Computer Says Maybe

Anna Bacciarelli and Shazeda Ahmed know more than anyone that there are only a handful of tech companies asserting dominance around the world by talking in high-level abstractions about what the future looks like. At REAL ML, they want to change that. More like this: REAL Resistance: Who's Behind Big Brother? This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Rea...

Mariel Garcia-Montes and Crofton Black share their stories and investigations that uncover the backdoor deals that allow the surveillance industry to thrive under the guise of ‘security’. If you have nothing to hide, you won’t mind if we spy, right? More like this: REAL Resistance: The Global Fight Against Technocolonialism This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collabo...

Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Fernanda Rodrigues, Angela Chukunzira, and Kauna Love Malgwi make it clear that colonial powers have never gone away. The people and technology powering them have just changed, and one of them is AI… More Like This : REAL Resistance: Against Automated Governments This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML , featuring the ex...

Maria Pilar Llorens, Divij Joshi, Gabriel Geiger, and Purity Mukami reveal how digitised welfare is not welfare — it’s just efficiency theatre. More like this: REAL Resistance: The AI Information Warp This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML , featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global network. In this conversation, three g...

Klaudia Jaźwińska, Aliya Bhatia, and Yanick Kemayou come together to answer: What happens when a small collection of AI companies start colonising the truth? More like this: The Toxic Relationship Between AI & Journalism w/ Nic Dawes This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML , featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global n...

How do we stand up against the human rights violations that exist in the gruesome relationship between the business of AI and war? More like this: Computer Says Kill: The AI Safety Circus w/ Heidy Khlaaf In our final installment of Computer Says Kill, Matt Mahmoudi returns, this time with Marwa Fatafta, to share the why and how of their recent joint statement on AI in warfare . The calls on AI com...

The AI industry loves to talk about safety, but their version of safety is putting us at risk. More like this: The Palestine Laboratory w/ Antony Loewenstein For our second to last series episode of Computer Says Kill, we’re joined by Heidy Khlaaf, a global expert in designing safe critical systems for high-risk infrastructures such as energy grids, nuclear power plants, and weaponry. Heidy outlin...

Israel has a long history of making new technological weapons of war and exporting them to the world. They have used Palestine as a testing ground to show how new tools can enable mass killing. And they are banking that demand for their products might protect them on the world stage. More like this: Anthropic is NOT the Good Guy w/ Maddy Batt In part seven of Computer Says Kill, author of The Pale...

The Israeli military is using data, surveillance, and AI to kill noncombatants in Southern Lebanon. More like this: Computer Says Kill: Collapsing the Chain w/ with Matt Mahmoudi This week, we're kind of taking a break from our Computer Says Kill series to play a interview from our YouTube channel that is extremely relevant to the conversations we've been having about AI and militarization. Alix s...

Anthropic’s AI systems have been used in illegal American invasions in Iran and Venezuela. They have partnered with Musk in the disastrous Memphis Colossus facility. And yet! News coverage, some civil society, and a lot of normies act like Anthropic is one of the good guys. They aren’t! More like this: The Toxic Love Triangle of Big Tech, Big War & Big Science w/ David Gray Widder For part six...

Academia, Big Tech, and the military are caught in a sordid love triangle — and their love language is money. More like this: Computer Says Kill: The Blank Check to Beat China w/ Lis Siegel For part five of Computer Says Kill, researcher David Widder describes the powerful trifecta that is academia, Big Tech, and the US military: all of them need each other to survive, but who is benefiting the mo...

The US is in a race to ‘beat China’ at AI. Or is it? What if I told you that powerful actors in the US have built the story of an all-or-nothing race to get what they want? More like this: Computer Says Kill: A License for Unlimited War w/ Amos Toh In part four of Computer Says Kill we are joined by Lis Siegel who shares the history. We start with a document produced by China in 2017, and arrive a...

RightsCon has just been cancelled by the Zambian government with no word to the organizers, five days before it was set to begin. RightsCon is the biggest annual global gathering of the digital rights community. Every year thousands of people come together to figure out how to make the internet safer and freer for everyone. When they can't connect, we all lose. Alix shares a few theories about why...

