Summary

This episode of the AI Governance Podcast features Dr. Carl Öhman, Associate Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University and author of "The Afterlife of Data." Carl joins Matt McCallum to discuss the shift from AI as a tool for the living to AI as a curator of our digital remains.

They explore the ethical implications of the "digital graveyard," the risks of outsourcing our collective memory to tech giants, and how the centralization of training data allows platform owners to govern the historical "truth" produced by AI models.

You can listen on Spotify or Apple Music or watch the episode here on YouTube.

Key takeaways

• Why our search histories and voice recordings should be viewed as "informational bodies" rather than mere metadata.

• The structural risks of "Data Colonialism" and the potential erasure of non-Western digital history for server efficiency.

• The shift from "human in the loop" to "human as history," where our data becomes the foundational truth for future AI systems.

• A preview of Carl's new work, "Gods of Data," and the atheistic critique of outsourcing human decision-making to "perfect" machines.