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Futures Podcast #5: Electronic Waste, with Dani Ploeger

This idea of (re)performing the posthu­man was pret­ty much based on a desire to talk about the cyborg ten years after, or fif­teen years, twen­ty years after the Cyborg Manifesto and Katherine Hayles’ book became famous. And to really—yeah, to talk about maybe the nor­mal cyborg, the nor­mal tech­nol­o­gized body. You know, tech­nol­o­gy in the every­day and its impli­ca­tions for the way we per­ceive and expe­ri­ence our bodies.

An Innovation Policy for the Green New Deal

By inno­va­tion pol­i­cy what we’re real­ly talk­ing about is fed­er­al R&D pro­grams. So despite the American econ­o­my’s rep­u­ta­tion for being this quin­tes­sen­tial free mar­ket sys­tem, much of the inno­va­tion and tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment in the American econ­o­my can be linked to direct gov­ern­ment intervention.

How to Predict the Future

Every sin­gle futur­ist has one of these as the first slide in their deck. It does­n’t real­ly mat­ter what this is. An expo­nen­tial curve, up and to the right. This rep­re­sents all of tech­nol­o­gy. The past thir­ty years of tech­no­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion is described in this. This could be any­thing. This is proces­sor pow­er. This is mem­o­ry per dol­lar. This is Internet pen­e­tra­tion. This is the num­ber of peo­ple play­ing Angry Birds.

ASU KEDtalks: Risk Is Not Just a Four Letter Word

Risk is a fun­ny thing. It affects pret­ty much every­thing we do. And yet, most of the time we treat it like a dirty lit­tle secret. Something that’s there, but we’d rather not talk about it, a lit­tle bit like an embar­rass­ing rel­a­tive. This prob­a­bly isn’t such a good idea, though.

ASU KEDtalks: Democratizing Digital Design

Rather than begrudg­ing­ly push­ing soci­ety for­ward to be ready, I ask design­ers to crit­i­cal­ly reflect on the lim­i­ta­tions of their own design prac­tices and to remem­ber that to design for one inter­sec­tion of society—namely, afflu­ent middle-to-upper-class white American men—does not mean that those designs will work for those who do not iden­ti­fy as such. Even with modifications. 

Humans as Software Extensions

What is this con­di­tion? I would sum­ma­rize it as peo­ple extend­ing com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tems by offer­ing their bod­ies, their sens­es, and their cog­ni­tion. And specif­i­cal­ly, bod­ies and minds that can be eas­i­ly plugged in and lat­er eas­i­ly be dis­card­ed. So bod­ies and minds algo­rith­mi­cal­ly man­aged and under the per­ma­nent pres­sure of con­stant avail­abil­i­ty, effi­cien­cy, and per­pet­u­al self-optimization. 

Liberalism in the Anthropocene

This emerg­ing nar­ra­tive of cat­a­stro­phe is putting enor­mous pres­sure on all our polit­i­cal beliefs. Now there’s still some con­ser­v­a­tive par­ties, some US Republicans for exam­ple, who deny the basic facts, but we can be pret­ty sure I think that any pol­i­tics that denies the facts does­n’t have much of a future.

How Should We Do Politics?

I think that pol­i­tics has always been sus­cep­ti­ble to con­ver­sion so that it’s not actu­al­ly about liv­ing peo­ple it’s about sig­nal­ing mem­ber­ship with­in a par­tic­u­lar community.

The Real Name Game

Citizenship, after not think­ing about it for a while, feels like some­thing we’re all think­ing about quite a lot these days. In the words of Hannah Arendt, cit­i­zen­ship is the right to have rights. All of your rights essen­tial­ly descend from your cit­i­zen­ship, because only coun­tries will pro­tect those rights.

Compassion through Computation: Fighting Algorithmic Bias

I think the ques­tion I’m try­ing to for­mu­late is, how in this world of increas­ing opti­miza­tion where the algo­rithms will be accu­rate… They’ll increas­ing­ly be accu­rate. But their appli­ca­tion could lead to dis­crim­i­na­tion. How do we stop that?

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