For Tech's Sake: Recent Episodes
Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody
Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody have been writing about tech for a long time. Now they’re talking about it in For Tech’s Sake, a co-production from Silicon Republic and The Headstuff Podcast Network. Silicon Republic is a leading source of technology news and views and editors Jenny and Elaine are always learning about fascinating and infuriating new developments. They take a side-eye view of tech, not evangelising or demonising it, but definitely throwing a bit of shade when it’s deserved. Join them as they take a look under the hood of both emerging and everyday tech to examine the good parts, the bad parts, and everything in between. Each episode also features a tech expert to help answer their probing questions. Listen in as they hash out what’s just tech for tech’s sake, and find them online @fortechssakepod to join the conversation.
Dublin Maker is coming soon so we spoke to one of its founders, Dr David McKeown, to find out all about this year’s festival and discuss the importance of events like this in encouraging people to engage with science. This year’s Dublin Maker will be hosted in Richmond Barracks on Saturday, 2 September. It’s completely free and welcoming to the creative and the curious. You can find out more about it at DublinMaker.ie and follow David at @dj_mckeown on Twitter to keep up with his work. And keep an eye out for The Big Life Fix returning to your screens on RTÉ. Some other things from this episode you might like to check out: — Jenny’s interview with Dr Elisabeth Bik https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/research-papers-misinformation-elisabeth-bik — Collie Ennis’s Critter Shed podcast https://play.acast.com/s/the-critter-shed — The results of Science Foundation Ireland’s Creating Our Future ‘national brainstorm’ https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/creating-our-future-results-science-research-in-ireland — A piece on making that David wrote for Silicon Republic https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/david-mckeown-maker-movement-ireland — The Tog hackerspace in Dublin https://www.tog.ie/ — The EIRSAT-1 project https://www.eirsat1.ie/ — Bright Club http://brightclub.ie/ — And Jenny’s interview with Dr Catherine Richards Golini on debunking scientific misinformation https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/science-communication-catherine-richards-golini-karger-publishers We’ll release David’s interview in its entirety for HeadStuff+ Community members next week, and we’ll be back in a fortnight with an all-new episode. For Tech’s Sake is a co-production from Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network, hosted by Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody. Thank you to Hilary Barry for production, Matt Mahon and Dall-E for our graphics, Claudia Grandez for her social media support, and all at the HeadStuff team. If you want to support The HeadStuff Podcast Network, for our sake, for tech’s sake and for many more great podcasts, visit HeadStuffPodcasts.com. And follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How much do you know about a tech tool you use every day? Google is often the first port of call for many of us online, but how much do we understand the algorithms deciding the results of our search? And how are recommendations engines shaping our online experience? To discuss these things and more, we spoke to Prof Gareth Jones, an internationally recognised expert on information retrieval and search technologies based at the ADAPT Centre in Dublin City University. Gareth gave us an insight into how search engines work, answered our questions on whether platforms are listening to us to generate recommendations, and gave us a glimpse into how we might search audio and video media in future. — Find out more about Gareth’s research at adaptcentre.ie — You can listen to Elaine’s TV reviews and recommendations every Monday evening on The Last Word, TodayFM — Read about the Bot Sentinel report she referred to at the top of the episode here: https://dot.la/amber-heard-trolls-2657703228.html — Check out Silicon Republic’s analysis of the 2023 Digital News Report for Ireland here: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/social-media-digital-news-report-ireland — Power up your search skills with these pro tips: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-tips-use-google-search-efficiently.html — And if you want to understand more about algorithms and AI, check out our previous episode, AI & U We’ll release Gareth’s interview in its entirety for HeadStuff+ Community members next week, and we’ll be back in a fortnight with an all-new episode. For Tech’s Sake is a co-production from Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network, hosted by Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody. Thank you to Hilary Barry for production, Matt Mahon and Dall-E for our graphics, Claudia Grandez for her social media support, and all at the HeadStuff team. If you want to support The HeadStuff Podcast Network, for our sake, for tech’s sake and for many more great podcasts, visit HeadStuffPodcasts.com. And follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr Patricia Scanlon is Ireland’s first AI ambassador, and she sees it as her duty to start a national conversation on AI and, especially, ethical AI. She joined us to talk about the kind of work that needs to be done to build better AI, and we wondered why that isn’t already the done thing.
Patricia is also the founder of SoapBox Labs, which builds kid-focused speech recognition technology. Follow her @ScanlonPatricia and their work at @soapboxlabs on Twitter (we’re not calling it X).
