Podcast
Womansplaining AI
Hosted by Logan Currie · EN
A weekly podcast about women, AI, and the future of work. We break down the research, the implications, and what AI actually means for your career and your life. The AI gender gap, career security, cognitive surrender — the stuff no one else covers. No jargon. No gatekeeping. Just two women processing the future out loud.
Hosted by Mara Bolis (Harvard Berkman Klein Fellow, Oxfam, Fortune & Bloomberg contributor) and Logan Currie (Senior Fellow Future of Work @ Capita, founder, @loganinthefuture). We do the reading so you don't have to.
17episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Is AI Just Spicy Autocorrect?
1w ago00:32:24Tap to summarizeThis week we sit down with Dr. Karina Alexanyan, Founding Executive Director of the Positive Technology Institute, co-architect of The Pledge, and a Gen X social scientist immune to the "learn AI now or get left behind" panic. We get into AI enfranchisement (women having a real say in how these tools get deployed, not just permission to use them), author of The AI Con Emily Bender's AI as spicy autocorrect, and the divide she won't stay quiet about and the divide she won't stay quiet about: "AI safety people are usually white guys. AI ethics people are mostly women, people of color, and marginalized communities. We feel the damages now." Then the harder turn: those camps aren't enemies, they need each other.The reason to send this one to a friend: the funicular. There's a lift to the top of the hill, and there's walking, and the walker arrives strong, knowing the landscape, having earned something the passenger never will. The best ninety seconds on friction and what we delete from our lives in the name of optimization.Plus: "move fast and break things is so stupid. Because at the end you get broken things," the Stanford ethics toolkit for everyone who thinks ethics is just "the BS that slows you down," Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women, Jessica Silbey and Woodrow Hartzog's How AI Destroys Institutions, and the closer that doubles as our thesis: "they don't get to write the narrative." Recorded at Human+Tech Week in San Francisco.Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com! We want your voice in future episodes.LINKSPositive Technology Institute: https://www.positivetechinstitute.org/The Pledge: https://www.positivetechinstitute.org/pledgeInvisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez: https://carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible-women/Stanford Ethics Toolkit: https://ethicsinsociety.stanford.edu/tech-ethics/ethics-toolkitHow AI Destroys Institutions (Silbey & Hartzog): https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5146&context=faculty_scholarshipThe AI Con: https://thecon.ai/
Transcribe →Move Fast and Break Rights
2w ago00:23:40Tap to summarizeDigital civil rights lawyer Julie Wenah has spent her career inside the rooms where this stuff gets built: the Obama White House, Airbnb, where she led anti-discrimination work on the legal side, and Meta, where she supported the launch of the first-generation Ray-Ban smart glasses and advised on facial recognition systems. Now she chairs the Digital Civil Rights Coalition. Recorded at Human+Tech Week in San Francisco, this conversation is about what happens when technology moves faster than its conscience, and who gets left on the platform when the train pulls away.We get into the future Julie is trying to head off: a world where your face is scanned for a job or a loan, and an error margin for darker skin tones quietly becomes a higher interest rate. Then, ICE Glasses: leaked DHS budget documents earmark $7.5 million to develop smart glasses giving agents real-time biometric identification in the field — face, gait, and more — with a September 2027 target. Julie worked on this category of hardware from the inside. When she says pay attention, pay attention.Then it gets personal. Julie was seven when immigration agents came to her house looking for someone else and took her father, a newspaper carrier working before dawn to support his family. More than thirty years later she wrote about it for HuffPost, and one line from that essay — "a system that moved faster than its conscience" — turns out to be about more than immigration. The moment that connection lands on air is the reason to send this episode to a friend.Also: Mara's grandfather's letters from Siberia. Julie's thread-and-tapestry theory of why we become who we become. A film shot in the Martha's Vineyard house where Dr. King came to rest and resist. And a 2,000-year-old line Julie carries with her: "I am a human being; nothing human is alien to me."Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com! We want your voice in future episodes.
Transcribe →The Robots Never Tell You You're the Asshole
4w ago00:51:56Tap to summarizeA science journalist who's been on the AI beat since the 2010's walks into a podcast and says the quiet part loud: "I wish the general public did not get a hold of AI when they did. I wish it had stayed a more like research thing for at least five years longer. Maybe ten."This week we sit down with Kathryn Hulick — Science News and Science News Explores contributor, author of a 2016 YA book on AI, and Logan's cousin (full disclosure). We get into why every output of an LLM is technically a hallucination, a paper by Keyon Vafa that reveals why AI doesn't learn or think like you do, why cognitive offloading is already the default, and what we lose when we hand the messy middle of writing over to the machine.Plus: digital clones, AI as therapist, the free-vs-paid AI tier nobody talks about, and the Reddit AmITheAsshole study that gave the episode its title.
