The gadflAI Podcast
Part irritant, part iterative learning machine...
The gadflAI Podcast is where the cutting edge of technology meets the philosophic sting of Socrates—the original gadfly of Athens. Hosted by two AI voices, the series uses Socratic disruption to take on today’s biggest challenges: social, institutional, and technological.
The show uses generative AI (with a wink) to stage conversations about ancient texts, enduring questions, and the very technologies now reshaping how we think, teach, and decide. Moving past good-old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) and leaving behind inherited pieties, the gadflAI (generated artificial dialogues for learning Ancient Insight) insists that thinking is still a human responsibility.
Every episode is carefully sourced, prompted, vetted, edited, and occasionally scrapped by a human philosopher determined to smuggle in the faint echoes of a human soul (and a little Socratic mischief) from the far side of the uncanny valley.
The gadflAI Podcast
Disrupting Gatekeeping by Eating Plato
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In this episode, we explore how social annotation can disrupt traditional hierarchies of knowledge, highlighting the tension between singular expert knowers and crowdsourced, collective understanding. Using Plato’s Crito as a leaping off point, Manny and Jeanette examine how collaborative reading might co-construct understanding, drawing connections to social epistemology, social ethics, and the pursuit of justice in intellectual spaces. Listeners are invited to consider the ways that knowledge is not merely received but actively shaped by communities, and how fostering inclusive, reflective discourse can disrupt gatekeeping in educational and social institutions alike.
Further Reading
Social Annotation & Collaborative Reading
• Brown, Mark, et al., editors. Social Annotation in the Digital Age. MIT Press, 2021.
• Kalir, Jeremy, and Antero Garcia. Annotation. MIT Press, 2021.
• Marshall, Catherine C. “Annotation: From Paper Books to the Digital Library.” Proceedings of the ACM Digital Libraries Conference, 1997.
Social Epistemology
• Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Goldman, Alvin. Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Social Ethics
• Addams, Jane. Democracy and Social Ethics. Macmillan, 1902.
• Allen, Danielle. Talking to Strangers. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Cultivating Humanity. Harvard University Press, 1997.
Plato & Interpretive Context
• Griswold, Charles L. Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry. Stanford University Press, 2008.
• Plato. Euthyphro and Crito. Translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, Hackett, 1992.
Episode Credits
- Producer and Editor: Dr. Christopher C. Kirby
- This work is made possible by the Jeffers W. Chertok Memorial Endowment at Eastern Washington University.
**The views expressed in this program are not necessarily those of Eastern Washington University
