Hoorf! Radical Care in a Late-Capitalist Heckscape

centering our human-ness in technological pursuits, with Dr. Damien Patrick Williams

• Elle Billing • Season 3 • Episode 11

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Elle Billing interviews Dr. Damien P. Williams, an assistant professor in philosophy and data science at UNC Charlotte, about the philosophy of contemporary (and future!) technologies. Dr. Williams discusses the Super Crip narrative,the importance of centering marginalized experiences in tech development, and the implications of accessible technology, highlighting the need for genuine engagement and ethical considerations in tech design. And yes, they even discuss the elephant in the room: “AI”

Links to connect with Dr. Williams, and all other resource links, are in the full show notes at hoorfpodcast.com

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Elle Billing:

Hi. My name is Elle. Billing. I am a chronically ill queer femme, and I'm tired. I'm here this episode and every episode to dig at the roots of our collective fatigue, explore ways to direct our care in compassionate and sustainable ways, and to harness creative expression to heal ourselves and to heal our world. Welcome to Hoorf: Radical Care in a Late Capitalist Heckscape. You Dr Damien Patrick Williams is an assistant professor in philosophy and data science at UNC Charlotte, where he teaches and researches on how technologies such as algorithms, machine intelligence, and biotechnology are impacted by the values, knowledge systems, philosophical explorations, social structures and even religious beliefs of human beings. Dr Williams received his PhD from Virginia Tech in the field of science, technology and society. All of Dr Williams research is concerned with how the knowledges and experiences of marginalized peoples affect and should be centered within the techno-social structures of human societies. I'm really excited to have Damien on the podcast today. Welcome to Hoorf, Hi, Damien welcome to Hoorf,

Damien P Williams:

hey

Elle Billing:

it is great to have you here.

Damien P Williams:

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being here today.

Elle Billing:

Yeah, this is one of those, I guess, last season, Ricki and I talked about, sort of how the arc of how an episode comes together, and Ricki talked about how we always brainstorm a list of dream guests. And there's always, like, the list of friends, right, who we think will be, like a sure, a sure thing, they'll agree. And then there's like, the list of like, like internet celebrities, or like, like dream guests. And you're kind of somehow, like, the overlap between those two, like, to me anyway, like you're, you're Ricki's friend, and to me, You're, like, one of those people on Bluesky that people like, like, repost your posts, like people pay attention to what you say. And so I was just telling you before we hit record, I was kind of intimidated by this interview, like, excited, but also we had enough tech problems coming into this that now I'm like, totally cool with it.

Damien P Williams:

Yeah, absolutely.

Elle Billing:

So like,

Damien P Williams:

just a person, and sometimes my computer messes up.Like, that'speople

Elle Billing:

We're all just people. And like, that's the thing that I have figured out doing this. Like, we're all people with ideas, and we have a conversation about them.

Damien P Williams:

That's right,

Elle Billing:

but there's some times when I'm like, oh gosh, this person I don't know.So Ricki and I have been talking about having you on the podcast for quite a while, and as far as the arc of our season, this works really well too, because we just talked about, we just did, like, two episodes on Ricki's book, and my, my art series, and your dissertation is, quote is, there's a page in Ricki's book where she pulled an epigraph from your from your dissertation that fits, like, I think it's like, the very last page,

Damien P Williams:

yeah, she told me that she wanted to use it for the last, the last section. And I was quite frankly honored,

Elle Billing:

yeah, and it packs such a punch on that last page. It's so good.

Damien P Williams:

I appreciate that, and I definitely appreciate its placement and its use in that way.

Elle Billing:

I think, yeah, yeah. So I'm excited to have you here, and I'm glad Ricki was like, No, we have to get Damian. So anyway--

Damien P Williams:

Thank you so much.

Elle Billing:

Yeah. So anyway, there's me like, fawning all over you at the beginning of the episode, everyone's gonna be like, oh gosh, geez. Just ask the questions.

Damien P Williams:

Let's get to it.

Elle Billing:

So here we are. Yeah, Ricki can cut out as much of that as she wants. The first question, how have you received care this week?

Damien P Williams:

this week, I have received care from my partner helping me to make my way through other technology troubles that I mentioned to you before we started recording. A lot of things were going wrong in a number of ways that I was blaming myself for, both fairly and unfairly, and my partner was very helpful in corraling that tendency that I have to blame myself when things go wrong that are, in some cases unavoidable and in some cases just random accidents of the universe that can't, you know, maybe could have been avoided, but definitely couldn't necessarily have been prevented by me or foreseen by me. So I'm very appreciative of that, of that particular range of care, because it got me in a head space to actually be able to sit down and think about how I needed to be responding to the situation in a way that I could actually like process it and move through it.

