What if AI's most powerful defence application isn't fighting wars, but preventing them?

In this episode of AI for Equity, Jenny Garrett OBE and Leah Garrett are joined by Melanie Garson, Associate Professor at University College London and expert in international security and conflict resolution. Melanie challenges the dominant narrative around AI and defence, making the case for "peace tech": technology designed to stabilise societies, forecast conflict, and rebuild after war.

In this episode:

• Peace tech vs defence tech, and why the distinction matters
• How innovation ecosystems bring governments, industry and civil society together for conflict prevention
• The dual use dilemma: the same drone that surveils can deliver vaccines
• AI's role in post conflict reconstruction, coordinating housing, healthcare and law enforcement data
• The ethical trade offs: privacy, surveillance, and how much we're willing to give up for security

Melanie Garson brings extensive experience in international security and conflict resolution to a conversation that will change how you think about technology's role in peace.

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#AIforEquity #PeaceTech #ArtificialIntelligence #ConflictResolution

Claire Roberts has spent twenty five years in technology strategy and transformation, most of it as one of the only women in the room. She got in without a degree, on the strength of being more useful than anyone else in the building.

In this conversation with Jenny Garrett OBE and Leah Garrett, she talks about what she saw when a major AI engineering company quietly let its diversity commitments slide once the external pressure changed direction, why researcher Sarah Weier's experiment on how models answer questions about women should worry us more than it does, and why the uncomfortable finding is not about the technology at all. The bias is not programmed in. It is in the record we left behind, and the model is reading it back to us.

She also makes the case for AI as a thought partner rather than a replacement, in healthcare, in engineering, and in the ordinary work most of us do every day. Her instruction is simple and harder than it sounds: don't outsource your thinking, use it to improve your thinking.

In this episode:
Getting into tech without a degree, and what usefulness actually buys you
Being the only woman in the room for twenty five years
What happened when diversity commitments met commercial pressure
Sarah Weier's experiment and what the training data revealed
Using AI to sharpen judgement instead of replacing it

The AI for Equity podcast, hosted by Jenny Garrett OBE and Leah Garrett.

What does it mean when an elderly woman calls a plastic device her best friend?

This week, Tracy Fischer and Mary Linberg from the Aging and Disability Resource Center in Dunn County, Wisconsin, join us to talk about their pilot with Ellie Q, an AI companion sitting in the homes of people the care system has quietly left behind. It's a genuinely warm conversation, and an uncomfortable one, because the device works. Users feel less alone. Annie found a friend.

But warmth and indictment can live in the same story. We get into the ethics of putting AI into elder care, the difference between complementing carers and replacing them, and the systemic failure that makes any of this necessary in the first place.

The technology isn't the villain here. The gap it's filling is the point. Loneliness was never a tech problem, and no lamp, however clever, is going to fix a society that stopped showing up.

Listen now.