Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Avriel Epps.
Dr. Avriel Epps is a computational social scientist, scholar, and strategist whose work bridges artificial intelligence, transformative justice, and youth well being.
With a PhD from Harvard University, Dr. Epps' research delves into the intersection of technology, storytelling, and social equity, focusing on how biases in artificial intelligence impact the human beings that use it.
Their work has been featured in major outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, Vogue, The Atlantic, and more. Dr. Epps is committed to leveraging digital spaces to usher in a just and regenerative future. They are currently the Civic Science Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. In Fall 2025 they will begin their tenure as Assistant Professor of Fair and Responsible Data Science at Rutgers University.
AI continues to be a major subject of debate—and for good reason. It’s a technology that holds incredible potential to shape and reshape power. This is why we have to remain more vigilant than ever to how AI models are built, who builds them, what their motivations and value systems are, and what we collectively demand from builders, and how we regulate them as a society. As with any emerging technology, what we’re talking about is not just technology—we’re talking about how that technology is interwoven into society.
Today’s guest, Dr. Avriel Epps, is an expert in these topics. Their work centers on how AI fits into questions of bias, equity, transformative justice, and identity formation—or doesn’t. When they provoke questions about how AI currently replicates existing harms, they simultaneously gesture to the ways it might not, and the actions that we ought to take to ensure AI doesn’t merely exacerbate the worst of modernity.
This is especially important when we think about kids, who lack agency over their own lives, but are simultaneously less fixed in their ideas about the world. On March 11, Dr. Epps will release A Kids Book About AI Bias, a book designed to help kids aged 5-9 understand how AI bias works and what all of us can do to address it. The book jumps off from the premise that if AI doesn’t work fairly for everyone, it’s not actually helpful AI. But you don’t have to be a technologist—or even an adult—to speak out in support of the development of fair technologies. For folks in the Los Angeles area, there will be book release event on March 15 with Black Girls Code, and Dr. Epps will also be at SXSW in support of the book.
Pre-order your copy of A Kids Book About AI Bias here!
We discussed the book and so many other thorny questions about AI, society, Dr. Epps’s ongoing research and background in the music industry, and much more.
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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with eco-philosopher & public intellectual Rupert Read:
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