Computer Says Maybe

Loneliness and mental health illnesses are rising in the US, while access to care dwindles — so a lot of people are turning to chatbots. Do chatbots work for therapy? More like this: The Collective Intelligence Project w/ Divya Siddarth and Zarinah Agnew Why are individuals are confiding in chatbots over qualified human therapists? Stevie Chancellor explains why an LLM can’t replace a therapeutic...

What’s it like working as a local representative when you live next door to Silicon Valley? More like this: Chasing Away Sidewalk Labs w/ Bianca Wylie When Hilary Ronen was on the board of supervisors for San Francisco, she had to make lots of decisions about technology. She felt unprepared. Now she sees local policymakers on the frontlines of a battle of resources and governance in an AI era, and...

Welcome to the final boss of scams in the age of technology: Enshittification  More like this: Nodestar: The Eternal September w/ Mike Masnick This is our final episode of Gotcha! — our series on scams, how they work, and how technology both amplifies and obscures them. For this final instalment we have Cory Doctorow on to chat about his new book Enshittification. Is platformisation essentially ju...

Thought we were at peak scam? Well, ScamGPT just entered the chat. More like this: Gotcha! The Crypto Grift w/ Mark Hays This is part three of Gotcha! — our series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them. This week Lana Swartz and Alice Marwick join Alix to discuss their primer on how generative AI is automating fraud. We dig into the very human, very dark world of the sc...

This just in with data centers: Energy grids are strained, water is scarce, utility costs are through the roof — ah well, let them eat compute, I guess! More like this: AI Thirst in a Water-Scarce World w/ Julie McCarthy It was just climate week in NYC and we did a live show on data centers with four amazing guests from around the US… Thank you to the Luminate Foundation for sponsoring this live s...

OpenAI just secured a bizarre financial deal with Nvidia — but the math is not mathing. Is the AI sector an actual market, or a series of high-profile announcements of circular relationships between a tiny number of companies? More like this: Making Myths to Make Money w/ AI Now Alix sat down with Sarah Myers-West to go through the particulars of this deal, and other similar deals that are proppin...

Multi-level marketing schemes have built an empire by enticing people with promises of self-realisation and economic freedom. The cost is simple: exploit and be exploited. More like this: Worker Power & Big Tech Bossmen w/ David Seligman This is part two of Gotcha! Our series on scams, how they work, and how technology is super-charging them. This week Bridget Read came to Alix with a very exc...

Hey you! Do you want some free internet money? If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is! More like this: Making Myths to Make Money w/ AI Now This is Gotcha! A four-part series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them. We start with Mark Hays from Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), and get into one of the biggest tech-fuelled financial scams out there: c...

Gotcha! is a four-part series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them — running through to October 10. In the series we look at: Crypto: Mark Hays on how a thing touting financial freedom ended up being a kind of fin-cult, rife with scamming Multi-Level Marketing : Bridget Read on the history of the biggest and most successful type of scam that still plagues us today Gene...

What if you could listen to multiple people at once, and actually understand them? More like this: **The Age of Noise w/ Eryk Salvaggio ** In our final instalment (for now!) of Nodestar, Andrew Trask shares his vision for a world where we can assembly understanding from data everywhere. But not in a way that requires corporate control of our world. If broadcasting is the act of talking to multiple...

Social media isn’t really social anymore. But that might be changing. Rudy Fraser over at Blacksky Algorithms has built something new. He has built the infrastructure to provide a safe online space for the black community, and in the process challenges the ideas of hierarchical, centralised networks. His work — even outside the very cool development of Blacksky — is an amazing, concrete example of...

How did the internet become three companies in a trenchcoat? It wasn’t always that way! It used to be fun, and weird, and full of opportunity. To set the scene for the series, we spoke to a stalwart advocate of decentratilsation, Mike Masnick. More like this: Big Tech’s Bogus Vision for the Future w/ Paris Marx This is part one of Nodestar, a three-part series on decentralisation: how the internet...

