Episode 25: Science in Abortion Politics and the Failure of One Laptop Per Child ft. Morgan Ames

The Received Wisdom

This month, Shobita and Jack discuss how scientists are engaging in the boiling politics of abortion in the United States, the implications of large language models (a new type of artificial intelligence), and Elon Musk's possible takeover of Twitter. And we have a fascinating conversation with Morgan Ames about her award-winning book The Charisma Machine, which focuses on the global One Laptop Per Child project. Ames is Professor of Practice at the School of Information and Associate Director of Research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

- Morgan G. Ames (2019). The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child. MIT Press.

- Morgan G. Ames (2021). "Laptops alone can’t bridge the digital divide." MIT Technology Review. October 27.

- Morgan G. Ames (2019). "Future Generations will Suffer if we Don't Solve Unequal Access to Tech." Pacific Standard. April 2.

- Morgan G. Ames (2019). "The Smartest People in the Room? What Silicon Valley’s Supposed Obsession with Tech-Free Private Schools Really Tells Us." LA Review of Books. October 18.

- Roger A. Pielke Jr. (2007). The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics. Cambridge University Press.

- Dan Sarewitz (2013). "Science must be seen to bridge the political divide." Nature. 493: 7.

- Johanna Okerlund, Evan Klasky, Aditya Middha, Sujin Kim, Hannah Rosenfeld, Molly Kleinman, Shobita Parthasarathy (2022). What’s in the Chatterbox? Large Language Models, Why They Matter, and What We Should Do About Them. Technology Assessment Project, Science, Technology, and Public Policy Project, University of Michigan.

- Richard Van Noorden (2022). "How language-generation AIs could transform science." Nature. April 28.

Study Questions:

1) What are the problems with scientists taking such a prominent role in the abortion debate, especially in the US?

2) What was the hope behind the One Laptop Per Child project, and how did it fail?

3) What biases lay underneath the One Laptop Per Child project, in the idea, the design, and the implementation?

4) What role does hype play in shaping our understanding of emerging technologies? What are its positive and negative dimensions?

5) Could a One Laptop Per Child-type project ever be successful? How?

Transcript available at thereceivedwisdom.org.