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  • Remainder Humanism & Language Machines

    Remainder Humanism & Language Machines
    2026/07/15

    Every time a machine catches up to us, we redraw the line around what makes us human — and call whatever's left the "remainder." This week, Jessica and Kimberly (no guest) dig into Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism by NYU professor Leif Weatherby, and ask whether the whole human-vs-machine contest is a trap.

    Along the way: why Emily Bender's "it's just intent" argument doesn't hold up as well as it seems to, why cognition and culture can't actually be separated, a 100-year-old linguistics theory (structuralism) that explains why LLMs work at all, and why the body — not the brain — might come first.


    In this episode

    • The core argument — Remainder humanism: defining "human" as whatever's left over once machines take a skill. Why that's a losing game (the "arm wrestling a forklift" bit).
    • Team Bender vs. Team Weatherby — Emily Bender's claim that intent is what separates human language from AI output, and Weatherby's counter: intent doesn't ground meaning, the language system grounds intent.
    • Form vs. function — A quick linguistics 101 detour: language isn't just words on a page, it's what those words do in context ("it's hot in here" as a request, not a weather report).
    • Cognition vs. culture — The WEIRD psychology problem (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) and why decades of "universal" cognitive science findings didn't hold up outside that narrow sample.
    • Structuralism, 100 years early — The idea that words get meaning from their relationships to other words, not from pointing at things in the world — and why that theory basically predicted LLMs.
    • Meaning without truth — Why hallucinations are what a meaning-making system with no truth-tracking looks like.
    • Embodiment — Descartes' "I think therefore I am" flipped: feeling comes before thinking, and what that means for machines that don't have bodies.
    • Practical takeaway — How to stop playing defense: quit asking "what can I still do that machines can't," start asking what these systems are trained on, who's represented, and who gets to shape them.


    Mentioned in this episode

    • Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism — Leif Weatherby
    • Emily Bender — linguist, "stochastic parrots" / text extrusion
    • Noam Chomsky — universal grammar, cognition as separate from culture
    • Maha Bali — "Where Are the Crescents in AI?"
    • Michael Pollan & Annika Harris — on consciousness and embodiment


    Personal segment

    The episode closes with a quick peach-and-pit check-in — home renovation surprises and a therapy update on sitting with feelings in the body instead of just thinking through them.

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    57 分
  • Mothering the Machine: Feminist Theory Meets Silicon Valley's Newest Metaphor

    Mothering the Machine: Feminist Theory Meets Silicon Valley's Newest Metaphor
    2026/07/08

    Guest: Dr. Michelle Morkert — gender scholar, leadership coach, founder of the Women's Leadership Collective.

    In this repisode (get it? re-episode?), Kimberly and Jessica sit down with Dr. Michelle Morkert to unpack the growing call from AI leaders for "maternal AI," which is the idea that treating AI systems like children we're raising will make them safer, kinder, and less likely to turn on us. Michelle walks through the difference between a gender analysis (counting heads) and a feminist analysis (asking who holds power and why), then the conversation turns to why "maternal" is a loaded, historically fraught word to hand to an industry that has never asked mothers what they actually need or wondered how mothers (or even women in general) might benefit.

    Topics covered:

    • Gender analysis vs. feminist/intersectional analysis, illustrated through the demographics of the U.S. Senate
    • The "maternal AI" proposal from figures like Geoffrey Hinton (computer scientist and cognitive psychologist often referred to as the "Godfather of AI" and Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google X. We talk about why they never get specific about what "maternal" would actually mean in practice.
    • Sarah Ruddick's concept of "maternal thinking" as a non-gendered ethical stance, and how it differs from what's being proposed now
    • Why Sam Altman's comment that saying "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT costs OpenAI "tens of millions of dollars," which he called "well spent", is a small but telling data point in this conversation
    • Deepfake harm and non-consensual imagery as the more urgent, material issue getting sidelined by the "maternal AI" metaphor
    • Radicalization pipelines and the "tradwife" aesthetic as a case study in how "maternal" framing gets co-opted politically
    • Donna Haraway's "God trick" and why tech's claim to neutrality keeps women out of the room
    • Karen Hao's Empire of AI and the Indigenous-language-model counterexample as a picture of what reciprocal, non-extractive AI development could actually look like

