Technoskeptic Podcast

Art Keller speaks with Holly Elmore, the Executive Director of the AI safety non-profit Pause AI. We cover a lot of ground, from the disturbing AI scheming in the recent Apollo Research report-to the much more dubious and reprehensible scheming of AI *luminaries* such as Sam Altman and Yann LeCun. We also cover the politics of AI, how AI companies publicly beg for regulation while privately treati...

Today we speak with Dr. Roman Yampolskiy.  Dr Yampolskiy is a tenured Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Speed School of Engineering at the University of Louisville, where he is the founder and current director of the Cyber Security Lab.  Dr. Yampolski is an expert in AI safety and the author of many books including, “AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, U...

Tim Kasser spent over two decades studying the relationship between materialism and well-being and penned the highly cited book, The High Price of Materialism . Mo Lotman interviewed Kasser while he was still a professor at Knox College-Knox has since been promoted to Professor Emeritus and retired. Professor Kasser and Mo discuss what types of values coincide with healthy relationships to ourselv...

Catherine Steiner-Adair is a clinical and developmental psychologist whose empathic 2013 book The Big Disconnect was one of the first big warning signs about tech’s effect on growing children. Mo Lotman speaks with Steiner-Adair about the invisible costs of tech-how it can impair the brain development of children, and may also hinder bonding between child and parent. Many concerned parents look at...

Courtesy MIT Mo Lotman interviewed Tomaso Poggio, Director of MIT’s Center for Minds, Brains, and Machines. Poggio explained the basics of how AI models work, why we’re still a long way from the dystopian fears of robot overlords, but also that the threat to jobs is real. (Editor’s Note: This podcast was originally recorded at an interesting moment in AI development: after machine learning and neu...

In mid-2017, Mo Lotmon spoke to journalist and media critic Bill Powers. Powers authored a bestselling book, Hamlet’s BlackBerry, about stepping away from tech. Powers was one of the first to publicly and loudly speak about the need to get away from “screens” and move to have “screen Sabbaths.” At the time he spoke to Mo Lotman, Powers was at MIT’s Media Lab trying to increase the quality of socia...

Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the  Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation  at the Kennedy School's Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.* She spoke with Mo Lotman about Eudaimonia aka “the good life.” They explore the emphasis in American education on STEM (science, technology, engineering, math), and the social costs of not...

Mo Lotman speaks with psychiatrist, professor, and author David Greenfield, founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction. Dr. Greenfield was one of the first medical professionals to recognize and study the addictive qualities of the Internet. Twenty-five years later his societal diagnosis has gone from outlier to mainstream. He explains what we know, what it means, and what can be...

We were delighted to speak to Will Reusch, a high school teacher with 15 years of experience ranging from under-resourced inner-city schools to elite private academies. We discuss using social media intentionally rather than in default mode (aka to anxiety-producing excess),  where tech helps and hurts in the classroom, and Will’s podcast Cylinder Radio . Will covers controversial topics with an e...

Narayan Liebenson, a guiding teacher at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, speaks to Mo Lotman about the benefits of mindfulness and attention. We’ve suspected for years that technology fragments attention to the detriment of our peace of mind and mental health. But is the mindfulness championed so thoughtfully by Liebenson mere mystical woo-woo, or a serious reme...

Tim Wu is the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia University, and a renowned scholar on communications networks, having coined the phrase “net neutrality.” He has written extensively on technology and its impact on society and has served both inside and outside of government and academia. Mo Lotman discusses Wu’s 2016  book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble...

We recently ran a lengthy print interview with Michaela Headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh about her school’s Digital Detox program and parents’ struggles in implementing it, Choosing Smart Kids over Smartphones . This podcast is the conversation we recorded with Michaela’s Headmistress as part of updating our 2019 with her. Some of the material in this podcast appeared in the “Smart Kids” article...

David Krakauer is President and Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute, a private, not-for-profit, independent research and education center. Krakauer focuses on the evolutionary history of information-processing mechanisms in biology and culture. He chatted with The Technoskeptic to discuss complementary vs. competitive cognitive artifacts—that is, how technologies extend or suppr...

Mo Lotman interviews mathematician Cathy O’Neil. O’Neil worked in the private sector to make the algorithmic systems that automatically judge and score us. Deeply troubled by what she saw, she went on to write the 2016 bestseller Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy . She shares her insider’s look at how algorithms are gaming our world, with the wo...

Kentaro Toyama At the Technsoskeptic Magazine, we often find that technologists provide the most salient critiques of technology’s effects on society. In this episode, Mo Lotman speaks with Kentaro Toyama, computer scientist, Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan, and author of the book “Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology.” After spending fiv...

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