Elle Billing:

Yeah, it's nice to have that other person there to like come alongside when stuff's not going well,

Damien P Williams:

yeah, very, very helpful. It's not the only way I've received care this week, but it is one of the most crucial.

Elle Billing:

Yes, yeah. So could you give our listeners, kind of an overview of your work and, like, what your areas of research and interest are?

Damien P Williams:

Yeah. So I do work in a couple of different overlaps, intersections. You know, my first couple of degrees are in Philosophy and Religious Studies. That's my master's. I have a PhD in science, technology and society. And at the intersection of that is me thinking about how human values and beliefs show up in socio-technical contexts, in the ways that we make technology in our society, in the way our society pushes us to make the technologies that we make, and specifically, even further, more corralled than that, I think about how marginalized lived experience should be centered in the creation of technology, and how the ways that marginalized lived experience is excluded from technology is actually kind of a root cause for many of the problems that we see in a kind of a bigger scale. And so I think about that in the context of race, gender, disability, many different kinds of axes of marginalization, many of them together,

Elle Billing:

okay, and you're, you're a professor at

Damien P Williams:

UNC Charlotte,

Elle Billing:

okay, yeah.

Damien P Williams:

I'm an assistant professor of philosophy and data science and two different home departments. Because, yeah, it's a it's rare to be able to find a place that is like focused on interdisciplinarity in this kind of a way. And the thing that the UNC Charlotte departments, both philosophy and data science have going for them is that they both care very deeply about the idea of different ways of bringing philosophical inquiry into the practice of philosophy, but also into the practice of thinking about data and technology and all of the different ways that humanities can can show up in technological processes like that.

Elle Billing:

I was also an educator in a very different, very different sphere, but during a decade when the big push was STEM, STEM STEM, STEM, STEM and I, I'm an arts and humanities person. Like, I went to science and technology camp when I was in eighth grade. It was the Governor's School for Careers and Technology and so, like, back in 1999 so, like, sort of the beginning of this, like, let's push kids into STEM thing. But as an educator, I was kind of right in that decade of like, everything's gonna be STEM. I was like, what about what about art?Like, what about The Arts? What about drama? What about well-roundedness? And just as I was sort of getting out, people were like, well, maybe we could do STEAM. And I'm like, Okay, it's a start. There was still, like, so much missing from the conversation. And it was really, it was, like, super frustrating as, like, a language and literature and arts, and let's think about well rounded, good people, type of teacher, yeah. And I mentioned before, I didn't before we recorded that I didn't finish my master's degree, but that was I was working on in, like, Bilingual Ed and critical pedagogy, and a lot of bell hooks and Paulo Freire and yeah. So I was butting heads a lot with people, because I do have that, like, that same interdisciplinary, like, are we thinking about, like, what are we thinking about, and how are we thinking about things? And when kids leave here, are they able to think and reason, not just think and reason, but, like, ethically.

Damien P Williams:

Yes, No, exactly like the the idea of, like, can they bring the the ethical side of things in? Can they bring the the creative and the the human side of things? Like, what does it mean to be a person with other people?

Elle Billing:

Yeah, are they still curious.

Damien P Williams:

exactly like the level of curiosity, inquisitiveness, and the ability to kind of critically engage and introspect with themselves, and, you know, think with each other, right? Like it's a social process, and you don't get that without some kind of practice of different types of sociality.

Elle Billing:

Yeah, that was --

Damien P Williams:

ways of being together.

Elle Billing:

"It's a social process." I was offered-- when I was still in-- I did eight years in elementary and five years in secondary. When I was in elementary, I was offered one-to-one iPads for my students. I was like, No, I don't want them. And the principal was, like, surprised, right? And I was like, my kids don't need Facetime. They need face time. Like... Like, these kids are language delayed, and they

