Shows / Computer Says Maybe
Computer Says Maybe
Technology is changing fast. And it's changing our world even faster. Host Alix Dunn interviews visionaries, researchers, and technologists working in the public interest to help you keep up. Step outside the hype and explore the possibilities, problems, and politics of technology. Learn more at www.themaybe.org/podcast.
Episodes
Computer Says MaybeWho Knows? Independent Researchers in a Platform Era w/ Brandi Geurkink
Imagine doing tech research… but from outside the tech industry? What an idea… More like this: Nodestar: Turning Networks into Knowledge w/ Andrew Trask So…
Computer Says MaybeTres Publique: Algorithms in the French Welfare State w/ Soizic Pénicaud
Governments around the world are using predictive systems to manage engagement with even the most vulnerable. Results are mixed. More like this…
Computer Says MaybeStraight to Video: From Rodney King to Sora w/ Sam Gregory
Seeing is believing. Right? But what happens when we lose trust in the reproductive media put in front of us? More like this: The Toxic Relationship Between AI…
Computer Says MaybeThe Toxic Relationship Between AI & Journalism w/ Nic Dawes
What happens when AI models try to fill the gaping hole in the media landscape where journalists should be? More like this: Reanimating Apartheid w/ Nic Dawes…
Computer Says MaybeUnlearning in the AI Era w/ Nabiha Syed at Mozilla Foundation
Mozilla Foundation wants to chart a new path in the AI era. But what is its role now and how can it help reshape the impacts and opportunities of technology…
Computer Says MaybeYou Seem Lonely. Have a Robot w/ Stevie Chancellor
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…
Computer Says MaybeLocal Laws for Global Technologies w/ Hillary Ronen
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…
Computer Says MaybeGotcha! Enshittification w/ Cory Doctorow
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…
Computer Says MaybeGotcha! ScamGPT w/ Lana Swartz & Alice Marwick
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…
Computer Says MaybeNYC Live: Let Them Eat Compute
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…
Computer Says MaybeAre AI Companies Cooking the Books? w/ Sarah Myers West
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…
Computer Says MaybeGotcha! How MLMs Ate the Economy w/ Bridget Read
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…
Computer Says MaybeGotcha! The Crypto Grift w/ Mark Hays
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…
Computer Says MaybeGotcha!
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…
Computer Says MaybeNodestar: Turning Networks into Knowledge w/ Andrew Trask
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…
Computer Says MaybeNodestar: Building Blacksky w/ Rudy Fraser
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…
Computer Says MaybeNodestar: The Eternal September w/ Mike Masnick
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…
Computer Says MaybeBig Tech’s Bogus Vision for the Future w/ Paris Marx
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…
Computer Says MaybeShort: UK Groups Sue To Block Data Center Expansion
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…
- Computer Says Maybe
Consciously Uncoupling from Silicon Valley w/ Cori Crider
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…
- Computer Says Maybe
After the FAccT: Labour and Misrepresentation
Did you miss FAccT? We interviewed some of our favourite session organisers! More like this: Part One of our FAccT roundup: Materiality and Militarisation…
- Computer Says Maybe
Short: Musk: Reanimating Apartheid w/ Nic Dawes
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…
- Computer Says Maybe
After the FAccT: 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…
- Computer Says Maybe
Making Myths to Make Money w/ AI Now
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…
- Computer Says Maybe
Is Computer Science Made for Dudes? w/ Felienne Hermans
Felienne Hermans calls herself an ‘involuntary ethnographer of computer science’. She studies the culture behind programming, and challenges the dominant idea…
- Computer Says Maybe
The Elephant in the Algorithm: Live from ZEG Fest in Tbilisi
Smart people focused on technology politics issues get it. We trade high level helpful concepts like surveillance capitalism, automated inequality, and…
- Computer Says Maybe
Is Digitisation Killing Democracy? w/ Marietje Schaake
There has been an intentional and systematic narrative push that tells governments they are not good enough to provide their own public infrastructure or…
- Computer Says Maybe
AI in Gaza: Live from Mexico City
This episode contains some descriptions of torture methods, automated human targeting by machines, and psychological warfare throughout Last week Alix hosted a…
- Computer Says Maybe
Logging Off w/ Adele Walton
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…
- Computer Says Maybe
Short: Sam Altman’s World w/ Billy Perrigo
Sam Altman is doing another big infrastructure push with World (previously Worldcoin) — the universal human verification system. We had journalist Billy…
- Computer Says Maybe
The Collective Intelligence Project w/ Divya Siddarth and Zarinah Agnew
Most of the time we interview people who say No to AI. In this interview, Georgia and Alix talk to two people who look at AI and ask How and For What. And lots…
- Computer Says Maybe
Net0++: Data Center Sprawl | NEW Research from The Maybe
We’re excited to finally share our report on data center expansion and resistance around the world. It’s been a labor of love, but also showcases the amazing…
- Computer Says Maybe
Net 0++: AI Thirst in a Water-Scarce World w/ Julie McCarthy
Last year, Elon Musk’s xAI built a data centre in Memphis in 19 days — and the local government only found out about it on the 20th day. How? Julie McCarthy…
- Computer Says Maybe
Short: Open AI for...Countries? w/ Marietje Schaake
