The Podcast for Social Research · The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Faculty Spotlight: Alfred Lee and Xafsa Ciise on AI, Big Tech, Race, and Histories of Trauma

·1 hr 12 min·4 clips

Alfred Lee says AI's human-intelligence metaphor now drives claims about AGI and investor narratives.

1. The Podcast for Social Research episode "Faculty Spotlight: Alfred Lee and Xafsa Ciise on AI, Big Tech, Race, and Histories of Trauma" brings together Alfred Lee and Hafsah Issa for a wide-ranging conversation about science, psychoanalysis, and politics. 2. Mark DeLucas hosts with Lord Wolff, while Alfred Lee appears as a Visser associate faculty member and freelance data consultant and Hafsah Issa appears as a UC Santa Cruz PhD candidate and associate faculty member. 3. The episode asks how Alfred's work on physics, data, and technology and Hafsah's work on racial trauma and psychoanalysis connect through shared problems of definition, metaphor, and social power. 4. Hafsah describes training in experimental social psychology, working in a lab on response latencies and race associations, and hearing the implicit association test discussed as "sort of a thing everybody was talking about." 5. She says she left quant work because she was unhappy with how data collection reduced people's experiences. 6. She then moved into a qualitative social psychology program and humanities courses at Santa Cruz before deciding she preferred the humanities. 7. Hafsah links her current research to racial trauma, therapeutic discourse, and terrorism cases involving Somali Muslims, where Frantz Fanon became a key reference. 8. She says that when she dug deeper into trauma theory, the definitions felt "confusing and often contradictory," which pushed her toward Sigmund Freud and the longer prehistory of psychoanalysis. 9. Alfred explains that he studied physics because he wanted to understand the universe, but later realized he had mostly learned how to solve equations. 10. He says he moved into data science after friends told him physicists make good data scientists, and he became more critical as he saw harms from technologies and the communities building them. 11. One recurring theme is the claim that science relies on metaphors, but the metaphors themselves can become misleading and politically loaded. 12. Alfred uses the history of AI to show how the machine metaphor gave way to the computational metaphor, which then narrows how people imagine minds and brains. 13. He argues that this language helps support claims that artificial general intelligence is close and can do human work, which matters to investors and politicians seeking lax regulation. 14. Hafsah says Alfred's class helped her notice the problem with information-processing metaphors for learning, memory, and problem-solving. 15. Alfred adds that theory shapes what data get collected and how observations are interpreted, which matters in both AI and trauma research. 16. The conversation also turns to the experimenter's effect, with Hafsah discussing Charcot, Bernheim, hypnotic experiments, and Foucault's psychiatric power. 17. Alfred and Hafsah describe the tone as collaborative, reflective, and analytical, with each person building on the other's examples rather than debating in a combative style. 18. The format stays interview-based and concept-heavy, but both guests move between personal trajectory, classroom material, and historical references like Descartes, Hobbes, Freud, Fanon, and Charcot. 19. People interested in AI, psychoanalysis, race, and science studies will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a light, fast, or purely practical conversation about technology may skip it.

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