Damien P Williams:

right. they have problems with pragmatics and social skills. Like, there's a place, there's a place for technology. And, like, there's a place for like, I mean, I had one iPad for my class, right? And like, I had a class of, like, eight kids or something. And like, they can do math drills on it or record themselves signing and then translate it into English or whatever. But like, they need face-to-face time working on language skills and all these other social things that they're not getting like, you don't need one-to-one, no, no, thank you, because learning is social. Like, that's Yeah, and that's the thing is, like, if you can, if you can, provide me with a context in which the iPad framework is going to enable sociability and socialization and engagement for kids in different modes, right? Like they would have access to we can work with that. That sounds great, but if it's just give a kid a piece of technology and then guide them through software, guide them through tools, that's going to work for some kids and for some kids, it's really, really, really not going to work, and that's going to be a problem. And so how do we like-- it's not to say there's no benefit to technology. It is to say that it's got to be a thing that we add in, not a thing that we entirely rely upon or used to replace, engaging with each other in more relational social ways. Like technology can facilitate relational sociality, but it has to be made to do that. It has to be used specifically and intentionally in a way to do that just assuming that it'll happen is just it's a recipe for disaster.

Elle Billing:

Yeah, yep. So-- you said it better. I'm gonna totally paraphrase it poorly. Marginalized experiences and technology, and how we should be centering those in how we approach and use and develop technologies. Can you talk a bit about the Super Crip narrative?

Damien P Williams:

Yeah

Elle Billing:

What that is and like, how it fits into, like, the erasure-- that the actual like, even though it seems to center disabled people, how it actually contributes to the erasure of disability?

Damien P Williams:

yeah, the Super Crip narrative is one of these tropes that's been kind of picked out and highlighted by Dr Ashley Shew. And Ashley was my advisor during my PhD at Virginia Tech. She wrote a book called Against Technoableism, and she talks about the ways that technology in disability contexts, oftentimes, rather than actually being of a benefit to disabled people, ends up erasing disabled people, ends up harming disabled people. And the super crip narrative is this one that, like really resonated with a lot of the work that I was doing when Ashley and I met. Because what it is specifically about, is about the ways in which, when you get disability, assistive technology, the idea is that it should make you better. Like, not just like, the idea of of a prosthetic or an implant or an assistive device that quote, unquote, fixes you is already bad, but the super crip narrative takes it that extra step further where it's not just that it quote, unquote, fixes you, it's that it makes you better than you were or better than baseline. And so this idea is that through having this extra technology, you become superhuman. And you become more than and oftentimes this is used, even within disability spaces, as a way to say, you know, don't discount disability. Don't think about being disabled as this thing that is like, gonna make your life so much worse. Because what you actually get through the use of the assistive technology that exists out there for disabled people is superpowers. You get implants that let you hear better than you ever could before. You get prosthetics that lets you change your height or run faster than you could. You get all of these. You get access to exoskeletons that make you stronger, like and this narrative still then sees the site of disability as a site of wrongness, right? and being disabled is somehow, in and of itself, a bad thing, and The Technology is what makes it okay. The technology fixes and, quote, unquote, enhances you in that space, right? And so oftentimes these things get talked about as enhancement technologies or augmentation technologies. In the past, I even talked about in that way myself, I would talk about human augmentation. I got into the habit of changing the way I talk about it, because I talk about them now more as interventions.

Elle Billing:

Yeah,

Damien P Williams:

bio technological interventions, because augmentation or enhancement, both of those terms, they're positive terms. It's not necessarily the case that the interventions that are taking place, are all good that they are necessarily positive, a more neutral term would probably be more appropriate, like intervention.

Elle Billing:

Yeah, right. I mean, you mentioned and of course, occupational hazard my brain latches on to, like the well, you get implants that help you hear better than you could have heard before. That's not how implantswork

Damien P Williams:

exactly.

Elle Billing:

And it's like, you take them off and you're still deaf, like

Damien P Williams:

precisely.

Elle Billing:

You can't, you can't wear them in the shower. You can't wear them swimming. They get wet, they fail. They

Damien P Williams:

They fail themselves. You have to replace batteries. You can't hear in certain registers in the same way as you used to,

Elle Billing:

and they're not as precise as your, like a human ear,

Damien P Williams:

all of these things.

Elle Billing:

I knew kids who had to have them removed, because they ended up, like with really rare infections, and they had to have their implants taken out, and then they heal for a year and then put back in. put

Unknown:

back in.