You can read more about Patricia and her role as Ireland’s AI ambassador here: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/ai-ambassador-patricia-scanlon-chatgpt-ethical-ai And some more links as promised in the episode:
— Cringeworthy product placement for Bing in Hawaii Five-0 (not Miami Vice as Elaine mistakenly thought): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4 — Background on the EU AI Act: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/ai-act-passed-eu-parliament — Some background on OpenAI’s efforts to ensure the safety of ChatGPT: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/openai-chatgpt-ai-safety-data-hallucinations — What you need to know about Bard, Google’s ChatGPT rival: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/google-bard-eu-europe-available-ai-chatbot-languages — A look at how hands-on piloting skills are diminishing as a result of automation: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/business/automated-planes.html — Our season one episode on AI with Abeba Birhane: https://pod.fo/e/1856e8 — A great chart illustrating the dramatically shortening route to 100 million users: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/threads-100-million-users/ — A bit of background on Threads, Meta’s Twitter rival which was released shortly before we recorded this episode: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/threads-twitter-rival-eu-data
We’ll release Dr Patricia Scanlon’s interview in its entirety for HeadStuff+ Community members next week, and we’ll be back in a fortnight with an all-new episode.
For Tech’s Sake is a co-production from Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network, hosted by Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody. Thank you to Julie Hassett and Dan Wilcox for production, Matt Mahon and Dall-E for our graphics, Claudia Grandez for her social media support, and all at the HeadStuff team.
If you want to support The HeadStuff Podcast Network, for our sake, for tech’s sake and for many more great podcasts, visit [HeadStuffPodcasts.com] (http://headstuffpodcasts.com/). And follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We are not the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain, at least that’s what expert Brian Honan says. Brian is internationally recognised for his expertise on cybersecurity and has advised Europol’s Cybercrime Centre along with several innovative security companies. He has even been inducted into the Infosecurity Europe Hall of Fame. And, according to Brian, it’s the tech-makers that need to take more responsibility for the safety of our digital information. While he has some sage advice on passwords and protecting ourselves, he believes in a future where remembering dozens of different complicated sequences of letters and numbers can be a thing of the past. This will take innovative thinking from the tech-makers, resilience from attack victims to avoid paying ransoms that go on to fund more cybercrime, and for the industry to stop limiting who can become a cybersecurity specialist. Because we really do need more Brians and their brains to keep us safe. Brian’s own cybersecurity company is BH Consulting and you can find him on Twitter @BrianHonan. You can find lots of cybersecurity stories on SiliconRepublic.com, and a good place to start is their Cybersecurity Week collection from earlier this year. And here are a few more links you may find interesting: — Brian recently weighed in on Ireland’s preparedness against cyberattacks for Silicon Republic: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/ireland-cybersecurity-cyberattacks-resilience-prepared-brian-honan — If you need a refresher, this is what happened with HSE cyber attack: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/hse-cyberattack-explainer-conti-ransomware — This is how Gmail plans to introduced verification: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/05/expanding-gmail-security-BIMI.html — And here’s some background on Google’s plans to ditch the padlock icon in Chrome: https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/03/google_chrome_padlock/ We’ll release Brians’s interview in its entirety for HeadStuff+ Community members next week, and we’ll be back in a fortnight with an all-new episode. For Tech’s Sake is a co-production from Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network, hosted by Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody. Thank you to Megan Fox for production, Matt Mahon and Dall-E for our graphics, Claudia Grandez for her social media support, and all at the HeadStuff team. If you want to support The HeadStuff Podcast Network, for our sake, for tech’s sake and for many more great podcasts, visit HeadStuffPodcasts.com. And follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Social media can connect us, divide us, entertain us and enrage us. We’d love if online spaces were made safer and better moderated to keep the nasty parts at bay, but in the end it often comes down to how we moderate ourselves, with some people understandably pulling back from their digital lives just to protect themselves. We spoke about the good, the bad and moderation of social media with journalist Aoife Barry, the author of ‘Social Capital: Life online in the shadow of Ireland’s tech boom’. This book is like a Reeling in the Years of online content, and we highly recommend you pick up a copy. You can follow Aoife online @sweetoblivion26 on Twitter and Instagram, and check out these links for more: — Find where you can pick up a copy of Social Capital here: http://linktr.ee/aoifebarry — Subscribe to Aoife’s newsletter at https://sweetoblivion.substack.com — Read more about the court case Aoife and other women took against their harasser here: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2023/04/22/it-felt-as-risky-being-a-teenage-girl-on-the-internet-as-it-did-being-a-teenage-girl-in-real-life/ — Find out more about BeReal, the social app we are big fans of, on Silicon Republic: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/what-is-bereal-photos-instagram — And more about the problematic Tattle, here: https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/tattle-life-investigation — And a little history of Scunthorpe Problem can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem We spoke at length with Aoife and couldn’t fit it all in here, but we will release her interview in its entirety for HeadStuff+ Community members next week. And we’ll be back in a fortnight with an all-new episode. For Tech’s Sake is a co-production from Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network, hosted by Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody. Thank you to Megan Fox for production, Matt Mahon and Dall-E for our graphics, Claudia Grandez for her social media support, and all at the HeadStuff team. If you want to support The HeadStuff Podcast Network, for our sake, for tech’s sake and for many more great podcasts, visit HeadStuffPodcasts.com. And follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We’re talking Big Tech, small start-ups and how they scale, disrupt and sometimes become one. Our special guest is Stripe CTO David Singleton, who we nabbed for an exclusive interview during his recent visit to Dublin.