    Also referenced in this episode:

    • Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib
    • Laura Bates on BBC's Radical with Amal Rajan (dehumanization and algorithmic feeds)
    • Allie K Miller's interview on the Mel Robbins Podcast

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    1 時間 2 分
  • AI Data Centers Are Coming to Your Backyard

    AI Data Centers Are Coming to Your Backyard
    2026/07/02
    AI doesn’t live in “the cloud.” It lives in buildings: large, energy-hungry, water-dependent facilities that require land, cooling systems, backup power, utility agreements, zoning decisions, and public infrastructure.We’re re-releasing this conversation because the issue has become urgently local. Across the United States, communities are debating whether proposed data centers are good economic development, risky infrastructure bets, or something in between. Here in Ames, Iowa, the City Council is reviewing a proposed data center. The City of Ames says the proposal is still in the early review stage, with no final decision made, and that the full buildout could require up to 25 megawatts of electricity.Kimberly recently wrote an open letter to the Ames Mayor and City Council asking them to slow down, require independent review, and make sure ratepayers are protected before any binding commitments are made. Read it here: “Open Letter to the Ames Mayor & City Council: Re: Proposed Lightedge Data Center on Aviation Way.”This episode originally focused on 3 of AI’s environmental impacts, energy consumption, water use, and e-waste. But the larger question is civic: who pays for the infrastructure behind AI, who benefits from it, and who gets a say before it shows up in their community?Kimberly and Jessica talk with Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais about the physical infrastructure behind AI and the local consequences of the data-center boom.We discuss:Why AI is not abstract, weightless, or magically floating in “the cloud”What data centers are and why they require so much electricity, cooling, and landThe difference between individual AI use and concentrated industrial infrastructureWhy “innovation” can become a rhetorical wrapper for public risk and private profitHow data centers can affect utility planning, municipal water systems, noise, land use, and local tax policyWhy communities should ask hard questions before approving long-term leases, incentives, or infrastructure commitmentsThe Lewiston, Maine, data-center fight and what other communities can learn from itWhy “AI infrastructure” is not just a tech issue, but a local governance issueData-center debates are spreading across the country. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported on July 1, 2026, that lawmakers in 15 states are considering bans or pauses on new data-center development while they study community impacts, grid resilience, and local costs. And nationally, more than 500 organizations from 47 states have called for a moratorium on new AI data centers until stronger protections are in place around energy, water, pollution, electricity rates, and community impacts.Kimberly’s open letter argues that the Council should require independent review before making commitments around a lease, sale, rate classification, or incentive package. The letter specifically asks the Council to protect current utility customers, evaluate the proposal against Ames’ climate and planning commitments, and require evidence around jobs, tax revenue, and community benefit before moving forward.Key questions for any community facing a data center proposalBefore a city approves a data center, residents can ask:How much electricity will it use at each phase of development?Not just at opening, but at full buildout.Who pays for grid upgrades, substations, transmission lines, and backup infrastructure?If the answer is “the utility,” ask whether that means current ratepayers.How much water will it use, and what kind of water?Municipal drinking water, industrial water, reclaimed water, or something else?What happens during peak heat, drought, or grid stress?Data centers may look different on an average day than they do during peak demand.How many permanent local jobs will actually be created?Construction jobs are not the same as long-term local employment.What tax incentives, abatements, or special rates are being offered?Public benefit should be measured against public cost.What protections are binding?Promises in presentations are not the same as enforceable agreements.What happens if the company leaves, expands, sells, or changes use?Communities need to think beyond the ribbon-cutting.How does this project fit with the city’s climate, land-use, and economic-development plans?If a city wrote those plans, this is the moment to use them. Otherwise, congratulations, we invented decorative planning documents.Who gets to decide?Public land, public utilities, and long-term infrastructure commitments deserve public scrutiny.Related reading and resourcesCity of Ames page on proposed Lightedge data center https://www.cityofames.org/News-articles/City-Council-to-Review-Proposed-Data-Center-Includes-Public-Input-ProcessIowa State Daily coverage of Ames City Council data center discussion https://iowastatedaily.com/339765/city-of-ames/city-council-discusses-data-center-proposition/NCSL: Which States Are Banning Data Centers? https://...
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    1 時間 39 分
  • Why Good Intentions Don't Stop Data Centers (or Bad AI Writing

    Why Good Intentions Don't Stop Data Centers (or Bad AI Writing
    2026/06/24

    We're back from a few weeks off (I went to Florida, Jessica bought a new house and went to a psilocybin retreat — more on that below) with a wide-ranging catch-up that ends up circling one idea: Incentives matter more than intentions. We trace that thread through a proposed data center near Ames, Iowa, through the words AI chatbots keep teaching us to use, and through our own complicated relationships with money, time, and control.