Damien P Williams:

They're a transdermal implant. They go, they necessarily break the site of the skin barrier to implant behind the ear and into the Cochlea. You know, bone, like those frameworks, necessarily are a potential site of infection. Any transdermal implant is a potential site of infection.This does not make cochlear implants all bad and should be completely eliminated from everyone's experience. It is a potential tool that people

Elle Billing:

It's a tool. should have the choice as to whether they get to access, and should have the availability for it if they make that choice. It should not be an expectation. It should not be a belief that you must get technology to, quote, unquote, enhance your life, or you are failing at being all you could be by being disabled. That's the super crip narrative. That's techno ableism, right? As as Ashley defines this, this framework of techno ableism, it's not just that we assume that disability is bad and quote, unquote, fixing it with technology is good. It's that we assume that the good of the technology makes everything about the new framework good, that the techno ableist framework becomes the space in which we assume that any accessibility technology, any technology specifically or supposedly rather for disabled people, is by definition, an improvement for their lives, and that framework is so potentially dangerous. It is because so many times the technology is made by non disabled people,

Damien P Williams:

exactly

Elle Billing:

without the consultation of people with disabilities,

Damien P Williams:

exactly that.

Elle Billing:

I swear, every year some kid for their science fair project creates a pair of gloves that can trans- that can translate--I'm using scare quotes here. You know where I'm going--gloves that can"translate" sign language.

Damien P Williams:

yes.

Elle Billing:

And it's always a hearing kid, and all it can do is finger spelling,

Damien P Williams:

yes.

Elle Billing:

And it's like, what's the use case for this?

Damien P Williams:

Right? What is, what is the good of this, and-

Elle Billing:

how does it actually help? Just learn sign language.

Damien P Williams:

Just learn sign language. You will know a new language. What is the bad part of you learning another language,

Elle Billing:

right? Like this doesn't help anybody. And there's always people in the-- like, the comments are always filled with people like, this is so great, because it's, it's that techno ableism, of like, the technology is viewed as inherently good. And anybody who was like, this doesn't actually help. They're like, quit being a hater. It's like, no, actually, I'm deaf, and this isn't helpful.

Damien P Williams:

This isn't helpful to myself.

Elle Billing:

Anybody like, Yeah, so like, this is, like, they literally could have spent their money and time on something else, right?

Damien P Williams:

Exactly

Elle Billing:

but, and then it always wins, like it always wins the science fair. And it's like no deaf people were consulted in the making of this device.

Damien P Williams:

So I'm gonna do a thing I often do in the space, because I use a pop culture reference. And in that pop culture reference. I am

Elle Billing:

Oh, my favorite. gonna give a little bit of warning that is gonna be a bit of a going to be a bit of a spoiler, the Marvel series Echo. The protagonist of the series is deaf, and she was raised by the villains of one of the Marvel, other Marvel series, Daredevil and Hawkeye, Wilson, Fisk the Kingpin. And the entire series is about her estrangement from him, and him trying to work his way back into her life in various ways, and her making different choices. But there's a moment where Fisk tries to reconcile with her and tries to show that he truly understands her. And what he does is that he gets this set of glasses, these AR glasses that translate sign language into something that he can hear, and then he can speak to his interpreter and have his interpreter sign for him in response. And he sees this as this, this thing that he has done. And there's this, this other intervention where it like it will it will display a projection of signing if the other person is wearing, you know, a paired glasses, they'll see when he speaks, they'll see sign in front of him, and he sees this, again,this is like this, he's trying to show that he understands, that he wants to communicate with her truly. And at one point in this she just, she tries. She they have conversations, but then she, I don't even remember what it is that causes her to have the realization, but she realizes that this is, this isn't going anywhere, and that this is just another way for him to get what he wants. And so she takes the glasses off, puts them on the ground and steps on them and says, basically, you could have just learned sign language, and walks away from it. Because, if you want to do this, if you want to actually understand me, if you want to actually communicate with me, having you spend all this money to mediate your experience through some glasses that translate for you, but money is easy for you. A piece of technology that gets products out in the world is not the same as trying to actually understand someone. You could have just learned sign language. Yeah, in the first season, I interviewed a friend, an artist friend of mine, who is limb different. She was born with one arm, and she spent a lot of her childhood wearing various prostheses, and so many of-- she talked about her experience with them and how she doesn't use a prosthetic anymore. And she talked about so many of like, so much of her art now is about processing the experience of like, going through the photos of her as a kid, where like, she's positioned so her her difference is hidden because and it was, it's to make able bodied people feel more comfortable

