John Danaher, Senior Lecturer in Law at NUI Galway, discusses his new book, Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World Without Work.

On the season finale of Technology & Prose, John Danaher joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about the meaning of work (1:13), the automatability and automation of work (2:36), why we should welcome automation — the case for technological unemployment (10:02), the gig economy, Uber, and the limits to improving the conditions of work (13:25), building a post-work future - the ‘cyborg utopia’ and the ‘virtual utopia’ (19:25), problems with cyborgization (22:44), the meaning of utopia (28:00), the concept of virtual reality (29:53), constructing a virtual utopia, the ‘utopia of games’ (34:40), psychedelics and other sources of human flourishing in a post-work future (41:25), Big Tech, universal basic income (UBI) and the political economy of virtual utopia (42:34).

References

Manyika et al, A Future that Works: Automation, Employment and Productivity

Frey and Osborne, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?

Moravec’s paradox

Robertson, Robo Sapiens Japanicus

UK Supreme Court decision in Uber v Aslam

Gallup, State of the Global Workplace Report

Harari, Sapiens and Homo Deus

Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia

Macintyre, After Virtue

Check out John’s blog and podcast, Philosophical Disquisitions

Recorded on 29th March 2021.

Sushma Raman, Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, discusses her new book, The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights (co-authored with Bill Schulz).

On this episode of Technology & Prose, Sushma Raman joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about the meaning and role of human rights in the Good Society (1:45), the tension between strengthening existing rights and recognising new rights (4:30), Big Data, surveillance and the right to privacy (5:54), intercultural perspectives on the right to privacy and human rights (11:35), human gene editing, DNA sequencing, the use of ‘shed DNA’ and rights in our DNA (14:20), the rights of synthetic embryos (SHEEFS)(21:25), sentience and the recognition of rights, animal and robot rights (23:30), the current state of human rights (25:48), the ‘right to transition’ and the pros/cons of recognizing new rights (28:40), grassroots activism, international human rights organizations and the locations of human rights power (31:17), technology and human rights at the Carr Center (33:30).

References

The Capabilities Approach https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/

Universal Declaration of Human Rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

Sheila Jassanoff and J. Benjamin Hurlbut, A Global Observatory for Gene Editing https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03270-w

Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award https://rfkhumanrights.org/

Justice Matters podcast https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/podcasts

Recorded on March 18th 2021

Aaron Roth, Professor of Computer Science at UPenn, discusses his recent book, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design.

On this episode of Technology & Prose, Aaron Roth joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about the importance of ethical algorithm design (1:34), differential privacy and designing privacy-preserving algorithms (6:09), the costs and trade-offs of designing for privacy (10:38), application of differential privacy by Apple, Google and the 2020 US Census (14:13), GANs and synthetic data (18:22), designing fair algorithms, the ProPublica COMPAS investigation, the value and challenge of formalising ethical norms (20:30), modelling fairness/accuracy trade-offs (28:26), multi-objective optimisation (32:36), algorithmic game theory and designing for cooperation (34:13), incentivising organisations to adopt ethical algorithm design, privacy and fairness regulation (40:28).

References

Dinur and Nissim, Revealing Information While Preserving Privacy

Goodfellow et al, Generative Adversarial Nets

Angwin et al, ProPublica report on COMPAS

Northpointe’s response to ProPublica

Kleinberg et al, Inherent Trade-offs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores

Recorded on March 5th 2021.