Episodes

  • AI Data Centers Are Coming to Your Backyard

    AI Data Centers Are Coming to Your Backyard
    Jul 2 2026
    AI doesn’t live in “the cloud.” It lives in buildings: large, energy-hungry, water-dependent facilities that require land, cooling systems, backup power, utility agreements, zoning decisions, and public infrastructure.We’re re-releasing this conversation because the issue has become urgently local. Across the United States, communities are debating whether proposed data centers are good economic development, risky infrastructure bets, or something in between. Here in Ames, Iowa, the City Council is reviewing a proposed data center. The City of Ames says the proposal is still in the early review stage, with no final decision made, and that the full buildout could require up to 25 megawatts of electricity.Kimberly recently wrote an open letter to the Ames Mayor and City Council asking them to slow down, require independent review, and make sure ratepayers are protected before any binding commitments are made. Read it here: “Open Letter to the Ames Mayor & City Council: Re: Proposed Lightedge Data Center on Aviation Way.”This episode originally focused on 3 of AI’s environmental impacts, energy consumption, water use, and e-waste. But the larger question is civic: who pays for the infrastructure behind AI, who benefits from it, and who gets a say before it shows up in their community?Kimberly and Jessica talk with Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais about the physical infrastructure behind AI and the local consequences of the data-center boom.We discuss:Why AI is not abstract, weightless, or magically floating in “the cloud”What data centers are and why they require so much electricity, cooling, and landThe difference between individual AI use and concentrated industrial infrastructureWhy “innovation” can become a rhetorical wrapper for public risk and private profitHow data centers can affect utility planning, municipal water systems, noise, land use, and local tax policyWhy communities should ask hard questions before approving long-term leases, incentives, or infrastructure commitmentsThe Lewiston, Maine, data-center fight and what other communities can learn from itWhy “AI infrastructure” is not just a tech issue, but a local governance issueData-center debates are spreading across the country. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported on July 1, 2026, that lawmakers in 15 states are considering bans or pauses on new data-center development while they study community impacts, grid resilience, and local costs. And nationally, more than 500 organizations from 47 states have called for a moratorium on new AI data centers until stronger protections are in place around energy, water, pollution, electricity rates, and community impacts.Kimberly’s open letter argues that the Council should require independent review before making commitments around a lease, sale, rate classification, or incentive package. The letter specifically asks the Council to protect current utility customers, evaluate the proposal against Ames’ climate and planning commitments, and require evidence around jobs, tax revenue, and community benefit before moving forward.Key questions for any community facing a data center proposalBefore a city approves a data center, residents can ask:How much electricity will it use at each phase of development?Not just at opening, but at full buildout.Who pays for grid upgrades, substations, transmission lines, and backup infrastructure?If the answer is “the utility,” ask whether that means current ratepayers.How much water will it use, and what kind of water?Municipal drinking water, industrial water, reclaimed water, or something else?What happens during peak heat, drought, or grid stress?Data centers may look different on an average day than they do during peak demand.How many permanent local jobs will actually be created?Construction jobs are not the same as long-term local employment.What tax incentives, abatements, or special rates are being offered?Public benefit should be measured against public cost.What protections are binding?Promises in presentations are not the same as enforceable agreements.What happens if the company leaves, expands, sells, or changes use?Communities need to think beyond the ribbon-cutting.How does this project fit with the city’s climate, land-use, and economic-development plans?If a city wrote those plans, this is the moment to use them. Otherwise, congratulations, we invented decorative planning documents.Who gets to decide?Public land, public utilities, and long-term infrastructure commitments deserve public scrutiny.Related reading and resourcesCity of Ames page on proposed Lightedge data center https://www.cityofames.org/News-articles/City-Council-to-Review-Proposed-Data-Center-Includes-Public-Input-ProcessIowa State Daily coverage of Ames City Council data center discussion https://iowastatedaily.com/339765/city-of-ames/city-council-discusses-data-center-proposition/NCSL: Which States Are Banning Data Centers? https://...
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    1 hr and 39 mins
  • Why Good Intentions Don't Stop Data Centers (or Bad AI Writing

    Why Good Intentions Don't Stop Data Centers (or Bad AI Writing
    Jun 24 2026

    We're back from a few weeks off (I went to Florida, Jessica bought a new house and went to a psilocybin retreat — more on that below) with a wide-ranging catch-up that ends up circling one idea: Incentives matter more than intentions. We trace that thread through a proposed data center near Ames, Iowa, through the words AI chatbots keep teaching us to use, and through our own complicated relationships with money, time, and control.