What’s the deal with Silicon Valley selling imagined futures and never delivering on them. What are the consequences of an industry all-in on AI? What if we thought more deeply than just ‘more compute’? More like this: Big Dirty Data Centres with Boxi Wu and Jenna Ruddock This week, Paris Marx (host of Tech Won’t Save Us) joined Alix to chat about his recent work on hyperscale data centres, and hi...

Foxglove and Global Action Plan have just sued the UK government over their YOLO hyperscale data center plans. More like this: Net0++: Data Centre Sprawl Local government rejected the data center. But Starmer’s administration overruled them. They want to force the development of a water-guzzling, energy draining data center on a local community who has said no. And all of this is on the green belt...

How do we yank power out of tech oligarch hands without handing it over to someone else? More like this: Is Digitisation Killing Democracy? w/ Marietje Schaake Cori Crider is a fearless litigator turned market-shaping advocate. She started litigating during many years at leading human rights organisation Reprieve, and then moved on to co-founding Foxglove so she could sue big tech. Now she’s set h...

Did you miss FAccT? We interviewed some of our favourite session organisers! More like this: Part One of our FAccT roundup: Materiality and Militarisation . Georgia, Soizic, and Hanna from The Maybe team just went to FAccT. Georgia and Soizic interviewed a bunch of amazing researchers, practitioners, and artists to give you a taste of what the conference was like if you didn’t get to go. Alix miss...

In May, Grok couldn’t stop talking about white genocide. This injection of right-wing South African politics triggered a conversation with a Musk contemporary, Nic Dawes. In this short Nic shares his perspective on how post-apartheid white communities have dealt with apartheid’s end. And how Musk is basically seeking out an information environment that can recreate the apartheid information system...

Georgia, Soizic, and Hanna from The Maybe team just went to FAccT. Georgia and Soizic interviewed a bunch of amazing researchers, practitioners, and artists to give you a taste of what the conference was like if you didn’t get to go. Alix missed it too — you’ll learn along with her! In part one we explore the depth of AI’s hidden material impacts, including its use in military applications and to...

AI Now have just released their 2025 AI Landscape report — Artificial Power . Alix sat down with two of it’s authors, Amba Kak and Sarah Myers-West for a light unpacking of the themes within. This report isn’t a boring survey of what AI Now have been doing this year; it’s a comprehensive view of the state of AI, and the concentrated powers that prop it up. What are the latest AI-shaped solutions t...

Felienne Hermans calls herself an ‘involuntary ethnographer of computer science’. She studies the culture behind programming, and challenges the dominant idea that learning to program has to be painful. Alix and Felienne chat about the history of programming and how it went from multidisciplinary and inclusive, to masochistic and exclusive. They also dig into all the ways it excludes women and peo...

Smart people focused on technology politics issues get it. We trade high level helpful concepts like surveillance capitalism, automated inequality, and enshittification. And even as some of these ideas are making it more mainstream, normies aren’t getting the message. We need stories for that. But how? How do we take the technical jargon and high-level concepts that dominate tech narratives and in...

There has been an intentional and systematic narrative push that tells governments they are not good enough to provide their own public infrastructure or regulate tech companies that provide it for them. Shocking: these narratives stem from large tech companies, and this represents what Marietje Schaake refers to as a Tech Coup — which is the title of her book (which you should buy!). The Tech Cou...

This episode contains some descriptions of torture methods, automated human targeting by machines, and psychological warfare throughout Last week Alix hosted a live show in Mexico City right after REAL ML . Four panellists discussed a huge important topic, which has been wrongfully deemed as taboo by other conferences: the use of AI and other technologies to support the ongoing genocide in Palesti...

Adele Walton’s new book *Logging Off: The Human Cost of our Digital World * is out NOW — for this week’s episode Alix sat down with her to discuss the book, and what pushed her to write it. Adele shares her experiences of using social media from age ten, and growing up only ever feeling ‘understood’ by her followers. And now, the constant ‘how can I make content out of this??’ mindset has followed...

Sam Altman is doing another big infrastructure push with World (previously Worldcoin) — the universal human verification system. We had journalist Billy Perrigo on to chat what’s what with World. Is Sam Altman just providing a solution to a problem that he himself caused with OpenAI? Do we really need human verification, or is this just a way to side-step the AI content watermarking issue? Further...