    In this episode:

    The data center fight in Ames, Iowa (Kimberly's current hometown). Ames is now considering airport-adjacent land for a data center, and we walk through what that actually means at scale, including the energy draw, the water use, the construction-jobs pitch that's more one-time than it sounds, and what a community can realistically do about it.

    Incentives over intentions. A phrase from Your Undivided Attention's recent episode on the Center for Humane Technology's seven principles of humane tech becomes the throughline for the whole episode. We talk about tech executives who don't let their own kids use their platforms and, more personally, the unsolicited advice that's well-meant but lands as criticism anyway.

    "Claudish" and linguistic capitalism. Kimberly has been tracking word-frequency spikes in a web corpus — quiet, nuanced, connective tissue, and others — that track suspiciously well with the rise of generative AI in everyday writing. We talk through Frédéric Kaplan's 2014 concept of linguistic capitalism and how an SEO-shaped corpus of web writing became the training data now teaching all of us to sound a certain way.

    Surveillance capitalism and bread and circuses. We talk about Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People and what it reveals about how Meta's own leadership treated their products' addictiveness, plus the older idea of "bread and circuses" — distraction and convenience as tools of social control. If you're unfamiliar with surveillance capitalism, we highly recommend this book by Shoshana Zuboff.

    Frugal hedonism (and failing at it). A book recommendation for The Art of Frugal Hedonism by Annie Raser-Rowland and Adam Grubb leads to an honest conversation about the gap between the lifestyle we'd like to want and the one we actually have.

    Pit & Peach. Beach trips, a near-drowning rescue, a psilocybin retreat in Georgia, and stepping away from a long-held academic role.

    Also mentioned in this episode:

    • Ayana Gray, I, Medusa (Kimberly's beach read)

    Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

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    1 時間 7 分
  • Motherhood and Higher Ed Burnout in an AI Moment

    Motherhood and Higher Ed Burnout in an AI Moment
    2026/06/10

    In this episode, Kimberly Becker and Professor Laura Dumin pull back the curtain on motherhood, higher ed burnout, and AI's effects on teaching. They talk pretty candidly about midcareer life with Laura sharing the reality of juggling three internal grants, release time, her kids' summer camp rush, and student needs and Kimberly tracing her own path out of Moxie, the AI feedback startup she co-founded with Jessica, and into a job completely outside academia after half a year of applications with zero interviews. Together, they discuss rising intolerance for institutional nonsense and why higher ed initiatives often feel like yet another layer of unpaid labor.

    Key themes:

    • 4–4 teaching loads and the myth of “just add research”
    • Being the primary earner: health insurance, risk, and career choices
    • Closing an edtech startup and facing a brutal job market
    • Midlife in academia: burnout, boundaries, and “less tolerance for everything”
    • Why many of us are choosing “good enough” over constant hustle

    Suggested links to include:

    • LinkedIn profiles for Kimberly and Laura
    • Prior WTBAI episode about Moxie

    Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

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    56 分
  • The Pope Joins the Chat that Women Were Already Having