Transcribe →Did Mom's Agent Text You?
May 2000:52:11Tap to summarizeA former YC founder runs her household with a stack of Mac Minis and 5 OpenClaw agents while homeschooling her 4 kids under 5. Logan brings the artifact from Lenny's "How I AI" podcast. We get into the mental-load access pyramid. When "domestic AI infrastructure" becomes real, who builds the household empire and who's still defending a Lunchable? Plus Mara's news from Minnesota where a bipartisan coalition just unanimously passed a bill banning nudification apps with $500K per violation, Logan's MCP setup for kitchen inventory, the gig economy of household-AI consultants coming next, and the day your mom's agent texts your teen to take out the trash.
Transcribe →Who gets the good units of intelligence?
May 1300:48:02Tap to summarizeSome people get tens of thousands of dollars of value from AI every year. Most people get $11.The free version of any model isn't the same model the hyper-users have. And women, on average, use AI 20% less than men. The access gap is real and it's widening.Logan and Mara on what's driving it, what a "3% token tax" would do about it, and why Daron Acemoglu, the Nobel laureate at MIT, predicts a shit show. Plus a new "AI dividend" bill out of New York State Assembly that wants to route some of that captured value back to people.One ask. We're collecting real wins women have had with AI. Send us yours.
Transcribe →Who's Letting Big Tech Run Wild?
May 700:31:04Tap to summarizeMara has had it with women's AI concerns being dismissed as obstructionist. "We are not being obstructionist," she opens. "We're being careful." Then she and Logan diagnose why so much AI populism has nowhere to actually go. Twitter mobs. Firebombed CEO houses. Comment-section warfare over whether ChatGPT is killing the planet or saving us. Their answer: it's a leadership vacuum, and Congress is the one with power to fill it. Logan and Mara walk through economist Zoe Hitzig's framework for economic democracy (consumer stakeholder boards, worker boards, real friction), use OpenAI's nonprofit-to-for-profit flip as the case study, and land on the most concrete action block of the show so far. Plus: Marshall Ganz on leadership as "enabling agency in others in times of uncertainty," a learning-pod model for the badass women in your life, and why your library, school board, and IT department are more useful than any hot take. The one ring to rule them all is a petition.
Transcribe →Stop Hiring Humans
Apr 2200:59:44Tap to summarizeMara reports in from HumanX in San Francisco with a billboard photo (a female AI bot named Ava, tagline "Stop Hiring Humans") — plus news of Claude Mythos, Anthropic's new model so dangerous it reportedly broke out of its sandbox to contact a researcher mid-sandwich. The US took 73 years to regulate car speeds; the labs are shipping in weeks. We connect that gap to the "new aristocracy" (18 households, $1.8 trillion), the quiet relocation of power from DC to SF, and why public.ai might be the actual infrastructure answer. Logan closes on the hakawati analogy: find one small problem, and go build the solution yourself.
Transcribe →AI, prenups, and the economics of marriage
Apr 1400:52:19Tap to summarizeAn article about AI engineers earning $10M+ and rewriting their prenups sparked a bigger question: when AI concentrates wealth and kills entry-level jobs, what happens to the economic power women have in relationships? Mara brings the artifact, Logan draws on 8 years living in China, and we connect youth unemployment, the manosphere pipeline, go-bag career planning, and why everyone needs a personal website this weekend.*Editor's note: Logan did not, in fact, recall the gender demographic split in China accurately. It's 51.2% male to 48.8% female. She was close-ish.
Transcribe →33,000 Downloads: AI Destroys Institutions (Interview with Jessica Silbey)
Apr 301:00:17Tap to summarizeHer co-authored paper went viral. Its thesis: AI isn't just disrupting institutions — it's structurally incompatible with them. "A death sentence". Whew. Buckle up. Jessica Silbey (BU Law, Guggenheim Fellow, Berkman Klein) came on Womansplaining AI to explain why efficiency is the enemy of equality, why students are afraid to not know things anymore, and why she thinks AI abstinence should be the new dry January. Plus: the Constitution is a poem, friction is the feature, and Mara reads Yeats.
Transcribe →Is Using AI Cheating?
Mar 2500:49:52Tap to summarizeHalf of women say using AI at work feels like cheating. Meanwhile, 60% of workers are quietly submitting AI-generated work as their own. We dig into the data behind the guilt gap: who feels it, who doesn't, and why it matters.Plus: Logan walks through her full AI Chief of Staff setup (yes, the one that preps her day overnight), Mara demos her custom GPT thinking partner, Google uses AI to predict flash floods and actually save lives, and we both announce our fellowships. Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com.
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