The Sunday Show

This week’s guest is Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and Founding Director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab. Benjamin was recently named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow, and she’s written and edited multiple books, including 2019’s Race After Technology and 2022’s Viral Justice. Last week she joined Justin Hendrix to discuss her latest book, Imagination: A Manifesto, published this year by WW Norton & Company.

This close to the end of 2024, it’s clear that one of the most significant tech stories of the year was the outcome of the Google search antitrust case. It will also make headlines next year and beyond as the remedies phase gets worked out in the courts. For this episode, Justin Hendrix turns the host duties over to someone who has looked closely at this issue: Alissa Cooper, the Executive Director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI). Alissa hosted a conversation with three individuals who are following the remedies phase with an expert eye, including:Cristina Caffarra is a competition economist and an honorary Professor at University College London, and cofounder of the Competition Research Policy Network at CEPR (Centre for Economic Policy Research), London.Kate Brennan is associate director at the AI Now Institute; andDavid Dinielli is an attorney and a visiting clinical lecturer and senior research scholar at Yale Law School.

Kate Starbird is a professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and director of the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation Laboratory at the University of Washington, and co-founder of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public. Justin Hendrix interviewed her about her team’s ongoing efforts to study online rumors, including during the 2024 US election; the differences between the left and right media ecosystems in the US; and how she believes the research field is changing.

Mass migration presents a challenge to democracy in multiple ways. Chief among them is that anti-immigrant sentiment often plays a major role in the advance of illiberal and anti-democratic politics. We've seen this play out in the United States, where President-elect Donald Trump has promised a dramatic crackdown on immigration and the mass deportation of millions. But the scale of today's migration may be dwarfed by what's to come. How has the movement of people affected the politics driving the development of surveillance, biometrics, big data and artificial intelligence technologies? And how do these technologies employed at borders and in governments themselves drive policy and change the way we think about the movement of people?Today's guest has spent years traveling the world to study how technology is being deployed in border regions and conflict zones, and she's written a book about it. Petra Molnar is a lawyer and an anthropologist and the author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.