Military spending on AI is a triple black box: How is AI being used in the military? Who is winning these contracts and what are they worth? And what is the military’s end-game here? More like this: How a Calculator Company Reshaped Modern Warfare w/ Jeff Stern Amos Toh will help us answer these questions in part three of Computer Says Kill. We will cover how military spending has changed over the...

Precision weapons are meant to make warfare more exact. But what happens when the executive branch uses precision as an excuse to make more war and target with less and less accountability for accuracy? More like this: Computer Says Kill: Collapsing the Chain w/ with Matt Mahmoudi In part two of Computer Says Kill, Jeff Stern shares how a calculator company transformed modern warfare by making mor...

How does a country wage war using LLMs? Oh and WHY? More like this: AI in Gaza: Live from Mexico City In Computer Says Kill Ep #1 we are joined by Matt Mahmoudi. The US Department of War is leaning heavily on AI technologies to attack Iran. Matt explains how the use of LLMs to identify ‘legitimate targets’ is collapsing the chain of decisions that lead to lethal force. We discuss what this means a...

This is Computer Says Kill, a new series on series focused on tracing the people, decisions, and systems that have recklessly ushered AI into the business of war. What we’re watching play out— from AI military chatbots to tech companies in bed with authoritarian governments— isn’t a new story. It's the latest chapter in a much older relationship between technology, military power, institutional sy...

What better way than movies to help us process the world. Brian Merchant shares how our collective anxieties turn into cultural products. More like this: One Filmmaker’s Fight Against AI w/ Valerie Veatch Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, joins us this week to discuss his favorite unsettling, horror and thriller picks that bring our fears about AI and tech to life on screen. Alix and...

Naomi Klein has spent her career studying political movements — and she thinks progressives are doing better than we think. Because the fascists are scared. More like this: To be Seen and not Watched w/ Tawana Petty In her forthcoming book, End Times Fascism, Klein and co-author Astra Taylor take stock of the history of fascism and the collective power that has been brought to bear to fight it. Th...

The way artists make art matters. And some artists, like filmmaker Valerie Veatch, are exploring what role AI has in the craft of filmmaking. More like this: Fantasy Factory: AI Supervillains w/ Anat Shenker-Osorio Valerie Veatch is the director of Ghost in the Machine, a new film that explores the depths of the Silicon Valley fantasies around AI, and platforms all the people that challenge these...

Grammarly launched a feature that no one wanted and now they’re getting sued. They used the names of writers, journalists, and editors to pretend that AI versions of those people were making writing suggestions via the application. None of these ‘expert reviewers’ had any idea. Grammarly pissed off the wrong journalist. And now Julia Angwin is suing them. More like this: The Toxic Relationship Bet...

The left has a messaging problem. Silicon Valley elites are literally making up impossible fantasies and their narratives are winning out. Why? More like this: The Stories we Tell Ourselves About AI This week in our second episode leading to the AI Doc, we are joined by Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive campaign strategist who hosts the Words To Win By podcast. Anat tries to focus on the positive...

Next time someone tells you that we can build data centres in space, show them this podcast episode — because it is literally impossible. More like this: AI Safety’s Spiral of Urgency w/ Shazeda Ahmed Or better yet, recommend that they buy More Everything Forever , Adam Becker’s latest book exploring all the fantasies and promises of coming out of Silicon Valley. This episode is the first in our F...

How does an oppressed workforce organise against Big Tech employers with even bigger lobbying muscle? More like this: Worker Power & Big Tech Boss Men w/ David Seligman This week’s episode is a recording of our livestream from Monday: a litigator, regulator, and activist share their work and perspectives on coordinating bottom-up fights against Big Tech power, worker suppression, and unfair co...

This is the last of our series AI Lingo Bingo Series! We dig into four more co-opted concepts with four more all stars. More like this: Last week’s episode with Meredith Whittaker, Audrey Tang, Abeba Birhane, and Usha Ramanathan This week we’ll hear from Naomi Klein, who will discuss how ‘AI for Climate’ is very much not a thing; Nikhil Dey who shares all the ways powerful actors cosplay at having...