    The Pope Joins the Chat that Women Were Already Having
    2026/06/03
    When Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, his landmark encyclical on AI and human dignity, it lit up LinkedIn, Substacks, and newsfeeds worldwide. Kimberly read it the morning it dropped. Jessica, whose complicated relationship with religious institutions runs deep, read it anyway. And both of us had the same reaction as Abi Awomosu's: women have been saying this, uncited. In this episode, we explore the encyclical's arguments, like:technology is never neutralunchecked growth impoverishes rather than enrichestreating limitations as defects is a category error, and concentrated technocratic power may be beyond the reach of regulation. And we also name what's missing: the women, the scholars of color, and the critics who were making these exact arguments years before the Vatican caught up.We draw threads from the Pope's letter through late-stage capitalism, the bread-and-circus dynamics of the attention economy, and what Jolene Blais called AI's role as a "catabolic agent." We talk about certainty language, the death of expertise, and why scientists are trained to live with uncertainty (and why that training is increasingly under attack). We end up, somehow, at microplastics, frugal hedonism, egg freezing, and communes. It's that kind of episode.In this episode:What encyclicals are and why this one matters — even if you're not CatholicThe specific passages we highlighted and why they resonatedAbi Awomosu's critique: women have been saying this, uncited — and her piece "Vatican Washing: Why All the Tech Broligarchs' Roads Now Lead to Rome"The "Who Said It First" problem and why it's more complicated than it looksPosthumanism and transhumanism, and the Pope's sharp warning about treating some lives as less worthyData centers, extractive infrastructure, and colonial parallelsWhy scientists hedge (and why that's a feature, not a bug)Late-stage capitalism, the disintegration of community, and why collective action is harder when the technology driving us apart is the same technology we'd need to organize againstFrugal hedonism as a form of resistancePit & Peach: Kimberly's mom heads back to Mississippi (with a plan), and Jessica takes her first step toward freezing her eggsReferences & LinksThe encyclical:Magnifica Humanitas — Full text, Vatican.vaWhy is Anthropic helping launch the Pope's encyclical? — National Catholic Reporter (co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican presentation — yes, really)Scholarship & criticism:Abi Awomosu, "How Not to Use AI" — SubstackBender, Gebru et al., "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" (2021) — the paper Timnit Gebru was fired from Google over; a preview of nearly every argument that followedTom Nichols, The Death of Expertise (2017)Books:Klara and the Sun — Kazuo IshiguroHe, She and It — Marge Piercy — feminist cyborg novel from 1991 that remains eerily prescient on AI, corporate power, and communityThe Art of Frugal Hedonism — Annie Raser-Rowland & Adam GrubbFrom our archives:WTBAI: "The Trojan Horse of AI" with Jolene Blais & Jon IppolitoOur paper in Frontiers in Education: AI as Cultural Intermediary Leave us a comment or a suggestion! Support the showContact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/
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    54 分
  • AI Voice Cloning: Trust, Persuasion, and Who's at Risk

    AI Voice Cloning: Trust, Persuasion, and Who's at Risk
    2026/05/27

    When you call your bank, your doctor's office, or your financial planner, the voice that greets you may have been deliberately engineered to make you feel safe, calm, and compliant — and you almost certainly can't tell. Research shows people correctly identify synthetic voice only about 55% of the time. That's barely better than a coin flip.

    In this co-host deep dive, Kimberly and Jessica pull apart what "voice" actually is (pitch, pace, prosody, timbre, accent) and why those features matter for trust, persuasion, and power. Synthetic voice isn't new, but the technology has crossed a threshold because it now replicates the subtle features that signal warmth, authority, and credibility. That has obvious applications in healthcare and customer service. It also powers grandparent scams, deepfake executive impersonation, and sales pipelines designed to move you from skepticism to compliance before you notice what happened.

    In this episode:

    • What linguistics actually tells us about why we trust certain voices (and why politicians hire coaches to lower their pitch)
    • The FTC's 2024 numbers on imposter scams — $700 million lost by people over 60 in one year, a 362% increase from 2020
    • The Hong Kong finance worker who wired ~$25 million USD (HK$200 million) after a deepfake CFO appeared on a Zoom call
    • ElevenLabs, Speechify, and the companies building what they call "emotional operating systems" for AI
    • Trust vs. persuasion: when shared goals protect you — and when they don't
    • Why older adults are the highest-risk population, and why detection tools aren't the solution
    • Where regulation actually stands: New York's synthetic performer law (SB 7013), the EU AI Act, and what's still missing
    • Practical questions to ask yourself — and the companies you interact with

    Mentioned in this episode:

    • Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
    • Project Hail Mary directed by Drew Goddard, starring Ryan Gosling (film, 2025)
    • The Martian by Andy Weir
    • "Walk my Walk" by Blanco Brown (the real human artist)
    • "Walk my Walk" by Breaking Rust (the AI-generated version)
    • Kimberly and Jessica's paper: "Defining and assessing AI literacy for researchers across the research lifecycle" in Frontiers in Education

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    45 分