaking with an expert in space law, Heather Allansdottir. But why should we care about space when the planet we are standing on is falling to shreds? Currently, outer space belongs to no one. We have an Outer Space Treaty which was d...
May 02, 2025•49 min•Ep. 50
Child safety is a fuzzy catch-all concept for our broader social anxieties that seems to be everywhere in our conversations about the internet. But child safety isn’t a new concept, and the way our politics focuses on the spectacle isn’t new either. To help us unpack this is Kate Sim, who has over a decade of experience in sexual violence prevention and response and is currently the Director of the Children’s Online Safety and Privacy Research (COSPR) program at the University of Western Austral...
Apr 25, 2025•48 min•Ep. 49
This week Alix interviewed David Seligman, Executive Director of Towards Justice, to tell us more about how big tech companies act brazenly as legal bullies to extract wealth and power from the working class in the US. He makes a compelling case for the urgent need to re-orient our thinking about political power and organise against it. We talk about legal devices like forced arbitration and monopolistic practices like algorithmic price fixing and wage suppression. And we dig into the existentia...
Apr 18, 2025•46 min•Ep. 48
Last week Alix was in London to talk UK politics and broligarchy with four amazing guests: Martha Dark from Foxglove gave us the history and implications of the NHS/Palantir partnership of horror Matt Mahmoudi outlined the UK’s push to amp up facial recognition surveillance and to outlaw protests (seems good) Seyi Akiwowo shared a retrospective of the development of the Online Safety Act — the UK’s online speech regulation meant to protect kids Tanya O’Carroll did a victory lap, sharing details ...
Apr 11, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 47
Amidst the scrambling of geopolitics, there is increasing conversation and momentum for the concept of tech sovereignty. It basically means that countries should build their own technology rather than rely on Silicon Valley. India Stack! Euro Stack! Everyone wants a stack. In this episode we explore India’s work over the last 20 years to build ‘digital public infrastructure’ or DPI. They went YOLO on a digital ID system in a country of 1 billion people — with very mixed results. Did this ‘public...
Apr 04, 2025•50 min•Ep. 46
Two years ago, we were told that ‘prompt engineer’ would be a real job — well, it’s not. Is generative AI actually going to replace and transform human labour, or is this just another shallow marketing narrative? This week Alix speaks with Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra Mateescu, who recently authored Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work . They discuss how automation is now being used as a threat against workers, and how certain types of labour are being devalued by AI — especially...
Mar 28, 2025•43 min•Ep. 45
This week Alix is speaking with her long-time friend and collaborator Carly Kind, who is now the privacy commissioner of Australia. Here’s something you may be embarrassed to ask: what does a privacy commissioner even do? We got you… Alix and Carly will discuss how privacy regs bump up against current trends in AI, how to incentivise compliance, and the limits of Australian privacy laws. **Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that yo...
Mar 21, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 44
This week producer Georgia joins Alix to discuss something huge that we’ve yet to go deep on: the prevalence of trans misogyny online. This episode is jam-packed with four amazing guests to guide us through this rough terrain: Shivani Dave is a journalist and commentator who uses social media for their career and income. They share their experiences with receiving hate online, and having to balance posting against hits to their mental health Alice Hunsberger is a trust & safety professional ...
Mar 14, 2025•53 min•Ep. 43
This week Alix interviewed Catherine Bracy on her book World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalising the Economy . Support Catherine’s work and buy it NOW. Venture capital wasn’t always how it is today. But now it’s a driver of inequality, political and economic instability, and insufferable personalities. How did we get here and what might come next? In this conversation Catherine outlines her views on our current political moment and the role of VC in it. We’ve all got feelings about VCs,...
Mar 07, 2025•48 min•Ep. 42
Alix’s conversation this week is with Jenny Reardon, who shares with us the history of genomics — and the absolutely mind-melting parallels it has with the trajectory of the AI industry. Jenny describes genomics as the industrialisation of genetics; it’s not just about understanding the genetic properties of humans, but mapping out every last inch of their genetic information so that it’s machine readable and scalable and — does this remind you of anything yet? There are a disturbing amount of c...
Feb 28, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 41
Do you ever wonder how semiconductors (AKA chips) get made? Or why most of them are made in Taiwan? Or what this means for geopolitics? Luckily, this is a podcast for nerds like you. Alix was joined this week by Brian Chen from Data & Society, who systematically explains the process of advanced chip manufacture, how its thoroughly entangled in US economic policy, and how Taiwan’s place as the main artery for chips is the product of deep colonial infrastructures. Brian J. Chen is the policy d...
Feb 21, 2025•37 min•Ep. 40
Are you tired of hearing the phrase ‘AI Safety’ and rolling your eyes? Do you also sometimes think… okay but what is technically wrong with advocating for ‘safer’ AI systems? Do you also wish we could have more nuanced conversations about China and AI? In this episode Shazeda Ahmed goes deep on the field of AI Safety, explaining that it is a community that is propped up by its own spiral of reproduced urgency; and that so much of it is rooted in American anti-China sentiment. Read: the fear that...
Feb 14, 2025•56 min•Ep. 39
Kapow! We just did our first ever LIVE SHOW. We barely had time to let the mics cool down before a bunch of you requested to have the recording on our pod feed so here we are. ICYMI : this is a recording from the live show that we did in Paris, right after the AI Action Summit. Alix sat down to have a candid conversation about the summit, and pontificate on what people might have meant when they kept saying ‘public interest AI’ over and over. She was joined by four of the best women in AI politi...
Feb 12, 2025•47 min•Ep. 38
The Paris AI Action Summit is just around the corner! If you’re not going to be there, and you wish you were — we got you. We are streaming next week’s podcast LIVE from Paris on YouTube — register here 🎙️ On Tuesday, February 11th , at 6:30pm Paris time / 12:30pm EST , we’ll be recording our first-ever LIVE podcast episode . After two days at the French AI Action Summit, Alix will sit down with four of the best women in AI politics to break down the power and politics of the Summit. It’s our P...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 37
