Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal 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 Meredith Broussard.
Meredith Broussard is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and the research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of the book, More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT Press, 2023), as well as the award-winning 2018 book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting, with particular interests in AI ethics and using data analysis for social good. She appears in the Emmy-nominated documentary “Coded Bias,” now streaming on Netflix. Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute of Museum & Library Services, and the Tow Center at Columbia Journalism School. A former features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has also worked as a software developer at AT&T Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab. Her features and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Vox, and other outlets.
The public discourse around AI is noisy. Depending on where you turn, it’s either about to save the world or destroy the world, grant you magical powers or take your job and leave you penniless. But AI is a very real thing happening in and to society. Rarely is the hype-doom binary helpful for understanding how it is and will be woven into our lives from a practical perspective—as well as the social, cultural, political, and economic issues it surfaces or amplifies.
So I was thrilled to chat with Meredith, who has been a guiding light in understanding what AI actually is here and now, as well as how to approach the technology ethically. She published Artificial Unintelligence in 2018—which in the dog years of tech bubbles is several lifetimes ago. In it, she proposed the notion of (and makes the case against) technochauvinism, the belief that technology is always the best or only solution to social problems. Technochauvinism is a powerful lens to understand the mistakes people make in developing AI, as well as in the narratives put forward by AI developers. It’s also helpful for understanding how race, gender, and ability bias in technology is perpetuated through AI—which is the focus of her most recent book, More Than a Glitch. These forms of systemic injustice and oppression that are amplified by algorithmic tools are not abstract, they have real world consequences for real people. The book is an absolute must-read—actually just got a new paperback release a few months ago, so make sure you go grab a copy.
Across both of these books, and the rest of her scholarly and public output, Meredith has an incredible gift for making complex technical topics related to AI and computing accessible without dumbing things down. However you feel about AI—and I know there are many mixed opinions—it’s clearly going to be part of our lives for the foreseeable future. As a non-technical person myself, I believe it’s vital to develop basic literacies and informed positions on AI, so that we’re able to meaningfully participate in advocating for prosocial uses and sensible regulations. And we get to these positions by learning from experts like Meredith Broussard.
📚 Grab your copy of More Than a Glitch here and Artificial Unintelligence here.
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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, Lia Halloran & Kip Thorne, Cherie Hu, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, and more. Here is another recent episode with artist & science communicator Margaret Wertheim:
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