After a visit to the University of Michigan’s Laboratory for Progress (Perceptive Robotics and Grounded REasoning SystemS), 2023 Just Tech Fellow Jay Cunningham interviewed Odest Chadwicke “Chad” Jenkins, professor of robotics and electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, about his research and thoughts on robotics and AI, the role ethics play in novel technologies, and educating and mentoring the new generation of technologists.

Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal is a collaborative work of the DISCO Network, a collective of researchers that includes 2024 Just Tech Fellow Catherine Knight Steele, that explores how skepticism of technology can reveal new possibilities. This excerpt from Chapter Four, “The Longing for Home,” prompts us to define and redefine “home” within digital communities and what that definition looks like as we collectively remember a not-too-distant digital past in the face of an increasingly algorithmically controlled digital future.

Accompanying the proliferation of generative AI have been parallel increases in AI optimist and doomer discourses. Here, Ruby Thelot critiques AI doomerism through an eschatological lens, arguing that the narratives AI doomers trumpet about the impending doom of superintelligent AI mirror those found in Judeo-Christian religious texts about the end of times.

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