The Technically Human Podcast

What happens to mathematics when doing mathematics is no longer an exclusively human activity? For years, we've watched artificial intelligence get progressively better at math: solving equations, passing exams, succeeding at mathematical competitions, and generating proofs. But recent developments seem to cross a different kind of threshold. This month, OpenAI announced that an internal AI system had produced a solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem—one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, designed to represent some of the most difficult unsolved questions in mathematics. The announcement has generated excitement, skepticism, and controversy. But it also raises a much larger set of questions. What does it actually mean to do mathematics? Is mathematics about arriving at a correct answer, or understanding why that answer is true? What happens to ideas like discovery, creativity, and authorship when machines can participate in producing new mathematical knowledge? And what does that tell us about artificial intelligence—and about ourselves? My guest today is Dr. Noah Giansiracusa, a math professor at Bentley University and a faculty associate at Harvard, with a PhD in algebraic geometry from Brown University. Noah is cohost of the podcasts Breaking Math and AI in Academia, and his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Scientific American, TIME, Wired, Slate, and The Boston Globe, among others. His first book, How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News, examined the mathematics and technology underlying our information ecosystem. His latest, Robin Hood Math, asks how people from all backgrounds can use mathematics to navigate—and reclaim some control over—a world increasingly governed by algorithms. Today, we're talking about what happens when those algorithms begin doing mathematics themselves.

What does it mean for the web to be open—and open to whom? For most of the web’s history, we’ve operated on a fairly simple assumption: if you put something on a public website, people could find it, search engines could index it, and information could move relatively freely across the internet. But as AI systems increasingly crawl, extract, learn from, and act on information from the web, that bargain is beginning to change. My guest today is Shane Evans, co-founder and CEO of Zyte, a company that builds technology for extracting data from the public web for use in AI, analytics, and other applications. Shane has been working on the web since the late 1990s. He was a lead engineer at lastminute.com during the dot-com era, later created Scrapy, the widely used open-source web-scraping framework, and founded Zyte in 2010. Today, we’re talking about Zyte’s new research suggesting that the Open Web is increasingly becoming a “Controlled Web”—and what that means for publishers, AI companies, web users, and the future of access to information online.

My guest today is Dave Merritt, cofounder and Chief Technology Officer of Watch Duty. Founded in 2021, Watch Duty is a nonprofit emergency-information platform that provides real-time, verified intelligence about wildfires and floods across all 50 states. Its network of active and retired firefighters, dispatchers, first responders, and reporters monitors radio traffic, satellites, cameras, weather data, and official sources to give people information they can act on—often in the critical period before traditional emergency communications catch up. Today, Watch Duty serves more than 16 million active users annually. Building technology people rely on during a disaster raises profound questions about trust: How do you move information quickly without sacrificing accuracy? How much uncertainty should you expose to the public? What should we automate—and what decisions still require human judgment? And what happens when a nonprofit technology platform begins functioning as critical public infrastructure? Dave Merritt has spent roughly fifteen years building software and scalable technology systems, and today leads the technical architecture behind Watch Duty.   In our conversation, we talk about what technological infrastructure looks like when wildfire risk has increasingly become part of the background condition of everyday life. When a fire does start, one of the most consequential questions is also one of the simplest: What is actually happening, and what do I need to do? Watch Duty was built to answer that question. Watch Duty is a nonprofit organization that relies on donations and volunteers. To support Watch Duty as a donor or. volunteer, please visit watchdutz.org.

In the wake of this week’s landmark $18 billion settlement with Meta, we’re bringing you an episode with Yaël Eisenstat, one of the leading thinkers on the issues at the heart of that case — and the many other recent legal challenges that may be fundamentally changing how we think about the power and responsibility of technology platforms. In recent months, courts and juries across the country have been confronting questions that technology policy has wrestled with for years: When should platforms be held responsible for harms facilitated by their products? Where is the line between regulating speech and regulating product design? And what does it look like to build the legal cases that hold Big Tech accountable? And after decades in which Section 230 and other legal protections often prevented these questions from reaching juries at all, are we witnessing the beginning of what we’re calling tech’s Big Tobacco moment? In the episode, I speak with Yaël Eisenstat about the recent cases against Meta and other platforms, the years of research, journalism, whistleblowing, advocacy, and litigation that made this moment possible, and what happens when evidence about the consequences of technological design finally reaches ordinary jurors. We also ask what these cases can—and cannot—accomplish. Can litigation succeed where legislation and regulation have struggled? Can social media actually be redesigned to serve the public interest, or are its harms inseparable from its underlying business model? And as our technological landscape shifts from social media toward increasingly personalized and intimate AI systems, are we building an accountability framework for the last technological era just as the next one arrives? Yaël Eisenstat is the Director of Policy and Impact at the CyberSafety Research Center, where she works on policy approaches to holding online platforms accountable for their effects on public safety and democracy. She previously served as Vice President of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology & Society and, in 2018, joined Facebook as its Global Head of Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising. Before entering technology policy, Eisenstat spent 14 years in public service as an intelligence officer, diplomat, and White House adviser. She has since become a prominent advocate for greater transparency and accountability in the technology industry.

My conversation today is with Monika Bielskyte, a futurist, foresight strategist, speculative designer and founder of Protopia Futures. She developed the Protopia World Stack, a science-informed, life-centric foresight methodology. Protopia is an Inclusive future vision based on evolved values, informed by bleeding edge scientific research and supported by advanced technological tools. She was Nike's first Futurist in Residence, is an EY Luminary, and has consulted across entertainment, technology, science, and government – including Disney and Marvel's Black Panther franchise. Her technical expertise spans AI, spatial computing, XR, and synthetic media, with particular attention to how these systems can expand human agency or be weaponized for behavioral manipulation and disinformation. Monika bridges the worlds of entertainment and real future-making by prototyping culturally expansive, socially and environmentally engaged future visions that combine the best of creativity and science, delivering energizing vision, lasting value and resilience to disruptions. What connects all of it is a commitment to futures literacy - the belief that rendering better futures compelling, curiosity-inducing, and inhabitable is the mechanism by which transformation happens.