🎙 Listened to Tech Won’t Save Us podcast.

I came to it for an antidote to the recent AI mega-hype, to which it did provide some counter-balancing relief with episodes featuring experts such as Emily M. Bender of “Stochastic Parrot” fame . But the weekly show covers subjects far beyond AI.

Mashable sums it up well as :

…a healthy counter dose to the nauseating tech utopia idealism that typically surrounds Silicon Valley and its enthusiast press coverage.

It has a decent dose of philosophy in between discussions of the technology itself. The most recent episode had an interesting history of consumerism throughout the ages, leading up to the current algorithmically-spewed mess that is the results you get when you search for most categories of products via Google or Amazon.

“Consumerism is an anti-solidary machine” was one of my favourite soundbites from that one, which also hints at the show’s somewhat socialist leanings.