Damien P Williams:

exactly. And that's one of the things that we talk about when we talk about prosthetics use, especially for armed amputees. You know, prosthetics use is often not about actual functionality, or not for the benefit of the prosthetics user. It's about making the people around them feel comfortable. And so I'm actually, after spring break, we're going to be moving into a chapter, a couple of sections on prosthetics in my Philosophy of Technology and Disability class. And so we're looking at this framework of Wearers versus Starers, the people who wear prosthetics versus the people who stare at those who wear prosthetics. This is a framework that comes from Rosemary Garland Thomson. It's from her book Staring. And this idea of who is the prosthetic actually for? Is it for the benefit of the person who's using the prosthetic? Because if it was, wouldn't it then be developed differently? Wouldn't it necessarily be responsive to the needs, the preferences of the person who actually will be using it every day? If prosthetics are actually for the purposes of the person who will engage it, why do all prosthetics still have to look like? Why are they defaulted to look like four fingers and a thumb around a central palm, right? Why is that our framework of what a prosthetic limb, quote, unquote, should look like? What about different frameworks of usage? What about people who have gotten more comfortable without using prosthetics and have adapted to engaging in the world in that way, and no prosthetic that exists actually gives them the range of functionality that they have in their daily life already. Why the assumption that someone should use a prosthetic, if not? Because seeing someone without a prosthetic makes people uncomfortable, right? And honestly, that's a problem for the uncomfortable person, not the person. That's the problem for the rest of us. That's an us problem, right? That is not the prosthetic user or deniers prosthetic, you know, non users problem like that's that is a problem for the person to work out in themselves. Why are you uncomfortable by seeing somebody who chooses not to put a fake limb on for your comfort. Why are you made unsettled by that? Why not just recognize that bodies come in different configurations and move on with your life?

Elle Billing:

Yeah, I think, I think that kind of gets into one of the next things I wanted to talk about, a little bit: diversity of bodies, I think gets into, like, what used to be the ugly laws where people with physical disabilities or severe impairments couldn't be, weren't allowed to be seen in public, basically

Damien P Williams:

Right

Elle Billing:

--led to mass institutionalization of disabled people, which gets into, like, the question that your dissertation really provokes, and I think a lot of your work does, too, is like, who gets to be human?

Damien P Williams:

Yeah who gets to call themselves a human? Like, what is humanness? Which I think really kind of, if we can get just slightly more, it's more than slightly, slightly for a moment, Very, very political. Yes

Elle Billing:

yeah. I think it's sort of crystallized in this political moment we're in right now, the coup within the government, the US government. We have other, we have listeners from other countries, but I'm sure they're aware of what's going on here, because people have opinions about it, a coup within the federal government, the elimination, like the scorched earth approach to all the DEIA initiatives, and then Elon Musk's rampant transphobia and racism and ableism and his investment in Neuralink

Damien P Williams:

Right,

Elle Billing:

plus his personal belief that he is a genius destined for Mars who must repopulate as many genetically selected offspring as possible, right? I mean, all of that is based in like, long embedded beliefs about eugenics and humanness,

Damien P Williams:

yeah,

Elle Billing:

and who gets to call themselves human? And I think you know the talk about like, functional prosthetics versus esthetic prosthetics as part of that, as well. as disabled people living in this moment.

Damien P Williams:

Yeah.

Elle Billing:

How? How do you think we can have useful, constructive, or even hopeful? I mean, it doesn't feel very hopeful right now, but how, how can we have useful and hopeful conversations about all of like--It's such a, I think, a pure distillation of the direction everything's going,

Damien P Williams:

yeah,

Elle Billing:

just right now. It just, it feels so heavy, yeah,

Damien P Williams:

yeah, um, I was actually on a working group call with some of my collaborators earlier today, and one of the things that we kind of ended with at the end of it was that we always end our our project calls more hopeful than we start. And like that's in a very real way, a function of being in community with disabled people and being in community and thinking together about the things that we want to do, and the things that we want to build, both in spite of but also without regard to the current political situation. What are the things that we can do to make our lives more joyful, to make our communities fuller, to make our experience better in general. And how do we build that kind of capacity for for ourselves? That isn't easy by any means, and some days it it feels much harder than others, and increasingly so especially. I mean, I say this for my own sake, but I've heard it from I know it is true for others as well, but the only thing for it is to try to be in community with those who can help us to lighten that load and to build something in place of the stuff that is happening right now, something that that provides a meaningful alternative and that community can, you know, hopefully be in physical person and spaces together, but even if it's built around online communities of people working in disparate parts of the world. You know, as I said before,technology can facilitate and enhance communication. It can help us build community, but we have to use it that way. We have to build it that way. And when we do when we can and use it and build it that way, we can make good things happen over large distances. We can be distributed, but work together,

