
Guten Tag, Tech Bros
Our youngest womansplainer yet builds Alzheimer's-detection AI at the National University of Singapore, has spoken at the United Nations, and reads Nietzsche to relax. She's also still in high school. We start with Zara's research: why the earliest signs of Alzheimer's show up in how we speak, how she used small language models to catch those biomarkers, and why she refuses to treat language as a measure of intelligence ("look at where that's gotten us over the years"). Then we go where Zara always goes — philosophy. Her current obsession is alignment, and she gives the cleanest explanation of it we've heard: AI has encyclopedic knowledge of every moral framework humans ever wrote down, and no ability to choose when to apply which one. Then the generational stuff gets good. Zara's friends treat AI as a "convenience machine," and she thinks that complacency is the real danger — her answer is to be the captain: "I am using AI, it's not using me." We dig into why Singapore is so much more AI-optimistic than the West, what her friends abroad hear when they admit to using AI, and whether the gender gap in adoption shows up in her world at all. Also: Zara started a sci-fi book club at age eight and then watches the scenarios come true in her AI safety courses. A German philosophy podcast drops the most haunting idea of the episode — we used to prove our superiority by separating ourselves from animals, and now, faced with AI, we compare ourselves to animals to prove we're human. Logan's German turns out to be entirely curse words, Mara's includes "overhead projector," and the episode earns its title. Plus rapid-fire book recommendations that will wreck your TBR. Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com — we want your voice in future episodes! About Zara Khanna Zara Khanna is an AI researcher at the National University of Singapore, where her first paper — on detecting Alzheimer's disease through speech patterns — was just accepted for publication. She is the first-ever Global Youth Ambassador for She Loves Tech, the world's largest startup platform for women in tech, and she has spoken at the United Nations about responsible AI. She has been recognized by the Singapore Computer Society (Girls in Tech) and Singapore's IMDA, where she built an AI ethics curriculum for students. She is also still in high school. Find her at zarakhanna.com. In this episode Detecting Alzheimer's through speech: why the disease shows up first in how we talk, and how three small language models (BERT, ALBERT, DistilBERT) catch it Singlish as an AI problem — building detection tools for a dialect that mixes English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay "We can't use language as indicative of intelligence. Look at where that's gotten us over the years." Alignment, explained by a philosophy student: AI knows every moral framework ever written and can't choose between them The Claude blackmail test — what it means when an AI acts to save itself The "convenience machine" problem: why Gen Z's complacency worries Zara more than the doomsday scenarios "I am the captain of this ship. I am using AI, it's not using me." Singapore vs. the West: the AI optimism gap, and what Zara's friends abroad get attacked for Big tech is hiring philosophers — and Zara's case for why liberal arts matter more than ever The maxim: technology should make us better, not just easier Rapid fire: the books Zara sacrifices sleep for Resources mentioned Zara Khanna, "Singapore's youth use AI every day — but most don't know what it's really doing" (The Straits Times, via NUS) zarakhanna.com — Zara's research and publications She Loves Tech The Claude Opus 4 blackmail test scenario — Fortune's coverage of Anthropic's system card findings Meinke et al. (Apollo Research), "Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming" — the research paper Zara shared on AI models deceiving to preserve themselves Lanz + Precht #255, Sommergespräch mit Peter Wohlleben (in German) — the podcast behind the humans-animals-AI idea. Guten Tag, German listeners. Isaac Asimov, I, Robot Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem Neal Shusterman, Arc of a Scythe Kaveh Akbar, Martyr! John Steinbeck, East of Eden Donna Tartt, The Secret History Plato, Symposium and The Republic Marcus Aurelius, Meditations AI Across Borders — Dr. Ayesha Khanna's podcast, featuring Zara's youth-and-AI interview series
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