By Matthew Royer

Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of information studies, sat down with Matthew Royer, the Daily Bruin’s national news and higher education editor, to discuss Srinivasan’s new podcast “Utopias,” which spotlights his outlook on the future of media and what he hopes students will learn in a world surrounded by new technologies.

Srinivasan also serves as the founder and director of the UC Digital Cultures Lab, and he previously served as a campaign surrogate on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. Guests on the podcast have included Andrew Yang and Cornel West.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Daily Bruin: What is your vision for “Utopias,” and what does it mean to you?

Ramesh Srinivasan: I went to university at Stanford in the late ’90s, and I saw firsthand in my engineering classes how we were starting to create technologies that we prophesized would dramatically impact the world. This is something I saw even further when I was a graduate student at MIT in the Media Lab. And I had always been motivated by the question of, “What is the right way for life to be?” It’s motivated everything I’ve done since graduate school onward.

I started to see a direction for technologies to take digital technologies – like web technologies, even AI systems – that really could be in line with the diversity of peoples around the planet.