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News on Platforms & Infrastructure
Mishal Khan is a senior researcher in the Technology and Work Program at the University of California Berkeley Labor Center. With a doctoral degree in sociology from the University of […]
Dr. Zameshia Williams, chief of research at Measure, is an intellectual strategist who bridges public systems governance, technology policy, and community-engaged scholarship. Dr. Williams provides the senior methodological oversight for […]
Jose Adalberto Teran is a senior technology executive and AI transformation leader based in Austin, Texas, with over 25 years of experience building and scaling technology-driven platforms across industries, including […]
A quarter of a century later, the year 2000 problem, also known as Y2K, may help us better understand our technology concerns. Historian Zachary Loeb explains the circumstances around Y2K and how the embedding of computer systems into US infrastructure opened it to vulnerabilities, which could potentially be echoed in the near future with the integration of AI.
Zachary Loeb is an assistant professor in the department of history at Purdue University. His research sits at the intersection of the history of technology and the history of disasters. […]
Paola Mosso, a cyber-feminist Latina activist and creative thinker, is currently executive director of the Engine Room. She leads on organizational strategy, development and fundraising, and oversees team-wide programmatic implementation. […]
Lesedi Bewlay serves as deputy director at the Engine Room, where he leads efforts to strengthen partnerships and advise project leads across sub-Saharan Africa. Bewlay has a background in computer […]
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.
The DISCO Network (Digital Inquiry Speculation Collaboration Optimism Network) is an intergenerational collective of researchers, artists, technologists, policymakers, and practitioners working together to challenge digital social and racial inequalities. Participants include:
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.