This is another Computer Says Maybe short, this time with Marietje Schaake (author of The Tech Coup), to discuss OpenAI’s recent announcement: they want to…
- Computer Says Maybe
Short: What Just Happened to 23andMe? w/ Jenny Reardon
Personalised genotyping company 23andMe just went bankrupt — what’s gonna happen to all that genetic data? We brought back genomics professor Jenny Reardon to…
- Computer Says Maybe
Terra Nullius: Who Owns the Skies? w/ Julia Powles
This is our second Terra Nullius episode. As a reminder this means ‘Nobody’s Land’ — an infamous legal fiction from the age of Empire. In this episode we ask…
- Computer Says Maybe
Terra Nullius: Who Owns Outer Space? w/ Heather Allansdottir
This is our first in a series called Terra Nullius. Huh? It’s Latin for ‘Nobody’s Land’. We will be exploring how rules are made for contested territory. If a…
- Computer Says Maybe
How to (Actually) Keep Kids Safe Online w/ Kate Sim
Child safety is a fuzzy catch-all concept for our broader social anxieties that seems to be everywhere in our conversations about the internet. But child…
- Computer Says Maybe
Worker Power & Big Tech Bossmen w/ David Seligman
This week Alix interviewed David Seligman, Executive Director of Towards Justice, to tell us more about how big tech companies act brazenly as legal bullies to…
- Computer Says Maybe
AI Can’t Fix This: Live in London
Last week Alix was in London to talk UK politics and broligarchy with four amazing guests: Martha Dark from Foxglove gave us the history and implications of…
- Computer Says Maybe
Technology Nationalism in India w/ Divij Joshi
Amidst the scrambling of geopolitics, there is increasing conversation and momentum for the concept of tech sovereignty. It basically means that countries…
- Computer Says Maybe
AI Assistant or AI Boss? w/ Data & Society
Two years ago, we were told that ‘prompt engineer’ would be a real job — well, it’s not. Is generative AI actually going to replace and transform human labour…
- Computer Says Maybe
Regulating Privacy in an AI Era w/ Carly Kind
This week Alix is speaking with her long-time friend and collaborator Carly Kind, who is now the privacy commissioner of Australia. Here’s something you may be…
- Computer Says Maybe
Dogwhistles: Networked Transphobia Online
This week producer Georgia joins Alix to discuss something huge that we’ve yet to go deep on: the prevalence of trans misogyny online. This episode is…
- Computer Says Maybe
VCs Are World Eaters w/ Catherine Bracy
This week Alix interviewed Catherine Bracy on her book World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalising the Economy. Support Catherine’s work and buy it NOW…
- Computer Says Maybe
Power Over Precision w/ Jenny Reardon
Alix’s conversation this week is with Jenny Reardon, who shares with us the history of genomics — and the absolutely mind-melting parallels it has with the…
- Computer Says Maybe
The Taiwan Bottleneck w/ Brian Chen
Do you ever wonder how semiconductors (AKA chips) get made? Or why most of them are made in Taiwan? Or what this means for geopolitics? Luckily, this is a…
- Computer Says Maybe
AI Safety’s Spiral of Urgency w/ Shazeda Ahmed
Are you tired of hearing the phrase ‘AI Safety’ and rolling your eyes? Do you also sometimes think… okay but what is technically wrong with advocating for…
- Computer Says Maybe
Live Show: Paris Post-Mortem
Kapow! We just did our first ever LIVE SHOW. We barely had time to let the mics cool down before a bunch of you requested to have the recording on our pod feed…
- Computer Says Maybe
Defying Datafication w/ Dr Abeba Birhane (PLUS: Paris AI Action Summit)
The Paris AI Action Summit is just around the corner! If you’re not going to be there, and you wish you were — we got you. We are streaming next week’s podcast…
- Computer Says Maybe
DEI Season Finale: Part Two
This week Alix continues her conversation with Hanna McCloskey and Rubie Clarke from Fearless Futures and we take a whistle-stop tour of the past 5 years. We…
- Computer Says Maybe
DEI Season Finale: Part One
DEI is a nebulous field — if you’re not in it, it can be hard to know which tactics and methods are reasonable and effective… and which are a total waste of…
- Computer Says Maybe
DEI: the final season + Alex Kotran on the Future of Education
We have a special episode for you this week: we brought in Hanna Mccloskey and Rubie Clarke from Fearless Futures to talk about the recent announcement from…
- Computer Says Maybe
To be Seen and not Watched w/ Tawana Petty
Welcome back! Let us know what you think of the show and what you want to see more of in 2025 by writing in here, or rambling into a microphone here. In this…
- Computer Says Maybe
Our learnings from 2024
We’re wrapped for the year, and will be back on the 10th of Jan. In the meantime, listen to Alix, Prathm, and Georgia discuss their biggest learnings from the…
- Computer Says Maybe
A $20bn Search Engine w/ Michelle Meagher
Google has finally been judged to be a monopoly by a federal court — while this was strikingly obvious already, what does this judgement mean? Is this too…
- Computer Says Maybe
The Age of Noise w/ Eryk Salvaggio
What happens if you ask a generative AI image model to show you what Picasso’s work would have looked like if he lived in Japan in the 16th century? Would it…
- Computer Says Maybe
The Happy Few: Open Source AI (part two)
In part two of our episode on open source AI, we delve deeper into we can use openness and participation for sustainable AI governance. It’s clear that…
- Computer Says Maybe
The Happy Few: Open Source AI (part one)
In the context of AI, what do we mean when we say ‘open source’? An AI model is not something you can straightforwardly open up like a piece of software; there…
- Computer Says Maybe
Algorithmically cutting benefits w/ Kevin De Liban
This week Alix was joined by Kevin De Liban, who just launched Techntonic Justice, an organisation designed to support and fight for those harmed by AI…