Join Society + Technology After Hours on Monday, January 12, 2026, at 5:30 PM at Halcyon Brewery (8564 Greenwood Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103) for Who’s Watching? Privacy and Urban Surveillance, a conversation with Ryan Calo (Law and Information, UW Seattle), Brie McLemore (Political Science, UW Seattle), and NPR’s Martin Kaste. Free and open to the public, no registration required.
You’re invited to a conversation with Ryan Calo (Law, UW Seattle) about the frictions between law and technology in honor of the launch of his new book, Law & Technology: A Methodical Approach (Oxford University Press), on Monday, December 8, 2025 at 6 PM at Ada’s Technical Books & Café (425 15th Ave E, Seattle, WA 98112).
Why is technology hard to regulate? What can be done about this? Join us for a cool walk-through of a framework to understand and address legal challenges posed by technologies at Seattle’s geekiest bookstore with UW’s leading scholar of technology and law.
No registration required.
Please feel free to share widely with colleagues, students, and friends who
might be interested.
On Monday, December 1, 2025, at 5:30 PM, head to Figurehead Brewing in Fremont (3513 Stone Way N, Seattle, WA 98103) for a pint and a conversation with Hansi Singh, CEO of Planette.ai, on technology, power, water, and carbon math.
Signals & Society is an independent, public-facing, traveling series devoted to exploring how technology shapes—and is shaped by—society.
The event is public; no registration required.
Please share widely with colleagues, students, and friends who might be interested.
On Thursday, April 3, 2025, the UW Tech Policy Lab, which hosts Society + Technology at UW, brought Dr. Alondra Nelson to campus for the annual Distinguished Lecture, drawing a crowd of over 350 to Kane Hall in Seattle, Washington.
Nelson, the former Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, focused her remarks on “algorithmic agnotology,” which is the strategic manufacture of ignorance at scale. She identified how artificial intelligence technologies, when administered through large corporations, follow the pattern of other examples of agnotology, namely the tobacco and fossil fuel industries’ efforts to sow doubt and unknowing among the population.
Nelson suggested that companies create knowledge asymmetries that reinforce their power while evading accountability. Deliberate opacity has profound implications for democratic governance and digital rights, she said.
She urged the audience to design policies that confront the systemic nature of doubt, rather than accepting the unknown, and as inevitable.
Over a dozen audience members lined up to ask questions after the lecture.
“I’m especially interested in how we can […] actively redistribute power and understanding to users,” said Cherry Roy, a UW graduate student pursuing a Master’s of Science in Technology Innovation, who attended the lecture and found the parallels between Big Pharma and AI thought-provoking.
The lecture continued to spark conversations in classes and labs afterwards.
“I have heard so many students and other faculty glow about the talk,” said Tech Policy Lab Co-Director Tadayoshi Kohno. “Several students have now added ‘agnotology’ to their active vocabulary during project meetings.”
Vice Provost Mari Ostendorf opened the event with remarks about the importance of interdisciplinarity, and Kohno introduced Nelson, whose career spans academia and public service. Presently, Nelson is the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab. In 2023, she was named to the inaugural TIME100 list of the most influential people in AI and recognized by Nature as one of the “Ten People Who Shaped Science.”
This article is cross-posted with the Tech Policy Lab.