Elle Billing:

yeah

Damien P Williams:

and that is, I think, crucial right now, the aim for those things that let us think about not just what's horrifyingly wrong, because there is a lot, but to ask. Would we rather? What do we even beyond a world where we didn't feel like we had to struggle every moment for our survival? What would we rather this world look like, build what we want exactly, you know, and again, not easy, not not a given that we will be able to like, somehow, snap our fingers and make that happen, but being able to to work, to envision it together, to build community around that those shared visions of what the future can look like and what we can try to do. That, in and of itself, gives us something to push towards, rather than just against.

Elle Billing:

I dig that. So in terms of, I'm going to change the question just a little bit, just technology in general, I guess, and disability, or we could go like in terms of, because you do a lot with machine learning, not whenever you talk about "AI" you use scare quotes

Damien P Williams:

Every time.

Elle Billing:

Yep, I like that, because it's not what people think it is. People when they when they refer to it, they're not referring-- I think one of the things that I noticed, like that I really appreciated and like, hit me about when I was reading your dissertation, is like, even the people who are making it aren't in agreement about what they're making

Damien P Williams:

correct.

Elle Billing:

And I was like, Oh my God. Like, there's no agreement about what the goals are, or about why they're doing it, or what the like,

Damien P Williams:

what are the potential use cases, even like, once again, where it's like--

Elle Billing:

We don't know, we're just playing, we're just playing just,

Damien P Williams:

we just want to play with billions upon billions of dollars and massively carbon enhancing products just playing, yeah, these guys are trying to build a digital God. These guys are just trying to make money. These guys don't know what they're doing. These guys over here are thinking about digital Gods while they're trying to build a thing that makes money, and hope that the thing they make to make money somehow, somehow turns into a digital God sometime down the line. Who knows,

Elle Billing:

but they're worshiping it in the process of building it, in the process of building it. It's, yeah, it's, it's a

Damien P Williams:

exactly massive--

Elle Billing:

just like the lack of consensus on what words mean hence, hence the scare quotes around "AI," every single time, was astounding to me. I was like, they don't even know. They don't even know

Damien P Williams:

every single time. No one agrees on what it means when they're marketing it or talking about it, it is, so is at this point more of a marketing term than a meaningful referent to anything.

Elle Billing:

So, yeah, which you know, when we were trying to get on zencaster, which I use, which is a recording platform, we were having lots of problems with the mics and the headphones, and I almost said, ever since they added the AI components, it's been a nightmare to use. But it's like that actually means nothing, because which AI components and which part, right? Like this used to be a very basic platform, and it worked great, and then they just kept adding all of these features. And now I have, like, the most trouble with it,

Damien P Williams:

that's so, ugh, no

Elle Billing:

but we're not, we're not going to renew our subscription in May, because none of the buttons are labeled for visually impaired.

Damien P Williams:

I've been noticing that. I've been noticing that, like, all of the buttons are just icons and and they are just, you know, there's no, like, mouse over, or really anything else. It's, it's.

Elle Billing:

We found that out because I recorded an episode with a blind woman, and I have a friend who works in assistive tech for the blind. And I was like, Hey, can you go through my onboarding process to make sure everything's accessible? Everything I had built was accessible. Zencastr wasn't. And I was like, Well, I'm canceling my subscription, but it's paid through May, so we're using it through May, and then we're going to find something, probably just going to use Zoom,

Damien P Williams:

yeah, like, weirdly, of all of the tech that's out there right now, Zoom is weirdly the most accessible and all of these things, it's kind of bananas. Um, I mean, you know, they've been at it in many ways the longest. So they've had the long

Elle Billing:

they have, like the widest audience,

Damien P Williams:

the widest audience, the most you know, data to pull from about what they need to work on and what they need to fix and adjust. But at the same time, it's like, it is kind of shocking to me, because of the other ways in which Zoom is also still very bad.

Elle Billing:

Oh yeah,

Damien P Williams:

it's just not. Like, okay, so this is

Elle Billing:

like, all these little startups, all these little startups, yeah, and they're like, why are you canceling your subscription? Like, oh, I'll tell you.

Damien P Williams:

Yeah, we'll have a conversation about that. You don't want to have that conversation with me, but we'll talk about it.