    In this episode:

    The data center fight in Ames, Iowa (Kimberly's current hometown). Ames is now considering airport-adjacent land for a data center, and we walk through what that actually means at scale, including the energy draw, the water use, the construction-jobs pitch that's more one-time than it sounds, and what a community can realistically do about it.

    Incentives over intentions. A phrase from Your Undivided Attention's recent episode on the Center for Humane Technology's seven principles of humane tech becomes the throughline for the whole episode. We talk about tech executives who don't let their own kids use their platforms and, more personally, the unsolicited advice that's well-meant but lands as criticism anyway.

    "Claudish" and linguistic capitalism. Kimberly has been tracking word-frequency spikes in a web corpus — quiet, nuanced, connective tissue, and others — that track suspiciously well with the rise of generative AI in everyday writing. We talk through Frédéric Kaplan's 2014 concept of linguistic capitalism and how an SEO-shaped corpus of web writing became the training data now teaching all of us to sound a certain way.

    Surveillance capitalism and bread and circuses. We talk about Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People and what it reveals about how Meta's own leadership treated their products' addictiveness, plus the older idea of "bread and circuses" — distraction and convenience as tools of social control. If you're unfamiliar with surveillance capitalism, we highly recommend this book by Shoshana Zuboff.

    Frugal hedonism (and failing at it). A book recommendation for The Art of Frugal Hedonism by Annie Raser-Rowland and Adam Grubb leads to an honest conversation about the gap between the lifestyle we'd like to want and the one we actually have.

    Pit & Peach. Beach trips, a near-drowning rescue, a psilocybin retreat in Georgia, and stepping away from a long-held academic role.

    Also mentioned in this episode:

    • Ayana Gray, I, Medusa (Kimberly's beach read)

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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Motherhood and Higher Ed Burnout in an AI Moment

    Motherhood and Higher Ed Burnout in an AI Moment
    Jun 10 2026

    In this episode, Kimberly Becker and Professor Laura Dumin pull back the curtain on motherhood, higher ed burnout, and AI's effects on teaching. They talk pretty candidly about midcareer life with Laura sharing the reality of juggling three internal grants, release time, her kids' summer camp rush, and student needs and Kimberly tracing her own path out of Moxie, the AI feedback startup she co-founded with Jessica, and into a job completely outside academia after half a year of applications with zero interviews. Together, they discuss rising intolerance for institutional nonsense and why higher ed initiatives often feel like yet another layer of unpaid labor.

    Key themes:

    • 4–4 teaching loads and the myth of “just add research”
    • Being the primary earner: health insurance, risk, and career choices
    • Closing an edtech startup and facing a brutal job market
    • Midlife in academia: burnout, boundaries, and “less tolerance for everything”
    • Why many of us are choosing “good enough” over constant hustle

    Suggested links to include:

    • LinkedIn profiles for Kimberly and Laura
    • Prior WTBAI episode about Moxie

    Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

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    56 mins
  • The Pope Joins the Chat that Women Were Already Having

