Rosalie Post in conversation with Dan Wu: On ethical AI, inclusive governance and ideal future cities

The Human Show: Innovation through Social Science

Dan Wu is a Privacy Counsel & Legal Engineer at Immuta, an automated data governance platform for analytics. He’s advocated for data ethics, inclusive urban innovation, and diversity in TechCrunch, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company. He's helped Fortune 500 companies, governments, and startups with ethical & agile data strategies. Dan obtained a PhD in Social Policy and Sociology from Harvard Kennedy School, his doctorate work looked at the inter-sectoral collaboration for sustainable housing. Dan is passionate about how affordable housing can be advanced by technology and law.His extensive research centres on inclusive cities and data strategy and has been widely published within academia and outside of it. Dan has been a guest speaker at Asian development Bank, the Global UNESCO Forum, AI World, All Tech Is Human and more. For the past two years, Dan has been a privacy counsel and legal engineer at Immuta, New York, where he focuses on data and AI regulations and governance and combines law and tech to help companies navigate regulatory environments and accelerate ethical analytics. Find more resources on cities, ethics, and innovation here.

Rosalie Post is fellow anthropologist and advisor in the housing sector in the Netherlands. Her research interests too centre on the topic of sustainable housing and its governing mechanisms. She currently works for a consultancy firm that collaborates with municipalities on policy advice on housing projects.

In today’s episode Rosalie and Dan reflect on the concept of ideal city and the ways we can use technology to achieve it. Dan points out that despite its benefits, technology can easily obscure its many disadvantages. We have not yet managed to accommodate the voices that lack resources and are excluded from the participation. Can AI generated data substitute those voices and if so what are the ethical ways to do that? How much progress has been done in making cities more inclusive in the last 60 years? Dan, Rosalie and Corina dive into a reflective exchange of cases famous in the history of city design and governance - from the ideologically-focused emergence of Brasilia to Taiwan’s response to SARs. Lastly, Dan shares stories and initiatives that have helped cities move in the right direction and reflects on the way forward.

Mentioned in Podcast:

Zencity, https://zencity.io/about

Oscasr Niemeyer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Niemeyer

James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia, https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-City-Anthropological-Critique-Brasilia/dp/0226349799

Le Corbusier, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier

Jane Jacobs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

Robert Moses, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

Social media:

Dan’ s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wu12345/

Rosalie’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosalie-anne-post-66007b134/