Elle Billing:

Yeah, it's like you added all these other features before you bothered to make your platform accessible,

Damien P Williams:

right, right? Like, why --

Elle Billing:

you had three investor rounds before you made your platform accessible? Yeah, if you're adding generative AI features to your platform before you've made a screen reader accessible interface, then I don't think I want to engage with you anymore.

Damien P Williams:

right.

Elle Billing:

Yeah, I'm not gonna give you my money anymore. But no, the first season, it was free. You-- they've had it for That's I mean, you have it, you have it for two, like, three seasons, two seasons, yeah? But I had to start-- enshitification happened also. So like, the features that I used to get for free, we had to start paying for.

Damien P Williams:

Yep,

Elle Billing:

and then it's not as good. It's like,

Damien P Williams:

oh, you've you're charging me for a thing that I used to have for free, and now the charge version is also worse. Okay,

Elle Billing:

yep, yep.

Damien P Williams:

Have a good one. We'll see you later or never again, actually.

Elle Billing:

So all that said

Damien P Williams:

yes

Elle Billing:

in terms of technology,

Damien P Williams:

yes,

Elle Billing:

disability, all of these things. Where do you still find yourself the most frustrated?

Damien P Williams:

I think, I think that last conversation kind of encapsulates a lot of, yeah, but like, it's, it's, honestly, it's with the pushing of quote, unquote, AI into every aspect of things without actually asking for a use case. And more recently, one of the things that I have seen is that there's a lot of people who are pushing generative AI into spaces and billing them as accessibility, and saying those generative AI applications are gonna be of a huge benefit to disabled people.

Elle Billing:

Thank you

Damien P Williams:

and so I will not deny in any way, shape or form, that I know people who have used generative AI tools for help with things that you know their ADHD makes difficult for them, or, you know, things that are hard because of other neurodivergent conditions or any other number of disabilities. I have seen it. I have watched it happen. It is not a universal use case or preference or benefit to all disabled people. It has some fairly constrained use cases for certain people I have met and other people I have met who have tried to use it in the exact same way, get wildly different and far worse results. So the idea that you can just build this out as this universal panacea, it's like, and then anybody who attacks it is like, Why are you attacking this thing that's so great for disabled people? It's like, well, as disabled people, let me tell you, it's not actually that great for me.

Elle Billing:

Yeah,

Damien P Williams:

it's, I'm not everybody, but damn, it's not just good for everybody. So

Elle Billing:

or when I've seen I have other friends who are in academia who have like, no-AI policies on their syllabi, and students will be like, well, that's my accommodation, I needed for an accommodation. And it's like no,

Damien P Williams:

no, no, literally, anything that you get a generative AI system to do for you in the name of transcription or in the name of summarization, is yes. One, you can use other stuff for it, but two, and more importantly, for my purposes as an educator, it's going to do all of those things poorly for you, it's going to actually provide you with something that might actually do you real harm in terms of how well you retain the information and how well you can use it later. And that's a problem for me, as the person whose job it is to make sure you learn this stuff.

Elle Billing:

Like, I use otter AI to transcribe the podcast, and it still takes me an hour to go through the transcript and edit

Damien P Williams:

Absolutely, that's fast, because I was telling my students about otter the other day, and I was like, yeah, it's about a two to one for me. Like, if I've recorded,

Elle Billing:

it's not great half an hour's worth of stuff, it's going to take me an hour, if I've recorded an hour's worth of stuff, it's going to take me two hours to go through and then correct all of that and make like, listen to it, correct it. Listen to it, correct it, like, all of it. And that's just like, Otter AI is, is basic machine learning stuff. Like, it's the old school machine learning stuff is not, you know, until recently, large language model integrated, um, they started to do more of that. Unfortunately. Yeah, it did used to take me longer, like, but I have like, three seasons worth of episodes in there now, and they've been improving. They, they must have just done a big update,

Damien P Williams:

yeah,

Elle Billing:

to their software or their platform or something, because the last three episodes I've done were, like, so much better,

