Cyborg Goddess

Robots. Once the stuff of science fiction, now ubiquitous. From the military, to talk shows, to Syrian refugee camps, we are encountering and interacting with robots everywhere. Today on the pod, Jill talks with Dr. Julie Carpenter about how our interactions with robots may already be changing our sense of ourselves and our place in […]

Open AI released ChatGPT three to the general public at the end of 2022. And within five days of its release, it had over 1 million users. It’s fair to say that today, three years later, ChatGPT, and other large language models embedded in Google, Microsoft, X, Facebook, Snapchat, Adobe, and well, everywhere have become […]

It’s really surprising how little we know about the brain. But have you ever thought about how we know what we do know? And whose brains were on the line when it came to obtaining that information? In today’s episode, Jill interviews Dr. Michelle Pham about her research in the field of neuroethics. We examine […]

Since Roe versus Wade was overturned in the USA in 2022, there’s been increasing concern regarding how technologies like period tracking apps might be used in abortion court cases. We know these apps are not reliable, but there is concern that they might be used as evidence anyway. Surprisingly, Dr. Charlotte Sabourin, Jill’s guest today, […]

12 years ago, in 2013, Spike Jones released the motion picture, Her, staring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlet Johansson. And overnight, the idea of digital women as romantic companions was everywhere. Her was followed rapidly by a slate of other pop culture media exploring the pheonomen, like Westworld, Ex Machina and BladeRunner. The trope was very […]

(Note: Though this episode was published June 6 2025, it was recorded in the late summer of 2024.) We might think of peace as simply the absence of war. But some scholars and advocates argue that peace isn’t just passive, and it isn’t simply the absence of conflict. Instead, peace is a process that must […]

In this episode, Jill interviews Dr. Dennis Waskul and Michelle Anklan on their study of women’s perceptions and uses of the vibrator. Dennis and Michelle share their research into the somewhat complicated historical relationship the vibrator has with feminist thought, and the ways in which women in the second decade of the 21st century think […]

In this episode, Jill talks to Dr. Simone Natale about his research into the legacy of the Turing Test, and the ways in which this test for artificial intelligence has influenced subsequent AI research. Simone argues that the Turing Test is not so much a test of intelligence (though it is often framed as such) […]

In this episode, Jill interviews Dr. Michael Barnes on his research into online extremism. Michael identifies two different but related paths by which online platforms contribute to the radicalization of individuals and communities: the individual route, and the social route. Lastly, Michael discusses why platforms struggle with moderating and blocking hate speech and other harmful […]

Feminist philosophers have been writing about shaming and moral reproach for decades, but some of the theories and ideas about the moral justification for, and efficacy of, shaming don’t necessarily work when we’re talking about online shaming. In this episode, Jill interview Dr. Celia Edell about her research into online shaming. We’ll talk about what […]