I think as humans, we forget. We are often limited by our own stereotypes, and we don't see that in everyone there's the potential for beauty and love and all these things. And I think The Architecture of Oppression, both parts one and two, are really a reflection of all the community and civil rights work that I've been doing for the same amount of time, really - 25 years. And I wanted to try and mix my day job and my music side, so bringing those two sides of my life together. I...

“Having worked in this space for seven years, really since the inception of DeepFakes in late 2017, for some time, it was possible with just a few hours a day to really be on top of the key kind of technical developments. It's now truly global. AI-generated media have really exploded, particularly the last 18 months, but they've been bubbling under the surface for some time in various different use cases. The disinformation and deepfakes in the political sphere really matches some of the...

How is artificial intelligence redefining our perception of reality and truth? Can AI be creative? And how is it changing art and innovation? Does AI-generated perfection detach us from reality and genuine human connection? Henry Ajder is an advisor, speaker, and broadcaster working at the frontier of the generative AI and the synthetic media revolution. He advises organizations on the opportunities and challenges these technologies present, including Adobe, Meta, The European Commission,...

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with acclaimed author and activist, and San Francisco legend, Chris Carlsson about his new novel, When Shells Crumble. It begins in December 2024, when the US Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the Presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican, who proceeds to demolish democracy and install a fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than...

“When AI takes over with our information sources and pollutes it to a certain point, we'll stop believing that there is any such thing as truth anymore. ‘We now live in an era in which the truth is behind a paywall and the lies are free.’ One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't...

How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? How does bias affect our understanding of facts? Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College,...

“I think one very big example of this phenomenon is the computational irreducibility. This idea that even though you know the rules by which something operates, that doesn't immediately tell you everything about what the system will do. You might have to follow a billion steps in the actual operation of those rules to find out what the system does. There's no way to jump ahead and just say, "the answer will be such and such." Well, computational irreducibility, in a sense, goes against the...

How can computational language help decode the mysteries of nature and the universe? What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work? How will AI affect education, the arts and society? Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. He received his PhD in theoretical physics at Caltech by the age of 20 and in 1981, became the youngest recipient of...

“Generative AI, particularly Large Language Models, they seem to be engaging in conversation with us. We ask questions, and they reply. It seems like they're talking to us. I don't think they are. I think they're playing a game very much like a game of chess. You make a move and your chess computer makes an appropriate response to that move. It doesn't have any other interest in the game whatsoever. That's what I think Large Language Models are doing. They're just making communicative moves...

Is consciousness an illusion? Is it just a complex set of cognitive processes without a central, subjective experience? How can we better integrate philosophy with everyday life and the arts? Keith Frankish is an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme in Neurosciences at the University of Crete. Frankish mainly works in the philosophy of mind and has...

“We and all living beings thrive by being actors in the planet’s regeneration, a civilizational goal that should commence and never cease. We practiced degeneration as a species and it brought us to the threshold of an unimaginable crisis. To reverse global warming, we need to reverse global degeneration.”

Can we really end the climate crisis in one generation? What kind of bold collective action, technologies, and nature-based solutions would it take to do it? Paul Hawken is a renowned environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist committed to sustainability and transforming the business-environment relationship. A leading voice in the environmental movement, he has founded successful eco-friendly businesses, authored influential works on commerce and ecology, and advised global...

“So, New York City will ultimately build a seawall that it estimates will cost somewhere in the order of 120 billion dollars. And, you know, the fact is that many cities in the United States will not be able to afford that, especially smaller ones and especially southern ones. A part of planning for this needs to include thinking about managed retreat from highly vulnerable areas. The tax base of that community that supports schools undermines the real estate market and the value of property,...

An estimated one in two people will experience degrading environmental conditions this century and will be faced with the difficult question of whether to leave their homes. Will you be among those who migrate in response to climate change? If so, where will you go?

“There’s a lot of greenwashing that's going on these days. It is great marketing. And that was really the reason why I wrote this book. I had started to see the patterns. You can start to tell them the companies that are genuinely doing it versus the companies that are just talking about it. So that was one indicator, you know, a company that would send out a press release about their goals and what they anticipated to do in the next 5 to 10 years was very different from companies who had...

What is regenerative business? How can we create a business mindset that addresses social, economic and environmental issues? Esha Chhabra has written for national and international publications over the last 15 years, focusing on global development, the environment, and the intersection of business and impact. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and other publications. She is the author of Working to Restore: Harnessing the Power of Business to Heal...

“I'd like to focus more on the immediate harms that the kinds of AI technologies we have today might pose. With language models, the kind of technology that powers ChatGPT and other chatbots, there are harms that might result from regular use of these systems, and then there are harms that might result from malicious use. Regular use would be how you and I might use ChatGPT and other chatbots to do ordinary things. There is a concern that these systems might reproduce and amplify, for...

How can we ensure that AI is aligned with human values? What can AI teach us about human cognition and creativity? Dr. Raphael Millière is Assistant Professor in Philosophy of AI at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His research primarily explores the theoretical foundations and inner workings of AI systems based on deep learning, such as large language models. He investigates whether these systems can exhibit human-like cognitive capacities, drawing on theories and methods from...

“Bookselling captured my imagination and my heart as soon as I started working at the bookstore because I could see the potential for this great, amazing community-oriented work. Of course, it's a thrill to be around books, to meet authors, to read all this stuff, and to spend all day with people who love books, but what I think I really fell in love with was the sense of community, the people behind it, and the way a bookstore can really be an engine for positive social change within its...

What is the future of literature in the age of generative AI? How can bookstores build community and be engines for positive social change? What does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life? Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the books How to Protect Bookstores and Why and How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, Lit Hub, Diagram, HAD, and Barrelhouse. ...

“A lot of our work is comparative. We look at background behavior. Is there a burst of new activity? We zoom in on that and ask why that is suddenly appearing and why it didn't appear before. Imagine one day you wake up and you find water in a pot is boiling and you want to understand why water is boiling. If you go at it one molecule at a time, it's not giving you the big picture of what is going on. We've probably all done this: you take milk, stick it in the fridge, too lazy to go to the...

Neil Johnson is a physics professor at George Washington University. His new initiative in Complexity and Data Science at the Dynamic Online Networks Lab combines cross-disciplinary fundamental research with data science to attack complex real-world problems. His research interests lie in the broad area of Complex Systems and ‘many-body’ out-of-equilibrium systems of collections of objects, ranging from crowds of particles to crowds of people and from environments as distinct as quantum...

“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture...

What is road ecology? How are our roads driving certain species towards extinction? And what can we do about it? Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

“We've got four billion years of biological accidents that created all of the intricate aspects of everything about life, including consciousness. And it's about what's going on in each of those cells at the time that allows it to be connected to everything else and for the information to be understood as it's being exchanged between those things with their multifaceted, deep, complex processing.”