Damien P Williams:

yeah, and so like, that's one of the things that we can we can point to as, like, real, tangible improvements in the space. If you can use machine learning software and you can train it on a repository as large as otter AI has. If you can train your system on that much data, that much voice to text data, you can refine something into something that works 90 to 98% of the time, you know, in a way that will be indistinguishable from a human transcription, there will still be things that it gets weirdly wrong every single time. Yes, the thing that I've noticed, and the thing that a lot of people in the field have recognized, is that once you start to add in generative AI stuff into that space, generative AI tanks your actual like transcription, rate of reliability of what has been transcribed, because it doesn't do it as well. It's not as good at actually processing spoken language into text. It's built on older frameworks that are but like the things that generative AI processes do introduce ranges of types of errors that are just gonna happen in that space, figuring out how to mitigate for that is still in process. Yeah, people have better and worse solutions for it, but it's definitely not like, yeah, just gonna get a great transcription every single time with a lot of work afterwards, kind of get a great transcription if you make sure you put in the work. And that's the thing. And it goes back to the other thing is, like, so much of this is, if you put a human who knows what they're doing into conversational usage with this tool, you pick somebody whose job is transcription, will they be able to make use of this tool in a way that actually benefits and augments their day to day life? Quite probably, if you put someone who doesn't know the vagaries and sometimes weird quirks of transcription into use with that tool? Are they going to get the same level of benefit out of it? Probably not.

Elle Billing:

Yeah.

Damien P Williams:

So trying to sell these things as some universal again, this this kind of idea, it'll solve everybody's problems. Everybody will have access to all of these tools that used to cost money and used to be so opaque that's not necessarily how it actually ends up working at all. You still end up needing people who have expertise in this stuff to come in and make sure it works good. So why not just have those people there from the outset, that's my, you know, my range of frustrations on how AI, quote, unquote, so called, uh, ends up fitting into our lives. That it gets pushed in so many places that it just doesn't need to be push, and it gets defended with these spurious claims of it's going to make things better for people. And it's like, no, no. That's not what making an accessible world looks like. That's not what actually creating a world where disabled people have the things that they need looks like. This is another case in which you have determined, from your perspective, what disabled people ought to want, and then implemented it and pushed it as though it works for not the same as actually asking people what they want, what they need, and then designing something that can reliably give that to us, letting them design for themselves, letting us design for ourselves. What it is that will reliably do that for us?

Elle Billing:

Yeah. So last question, what is? What is One True Thing that you have learned from your work

Damien P Williams:

every single piece of technology and every single thing we do in society is better when we center the lived experiences of marginalized people first, we make things better than we otherwise. Would we do better? We are more responsive, more adaptable, we are more capable of thinking in different ways, because we have more different perspectives when we let marginalized, lived experiences and people lead the conversation, not just get consulted after the fact, but actually, like lead research questions, lead design teams, lead the actual development of technology, of policy, of social needs, we're asking different questions than we would otherwise. We're thinking in different routes than we would otherwise. We're developing things that respond and sit in the world in more ways than they would otherwise, and that is only, almost only ever, a good thing.

Elle Billing:

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for being here today. I appreciate your time.

Damien P Williams:

This has been a lot of fun and a really great conversation, so I really appreciate you having me on.

Elle Billing:

Thank you. Oh, if people want to find you on social media, where do they find you?

Damien P Williams:

Primarily on Bluesky. Okay, it's wolvendamien on blue sky. I'm I've got a website that's a future worth thinking about dot com.That's where essays, blog posts, preprints of papers, go up there.

Elle Billing:

Okay, I'll put those in the show notes so people can find you. Thanks.

Damien P Williams:

Thank you.

Elle Billing:

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hoorf. To get the complete show notes and all the links mentioned on today's episode, or to get a full transcript of the episode, visit hoorf podcast dot com Join the Blessed Herd of Saint Winkus. By signing up for our newsletter, you can get Hoorf episodes delivered directly to your inbox. What's more, you get invitations to our monthly Coffee and Biscuits Chat, where you get to hang out with Ricki and Elle, talk about the show and connect on the topics that mean the most to you. You can sign up for that at Hoorf podcast dot com If you become a patron for only$3 a month, you can support the creation of this podcast, help pay my editor and join a community of caregivers out here, just doing our best. Thank you again for joining me, Elle Billing the chronically ill queer femme who is very tired, on this episode of Hoorf. Until next time, be excellent to each other. Hoorf is hosted by Elle Billing@ellenadwink, audio editing by Ricki Cummings, @rickiep00h music composed by Ricki Cummings. Hoorf is a production of Elle & Wink Art Studio, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Hoorf can be found on all social media platforms, @hoorfpodcast, at H, O, O, R, F podcast,

Damien P Williams:

what would we rather this world look like?

Contributor

Ricki Cummings

Producer