David has been a fintech whizz ever since he built some invoicing software for his parents when he was a kid. But before he was the technical lead of a global financial services and software company, he spent many years in engineering at Google.
Google was once among the born-on-the-internet companies disrupting industry incumbents, but now it’s one the Big Tech behemoths eating up small businesses that threaten their dominance.
We explored this dynamic between big and small, and asked David about the scaling journey in between. He explained what makes crafty software businesses so nimble, and shared his own top tips for managing fast-growing software projects.
You can follow David over on Twitter, @dps, and check out these links for a bit more background on this conversation:
— Stripe is a multibillion-dollar company founded by Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison. For more on what it’s about, check out this recent article on Silicon Republic: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/stripe-david-singleton-payments-engineering-dublin
— Eileen O'Mara, head of EMEA revenue and growth at Stripe wrote this piece on scaling start-ups in Europe: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/stripe-research-europe-startup-ecosystem
— Check out this earlier interview with David on Silicon Republic, when he had just joined Stripe as CTO: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/stripe-david-singleton-payments-engineering-dublin
— At the top of the ep, we mention the controversy surrounding Tesla’s autonomous driving claims. HeadStuff Podcast Network members can hear more on this in v1.7_bonus: You drive me lazy (originally released 18 January 2022)
— And at the end, we mention this great discussion on building and scaling a start-up with Intercom’s Des Traynor at Future Human 2022: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/des-traynor-intercom-future-human-entrepreneurship
We’ll release David’s interview in its entirety for HeadStuff Podcast Network members next week, and we’ll be back in a fortnight with an all-new episode.
For Tech’s Sake is a co-production from Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network, hosted by Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody. Thank you to Megan Fox for production, Matt Mahon and Dall-E for our graphics, Claudia Grandez for her social media support, and all at the HeadStuff team.
If you want to support The HeadStuff Podcast Network, for our sake, for tech’s sake and for many more great podcasts, visit HeadStuffPodcasts.com.
And follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Claims of sentient AI have been largely debunked by experts, but there are still plenty of unsettling aspects of this technology that raise ethical questions.
In this episode of For Tech’s Sake, Abeba Birhane, an expert in AI and cognitive science, helps us to better understand this fast-spreading technology and its limitations. We find out how AI can be at best unhelpful and annoying, and at worst prejudiced, powerful and completely opaque, particularly when the building blocks it's based on contain toxic materials.
Read more about Abeba Birhane, the Gender Shades project, Blake Lemoine, and why sentient AI claims can be damaging on SiliconRepublic.com: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/mit-database-racist-misogynist-discovery-abeba-birhane https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/abeba-birhane-ucd-digital-colonialism https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/microsoft-facial-recognition https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/timnit-gebru-google-ai-scientist-fired-for-highlighting-bias https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/google-engineer-ai-sentient-lamda-chatbot https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/sentient-ai-google-lamda-research-development-ireland-insight
This episode of For Tech’s Sake was brought to you by Silicon Republic and The Headstuff Podcast Network.
If you want to support The Headstuff Podcast Network, for our sake, for tech’s sake and for many more great podcasts, visit HeadstuffPodcasts.com.
Follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Medical technologists are racing to fix all of our ills – even our inevitable death! But in the rush to embed technology into healthcare, are we thinking about all of the unintended consequences that may come with it? Is our health data really safe for example? Can medical devices be hacked? And how accessible will this health-tech be in the future? Listen as Silicon Republic’s Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody explore all of these questions and differentiate the needless from the necessary when it comes to technology in healthcare. To find out more, we also spoke to Ita Richardson, a co-principal investigator at the software engineering research centre, Lero and a professor at University of Limerick. Read more about what the future holds for health-tech on SiliconRepublic.com: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/series/future-health-week/ This episode of For Tech’s Sake was brought to you by Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network. Thank you to Gearóid Farrelly and Amy O’Dwyer for production, Matt Mahon and Dall-E for our graphics, Claudia Grandez for her social media support, and all at the HeadStuff team. If you want to support The HeadStuff Podcast Network, for our sake, for tech’s sake and for many more great podcasts, visit HeadstuffPodcasts.com. Follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
While plenty of technology has been designed to make the world a safer place, it can also introduce a whole new way to abuse and exploit others. From stalker apps to location trackers, tech has given many abusers the opportunity to track, monitor and control others. While other seemingly innocuous devices such as smart doorbells and virtual assistants can have their settings manipulated for nefarious actions. Listen as Silicon Republic’s Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody discuss how these devices work, and how they can be misused. We also spoke to Louise O’Hagan, co-founder of Cyber Awareness Ireland, about the growing trend of tech-facilitated abuse and how easily our everyday devices can be used against us. For more information on this topic, check out: CyberAwarenessIreland.com SafeIreland.ie https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/safe-ireland-digital-domestic-abuse-technology-guide Online safety booklet: https://www.safeireland.ie/lets-talk-tech-online-safety-tips/ This episode of For Tech’s Sake was brought to you by Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network. Thank you to Gearóid Farrelly and Amy O’Dwyer for production, Matt Mahon and Dall-E for our graphics, Claudia Grandez for her social media support, and all at the HeadStuff team. If you want to support The HeadStuff Podcast Network, for our sake, for tech’s sake and for many more great podcasts, visit HeadstuffPodcasts.com. Follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Digital transformation is a buzzword in all business right now, and some businesses are deciding to push ahead with new tech adoption without consideration for the people it will impact. While some elements of digital transformation can lead to better operations, some of it is truly tech for tech's sake, and lead to job displacement and bad service. Listen as Silicon Republic’s Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody dissect what digital transformation actually means beyond the buzzword. To find out more, we also spoke to Joan Mulvihill, the digitalisation and sustainability lead at Siemens. Read more about Joan Mulvihill and her thoughts on digital transformation on SiliconRepublic.com: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/digital-transformation-joan-mulvihill-siemens You can also check out Silicon Republic’s Digital Transformation Week, which covers this topic in more detail: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/series/digital-transformation-week/ This episode of For Tech’s Sake was brought to you by Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network. Thank you to Gearóid Farrelly and Amy O’Dwyer for production, Matt Mahon and Dall-E for our graphics, Claudia Grandez for her social media support, and all at the HeadStuff team. If you want to support The HeadStuff Podcast Network, for our sake, for tech’s sake and for many more great podcasts, visit HeadStuffPodcasts.com. Follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It’s been 60 years since John F Kennedy famously said, “We choose to go to the moon.” But why? Space exploration comes at the cost of billions and on the back of some stellar innovation spanning decades in development. Is it all really worth it? Listen as Silicon Republic’s Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody peer into space-tech and marvel at our fascination with whatever truths are out there. To find out more, we also spoke to Prof Tom Ray and Dr Patrick Kavanagh, two Irish scientists who worked on the James Webb Space Telescope. Read more about their work at DIAS and the JWST on SiliconRepublic.com: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/james-webb-telescope-irish-scientists-dias-nasa This episode of For Tech’s Sake was brought to you by Silicon Republic and The Headstuff Podcast Network. If you want to support The Headstuff Podcast Network, for our sake, for tech’s sake and for many more great podcasts, visit http://HeadstuffPodcasts.com Follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice.
Elaine Burke and Jenny Darmody have been writing about tech for a long time. Now they’re talking about it in For Tech’s Sake, a co-production from Silicon Republic and The Headstuff Podcast Network. Silicon Republic is a leading source of technology news and views and editors Jenny and Elaine are always learning about fascinating and infuriating new developments. They take a side-eye view of tech, not evangelising or demonising it, but definitely throwing a bit of shade when it’s deserved. Join them as they take a look under the hood of both emerging and everyday tech to examine the good parts, the bad parts, and everything in between. Each episode also features a tech expert to help answer their probing questions. Listen in as they hash out what’s just tech for tech’s sake, and find them online @fortechssakepod to join the conversation.