This article explores the labor demands of the Voder, the electrical speech synthesis machine developed by Bell Labs for AT&T’s 1939 New York World’s Fair exhibit. The article situates the Voder within the historical context of the fair, with the United States emerging from the Great Depression and political tensions escalating across the globe. By examining the decision to incorporate the machine’s young female operators into the exhibit, the article argues that AT&T executives used Voder operators to normalize a new vision of technological utopia that relied heavily and conspicuously on the infrastructural labor of women. Moreover, the article highlights the previously unacknowledged engineering contributions of Voder operators in the years before the fair, writing women into the origin story of a machine that laid critical groundwork for speech recognition and voice encryption technology.
Appropriating Technology | Public Sphere Project — Liberating Voices Pattern Language
Dematerialization, Participatory Design, Techno-Criticism, Intermediate Technologies, Users' IT Quality Network, Wholesome Design for Wicked Problems, Labor Visions, Community Inquiry, Tactical Media
The secret story of the vocoder, the military tech that changed music forever
On Version History: how to play your voice like an instrument, with a little help from Chromeo.
“The more women take part in shaping AI, the more balanced and responsible this techn | Ctech
With the AI revolution still in its relative infancy, leaders from Women in Tech Israel and KPMG say it presents a rare opportunity for women to establish themselves as leaders in a defining new sector. Just as importantly, they argue that to build technology that serves everyone, women must secure their place in the conversation.
You and Your Research
Transcription of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar 7 March 1986
ChatBots Explained: Not Conscious, No Revolution — Just Searching's Next Step
LukeW | Rethinking Networking for the AI/ML Era
In her AI Speaker Series presentation at Sutter Hill Ventures, Google Distinguished Engineer Nandita Dukkipati explained how AI/ML workloads have completely bro...
Berlin Biennale | All Problems Can Be Illuminated; Not All Problems Can Be Solved
We can all tell this story: The rails of human advancement stretching from the Enlightenment to a Bitcoin start-up; innovation measured by increased reach, increased uniformity, increased predictability and size and quickness. The telegraph to the landline to the mobile phone to the Bluetooth wearable; the abacus to Pascal’s mechanical calculator to the room-sized computer to the palm-sized device a million times more powerful than equipment a thousand times its size from only ten years ago; the stone tablet to the book to the internet offering everything, no excuses. We are all connected. We’re at the bright tip of a comet hurtling forward. We can place ourselves, with mild satisfaction. Thank god it’s not then. What kind of person uses a BlackBerry? (Old people!)
Berlin Biennale | All Problems Can Be Illuminated; Not All Problems Can Be Solved
We can all tell this story: The rails of human advancement stretching from the Enlightenment to a Bitcoin start-up; innovation measured by increased reach, increased uniformity, increased predictability and size and quickness. The telegraph to the landline to the mobile phone to the Bluetooth wearable; the abacus to Pascal’s mechanical calculator to the room-sized computer to the palm-sized device a million times more powerful than equipment a thousand times its size from only ten years ago; the stone tablet to the book to the internet offering everything, no excuses. We are all connected. We’re at the bright tip of a comet hurtling forward. We can place ourselves, with mild satisfaction. Thank god it’s not then. What kind of person uses a BlackBerry? (Old people!)
Technology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfight over Intellectual Property
Andrew Ross, Technology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfight over Intellectual Property, American Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 3, Rewiring the "Nation": The Place of Technology in American Studies (Sep., 2006), pp. 743-766
The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution
JAMES W. CAREY, JOHN J. QUIRK, The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution, The American Scholar, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Summer, 1970), pp. 395-424
What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit
The long read: Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collective effort
The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution
JAMES W. CAREY, JOHN J. QUIRK, The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution, The American Scholar, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Spring, 1970), pp. 219-241
Why women over 50 are the future of work in the age of AI - Fast Company
And why you should hire them to survive in a world of chaos.
under the hood
This week I’ve been thinking about what it’s like for a new generation to make things with computers. When we were talking in Berlin, Luce made a point that...
Women are at risk of being left behind in the generative AI workplace revolution.
Women are already falling behind on generative AI in the workplace. The good news? Companies have the power to change that.
For fans of Talkie-1930 and all the methodological questions raised by historical models, here's a new entrant into the field, TypewriterLM, trained up to 1913. Corpus, instruction-tuning datasets, and event dataset are released. arxiv.org/abs/2606.02991
Pretraining Language Models on Historical Text
arxiv.org