Can robots be good?

Good Robot is a podcast in an intersection of tech, ethics, artificial intelligence and feminism. Hosted by Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney they ask the experts: what is good technology? Creating a safe space for skepticism in the hype driven culture around everything "new".

We sat down with the host of the show Eleanor Drage to chat about The Good Robot and what they think about the current hype of AI.

What is Good Robot’s origin story?

We started the podcast during COVID. We had the idea of interviewing people on our bookshelves, and we had a lot of free time on our hands. It was a way of getting this unprecedented insight into the people that we admire. We think of these big names as really inaccessible. They write these long books that are difficult to get into. We're trying to explain the stuff that we listen to you to our moms, or to our friends. And so we thought it'd be quite nice if we got these scary mega stars of philosophy and feminism and technology to just come and chat for half an hour about some of their ideas.

How do you find guests for your podcast? You have around more than 50 episodes that’s very impressive.

Were very lucky. Like most people said yes, because there was nothing to do during COVID. And then we got momentum from there. Their friends were on it. Or they knew that we'd had these big names already like Jack Halberstam and Rosie Bray, Dotty and, and Chang and then it seemed like a safer zone. We've got a lot of traction on Twitter. We do a lot of I do a huge amount of research every time. Every time I reach out to somebody, I make sure I've read what they've done recently. I write very personable emails.

We also started from the people we really admire the voices that we found really important. Like Margaret Mitchell, the people who got fired from Google.

I guess we were kind of a safe space for them to come and talk. So we, it's lucky that we're at Cambridge, I think people see the University of Cambridge, and, you know, they think it's something worth doing as well.

And how are you choosing the subjects? I guess they are tied to the person who is coming on the podcast. But I also noticed you had a few episodes where you came back to some topics.

So Carrie and I have really expansive interests. We came from gender studies and politics and her PhD was in women's hunger strikes, both suffragettes and also in detention centers where immigrants are kept for dehumanizing periods of time. Mine was in utopian science fiction. We've been from the Gender Studies Department before. So we're interested in these connections between the humanities and the sciences and social sciences. My mom's an engineer. We really like talking to hiring managers. We work with people in recruitment, and AI systems. I guess we're sort of philosophers, but not really, we're kind of critical theorists. So we're both not really in one discipline, we're everywhere. We try and do as many things as we possibly can. And that leads us in many different directions. And then we trust that our listeners will be interested in the things that we're interested in.

What is a question the people who build AI tools or tools, in general, don’t ask themselves?

They don't ask themselves if the things that they find exciting are because of who they are and how they were brought up and the kinds of science fiction they were reading, or the things that interest them. They just presume that their curiosity about the world is valid. It's neutral. It's to do with them as a person rather than them as a demographic. And this leads to a homogenous design.

Because they all are the same people.

They are very excited about the same things. It's not a coincidence, guys.

It's all about creating things for the sake of it or creating. Pointless products?Like in the cartoon "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs".

In it, the main character is just excited by the idea of being an inventor. There's no need he's trying to fill. He's creating things for no reason, just because he enjoys the act of creating and actually, the role of the genius, the inventor. Creating projects for the sake of it moving fast and breaking things. Experimenting without a cause.

What’s a question we consumers should ask ourselves before throwing ourselves to play with all these new inventions?

I think it's a double-edged sword. Consumers can't be expected to make choices when they're often coerced into kinds of behavior patterns. But at the same time, you can't deny consumers agency by saying, well they can't exercise any responsibility or choose for themselves. Jack Halberstam has written a great manifesto called Get off, which says we should get off social media. If you think as a young person, you're there to connect, you're deluded. You're there to sell something, it's a commercial platform. And if you understand that, that's fine. If not, if you think it's just about social connections, which is what Facebook still purports to be, then you're really deluding yourself.

I often think that I would happily get off, but at the same time, it feels like such a loss of connecting with people.

Yeah, totally. So for example the teachers union that I'm part of, they talk to each other on WhatsApp. A lot of diasporic communities communicate via Facebook. So it's really hard to just like disappear from these platforms, it comes with a loss. For example, I don't use Instagram on my phone anymore, I have it on my desktop, and I don't really post things or when I do it's just to do with the podcast. But I know that people will see me less. I'm less out there on these platforms and it means I get invited to less stuff or people reach out less and so it doesn't necessarily making make you happier to get off. It just makes you respect yourself a little bit more.

I heard you said in your trailer you would like to create a space where there is no technological naive optimism, but also no doomerism. With all these messages we're bombarded with about AI, I sometimes feel like it's the end of the world. And I'm extremely online person as you can see probably. Where do you think we stand now?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think we're at all of the stages at once.

It's important to enjoy the things that work and then ask to either ban or reform the things that don't. So I try and exist in many temperatures at once to avoid going totally insane.

I'm really angry about the way that facial recognition is being used by the police here in the UK. I think it's totally unacceptable. And I will fight hard until it ends. At the same time I use an AI to do the transcripts for the podcast. We want to make everything as accessible as possible, so we have these long transcripts that I write with the help of this AI software called Descript, and it's really helpful for editing. I kind of try and enjoy those things as well.

There are AI doom and gloom pessimists like Karry. And then we have self-professed AI optimists like Henry Shevlin. So I think what's nice to know as well as that you have people on all sides of the divide that you'd be really angry with on Twitter, but actually in person those people can be your friends.

I think what matters is building those human relationships between people with different opinions. And that's what we try and do on the podcast. We try and ask what does it mean to have a feminist conversation with people that you might disagree with? We just want to, to encourage people to have those conversations and have them in a way that is ethical and is respectful.

What was the episode that was the most fun to record for your podcast?

I really enjoyed Alex Hanna's episode. She just left Google. She went through the ethics principles and told us why they're bullshit. It was quite fun, very cool. The most fun probably was the chaos of Os Keyes. He's just like, the most wonderful, incredibly well-read. But his mind is all over the place with different references. It was the hardest editing job I've ever had to do. Just to cut down this hour-long craziness thing into a 30-minute slot.

And the last question, which is actually two questions masquerading as one. What is the podcast that you listen to for fun? And what is the podcast that you listen to to learn something?

Okay, so for fun, I really like In our time. I know it's like a classic staple. But I really wanted to know what it was like to bring out the best in academics. What questions do you have to ask them to not be boring? And Melvyn Bragg, I think does it. He manages to create a story and an episode, and a switch between people. It's really hard to do that, to interview four people at once, and to write a script with different academics coming in at different moments to tell the story. Now doing a podcast, I really appreciate how challenging that is.

The one I listened to learn something about is this pretty hideous podcast that I both like and really dislike, and it's called All In. And it's got these four tech bros talking about AI issues. The reason why I kind of find it vaguely listenable is that even though all of them are tech bros extraordinaire, is because they come from different parts of the political spectrum. They often vote independently, or they vote across the political aisles so they're not like strong Republicans or Democrats. One of them is a vegetarian. One of them is anti-vegetarian. I like seeing what binds them what binds people from different very different political persuasions with very different views and opinions, even on technology, and how to have the love for each other, I guess shine through because that's what they do really well on the podcast and on all good podcast, I think, is where the hosts really love each other.

There's also a couple of French podcasts that I listened to because they also speak some other languages. I love Les Couilles sur la table which means your balls on the table, and it's about deconstructing masculinity.