    The Pope Joins the Chat that Women Were Already Having
    Jun 3 2026
    When Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, his landmark encyclical on AI and human dignity, it lit up LinkedIn, Substacks, and newsfeeds worldwide. Kimberly read it the morning it dropped. Jessica, whose complicated relationship with religious institutions runs deep, read it anyway. And both of us had the same reaction as Abi Awomosu's: women have been saying this, uncited. In this episode, we explore the encyclical's arguments, like:technology is never neutralunchecked growth impoverishes rather than enrichestreating limitations as defects is a category error, and concentrated technocratic power may be beyond the reach of regulation. And we also name what's missing: the women, the scholars of color, and the critics who were making these exact arguments years before the Vatican caught up.We draw threads from the Pope's letter through late-stage capitalism, the bread-and-circus dynamics of the attention economy, and what Jolene Blais called AI's role as a "catabolic agent." We talk about certainty language, the death of expertise, and why scientists are trained to live with uncertainty (and why that training is increasingly under attack). We end up, somehow, at microplastics, frugal hedonism, egg freezing, and communes. It's that kind of episode.In this episode:What encyclicals are and why this one matters — even if you're not CatholicThe specific passages we highlighted and why they resonatedAbi Awomosu's critique: women have been saying this, uncited — and her piece "Vatican Washing: Why All the Tech Broligarchs' Roads Now Lead to Rome"The "Who Said It First" problem and why it's more complicated than it looksPosthumanism and transhumanism, and the Pope's sharp warning about treating some lives as less worthyData centers, extractive infrastructure, and colonial parallelsWhy scientists hedge (and why that's a feature, not a bug)Late-stage capitalism, the disintegration of community, and why collective action is harder when the technology driving us apart is the same technology we'd need to organize againstFrugal hedonism as a form of resistancePit & Peach: Kimberly's mom heads back to Mississippi (with a plan), and Jessica takes her first step toward freezing her eggsReferences & LinksThe encyclical:Magnifica Humanitas — Full text, Vatican.vaWhy is Anthropic helping launch the Pope's encyclical? — National Catholic Reporter (co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican presentation — yes, really)Scholarship & criticism:Abi Awomosu, "How Not to Use AI" — SubstackBender, Gebru et al., "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" (2021) — the paper Timnit Gebru was fired from Google over; a preview of nearly every argument that followedTom Nichols, The Death of Expertise (2017)Books:Klara and the Sun — Kazuo IshiguroHe, She and It — Marge Piercy — feminist cyborg novel from 1991 that remains eerily prescient on AI, corporate power, and communityThe Art of Frugal Hedonism — Annie Raser-Rowland & Adam GrubbFrom our archives:WTBAI: "The Trojan Horse of AI" with Jolene Blais & Jon IppolitoOur paper in Frontiers in Education: AI as Cultural Intermediary Leave us a comment or a suggestion! Support the showContact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/
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    54 mins
  • AI Voice Cloning: Trust, Persuasion, and Who's at Risk

    AI Voice Cloning: Trust, Persuasion, and Who's at Risk
    May 27 2026

    When you call your bank, your doctor's office, or your financial planner, the voice that greets you may have been deliberately engineered to make you feel safe, calm, and compliant — and you almost certainly can't tell. Research shows people correctly identify synthetic voice only about 55% of the time. That's barely better than a coin flip.

    In this co-host deep dive, Kimberly and Jessica pull apart what "voice" actually is (pitch, pace, prosody, timbre, accent) and why those features matter for trust, persuasion, and power. Synthetic voice isn't new, but the technology has crossed a threshold because it now replicates the subtle features that signal warmth, authority, and credibility. That has obvious applications in healthcare and customer service. It also powers grandparent scams, deepfake executive impersonation, and sales pipelines designed to move you from skepticism to compliance before you notice what happened.

    In this episode:

    • What linguistics actually tells us about why we trust certain voices (and why politicians hire coaches to lower their pitch)
    • The FTC's 2024 numbers on imposter scams — $700 million lost by people over 60 in one year, a 362% increase from 2020
    • The Hong Kong finance worker who wired ~$25 million USD (HK$200 million) after a deepfake CFO appeared on a Zoom call
    • ElevenLabs, Speechify, and the companies building what they call "emotional operating systems" for AI
    • Trust vs. persuasion: when shared goals protect you — and when they don't
    • Why older adults are the highest-risk population, and why detection tools aren't the solution
    • Where regulation actually stands: New York's synthetic performer law (SB 7013), the EU AI Act, and what's still missing
    • Practical questions to ask yourself — and the companies you interact with

    Mentioned in this episode:

    • Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
    • Project Hail Mary directed by Drew Goddard, starring Ryan Gosling (film, 2025)
    • The Martian by Andy Weir
    • "Walk my Walk" by Blanco Brown (the real human artist)
    • "Walk my Walk" by Breaking Rust (the AI-generated version)
    • Kimberly and Jessica's paper: "Defining and assessing AI literacy for researchers across the research lifecycle" in Frontiers in Education

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    45 mins
  • The Certainty Trap: Why the AI Future Isn't Already Written

    The Certainty Trap: Why the AI Future Isn't Already Written
    May 20 2026

    In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Julia Stamm, founder and CEO of She Shapes AI, to unpack "The Certainty Trap." The way tech leaders project inevitability about AI, and the way that projection strips the rest of us of our agency. Julia is a sociologist and has held senior roles at the European Commission and the G20.

