Episode 19: Climate Change, Vaccines, AI, and the Lure of Technochauvinism ft. Meredith Broussard

The Received Wisdom

Episode 19: Climate Change, Vaccines, AI, and the Lure of Technochauvinism featuring Meredith Broussard

This month, Jack and Shobita discuss the recent IPCC report on climate change and the politics of vaccine "hesitancy", and puzzle over the lure of technological fixes to solve complex problems. And Jack speaks with Meredith Broussard, Associate Professor of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and Research Director, NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, who has developed a new approach to understanding this puzzle: technochauvinism.

- Jack Stilgoe (2013). "Why has geoengineering been legitimised by the IPCC?" The Guardian. September 27.

- Meredith Broussard (2018). Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. MIT Press.

- Meredith Broussard (2019). "When Binary Code Won't Accommodate Nonbinary People." Slate. October 23.

- Meredith Broussard (2019). "Letting Go of Technochauvinism." Public Books. June 17.

- Meredith Broussard (forthcoming, 2023). More Than a Glitch: What Everyone Needs to Know About Making Technology Anti-Racist, Accessible, and Otherwise Useful to All. MIT Press.

Study questions:

1. Why are policymakers and publics so attracted to seemingly simple technological fixes?

2. What are the costs of framing vaccine "hesitancy" or climate change as individual, moral problems?

3. What is technochauvinism, and what's wrong with it?

4. How might we approach artificial intelligence in a more socially responsible way?

5. Should facial recognition technology be banned? Why or why not?