Oct 28 2020 36 mins 2
In this episode, guests Svenja O'Donnell and Shannon Vallor discuss data biases, the danger of apathy, saucepan-enabled smuggling and more. Svenja is a writer, journalist, commentator and freelance adviser on Brexit, and UK and EU Politics. She previously worked as a foreign, economics and politics correspondent at Bloomberg News and Businessweek. Her articles have appeared in various publications, including the Financial Times, Sunday Times and Independent. She was awarded the Washington National Press Club Breaking News Prize in 2017 for her coverage of the Brexit referendum and her first book, ‘Inge’s War: A Story of Family, Secrets and Survival under Hitler’ was published in August 2020. Shannon is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI), and Professor in Philosophy. Prior to joining the University, Shannon was a Visiting Researcher and AI Ethicist at Google. Her research explores how new technologies, especially AI, robotics, and data science, reshape human moral character, habits, and practices. Her first book, ‘Technology and Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting’ was published in 2016, and she is currently working on ‘The AI Mirror: Rebuilding Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking’. Each episode of Sharing things is a conversation between two members of our university community. It could be a student, a member of staff or a graduate, the only thing they have in common at the beginning is Edinburgh. We start with an object. A special, treasured or significant item that we have asked each guest to bring to the conversation. What happens next is sometimes funny, sometimes moving and always unexpected. Find out more at www.ed.ac.uk/sharing-things-podcast