    We talk about why so many AI adoption strategies are measuring the wrong things, why employees are quietly doing more work since AI showed up rather than less, and why women founders keep getting penalized for running for-profit businesses while their male counterparts get celebrated for the same thing. Julia also shares why she believes the most powerful question any of us can ask right now is simply, who benefits from this story being told this way?


    Topics Covered

    • The certainty trap and Julia's TEDx talk on reclaiming agency in the AI age
    • Why the inevitability narrative is marketing, not prophecy
    • The for-profit double standard that women founders face
    • How AI adoption is breaking the social fabric of organizations
    • Why measuring adoption rates and time saved are the wrong metrics
    • The magic triangle behind She Shapes AI: female leadership, responsible AI, and social impact
    • Real examples of women building AI for impact, including Rhiana Spring's Sophia chatbot for survivors of domestic violence
    • Why employees are doing more work, not less, since AI arrived
    • The loss of optimism about the future and what it means for how we talk about AI
    • Why seeking out alternative narratives matters, and where to find them


    Referenced in This Episode

    • She Shapes AI
    • Julia's TEDx talk: Beyond the Certainty Trap
    • She Shapes AI Global Awards 2025/26 finalists
    • Rest of World, the nonprofit publication covering technology stories beyond the West
    • Empire of AI by Karen Hao
    • Cory Doctorow on the TINA framework (there is no alternative)
    • Ethan Mollick on the 3% of organizations using AI in the sweet spot
    • Julia Stamm on LinkedIn
    • Julia Stamm on Substack
    • Julia's forthcoming personal website at juliastamm.com

    Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

    Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

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    Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/








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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • The AI Adoption Trap: Why Women's Hesitation Is Rational — and Who's Really Responsible for Fixing It

    The AI Adoption Trap: Why Women's Hesitation Is Rational — and Who's Really Responsible for Fixing It
    May 13 2026

    We keep being told the problem is women's hesitation around AI, that we need to adopt faster, skill up, and get in the game. But what if the hesitation is the rational response? And what if the systems telling us to move faster are the same ones punishing us when we do?

    This week, Kimberly and Jessica talk with Nikki Meller, founder and CEO of CreduEd and DocuCred AI, a member of the Tech Council of Australia, and the founder of Women in AI Australia. Nikki brings a rare combination of on-the-ground organizing and firsthand experience as a female tech founder who has navigated investment rounds, built a development team, and made it to pitch week in San Francisco — all from a nursing background.

    The conversation centers on a problem that's structural, not individual: organizations hand employees an AI platform with no governance, no training plan, and no reassurance about job security, then interpret the resulting hesitation — which falls disproportionately on women — as a capability gap. Nikki makes the case that this hesitation is actually a form of due diligence, and that the "competence penalty" documented in recent research (AI-assisted work rated as less competent, with the penalty larger for women) reframes the whole "women are behind on AI" narrative as a trap rather than a failing.

    Topics covered:

    • What the Harvard Business Review's coverage of the "competence penalty" research actually shows — and why it reframes women's AI hesitation as rational risk assessment
    • How organizational culture creates the AI gender gap before policy ever enters the picture
    • Australia's National AI Strategy: what it gets right, where it mentions women (spoiler: mostly in the context of abuse and safety risk, not leadership or capability), and what that omission signals
    • The data aggregation problem: why lumping women, First Nations people, people with disability, and remote communities into a single "disadvantaged group" makes the research almost useless
    • Why "the leaky pipeline" is the wrong frame — and what better language would look like
    • What governments and organizations would actually have to do for "innovation is inclusive" to become more than a tagline

    Guest:

    Nikki Meller is the founder and CEO of CreduEd and DocuCred, a member of the Tech Council of Australia, and the founder of Women in AI Australia. You can find her and the organization at womeninai.org.au and on LinkedIn.

    Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

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    Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/








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    28 mins