Part 2 of our conversation with Payal Arora explores why optimism matters in the age of AI, what the Global South can teach us about digital innovation, and why technology should be understood as a tool that reflects human values rather than an autonomous force shaping our future.
From AI companionship and digital inclusion to policymaking, innovation, and global power dynamics, this episode challenges some of the most common assumptions about technology and its role in society.
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning
Guest
Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist and Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University. She has spent two decades doing fieldwork in some of the places the AI conversation most rarely reaches: factory towns, slums, townships, and favelas across India, Brazil, China, South Africa, and the Middle East. She is the author of The Next Billion Users and From Pessimism to Promise, both grounded in that fieldwork, and Forbes named her the next billion champion and the right kind of person to reform tech. Her work has been cited by many thousands of researchers, read across many thousands of classrooms, and it makes one of the most uncomfortable arguments in contemporary technology studies: that the story we tell about AI being dangerous is not a neutral observation. It is a story shaped by where you stand.
What is AI: Tools or Gods??
What happens when we stop treating AI as a force of nature and start treating it as what it is: a political choice?
AI: Tools or Gods? is a podcast about the stories we tell about artificial intelligence and why they matter. Each episode, host Caroline De Cock talks with researchers, lawyers, policymakers, and advocates who are building a more grounded, democratic alternative to the dominant AI narrative. No prophecies. No panic. Just honest, rigorous conversation about power, accountability, and what technology is actually for.
A companion to the book AI Tools, Not Gods (BTF Press, 2026, foreword by Brewster Kahle) and a production of information labs.