Meet Parashar Das – Our ACTivist of The Month
This month, we’re proud to spotlight Parashar Das, who brought both intellect and heart to Spring ACT when he volunteered with us last summer.
A PhD candidate in the London School of Economics, Parashar is researching the intersection of human agency and artificial intelligence, with a vision to ensure that technological advancements genuinely empower people. He aims to reshape the fear-driven narratives of technological advancement to ones centered on public interest and human dignity.
Let’s take a closer look at Parashar’s fascinating work and what drives his commitment to research-driven work:
Please introduce yourself to our audience. Where are you from, how was your childhood, what’s your passion, what keeps you up at night?
I am an Australian PhD student in London and I research the nature of agency in artificial intelligence systems.
I must admit that I had an idyllic childhood mostly spent meandering along the little creek beds that run down Adelaide’s hills.
I’m incredibly passionate about music and I was very fortunate to grow up amongst many talented Australian musicians who shaped my tastes. Spending time in their company also opened me up to other aspects of leading a creative life, such as writing and reading voraciously.
I find asking ‘how to begin anew?’ is hopeful yet often unsettling.
I remember that it kept me up in the wake of the failed referendum on constitutional recognition for indigenous Australians in 2023. But resolving to begin anew also entails a certain confidence that says the means of profound change are already available to us if we choose them. That seems to be a promising way of engaging with the world.
What brought you to volunteering?
As an undergraduate journalism student I had first volunteered at Radio Adelaide 101.5, which is Australia’s first community radio station. There I was taken under wing in a newsroom brimming with talents who came from all walks of life. Broadcasts always came together in an impromptu, unique and daring way. And, importantly, one’s collaborations felt like the community itself succeeding. I have learned to think of volunteering as the productive, experimental and highly ambitious accomplishment of a community.
How has been your experience of working on Comeback CatZ?
It feels personally empowering to work on a tool that supports survivors of sexism in such an immediate, accessible and everyday way. What strikes me is how much care the SpringACT team takes to hard bake concern for survivors’ wellbeing into the details of every task, collaboration, and workflow. Observing and learning how to enact that organisational practice has been an invaluable takeaway from my time with SpringACT.
I am very grateful to Rhiana, Simon and Ahona for taking considerable care to assign me a role that matched my research expertise and interests. It has been rewarding to apply insights from my PhD research to evaluate certain functions of the Comeback CatZ app.
I have also had many opportunities to learn a range of skills outside of my academic discipline, such as translating research outputs into actionable recommendations about app functionality, basic literacy in Figma, and crafting feedback for the Sophia chatbot’s training procedure. These firsthand experiences have had a transformative impact on my own research.
Please share details about your role and project for Comeback CatZ.
My role was to research and develop a set of recommendations for the Community function of the Comeback CatZ app. CCZ’s community function creates an online space in which survivors can find common ground, garner advice, and collaborate on developing practical strategies for tackling sexism in the workplace. However, there are significant obstacles to cultivating genuinely empowering online spaces.
To tackle this, I surveyed a range of popular social media platforms to identify user communities whose values aligned with the Comeback CatZ mission, with a focus on Reddit. I then analysed the user interactions in a handful of well-aligned Reddit communities. Specifically, I drew out the user behaviours and platform features through which a community proactively tackled a user’s problem by engaging in a collective problem solving process. I also identified the behaviours and platform features that undermined these attempts. I developed these features into a set of actionable recommendations for the design of Comeback CatZ’s community function. This was an excellent opportunity to apply aspects of my PhD research on the principles of aligning a digital app’s behaviour with the user’s intentions, preferences and basic values.
Additionally I had the invaluable opportunity to collaborate with the UX designer on certain aspects of this app. I took this opportunity to develop a framework for evaluating the preservation of a user’s agency across the app flow. This provides a tractable way of ensuring that the app interface is genuinely empowering to the user. I am excited to further develop this evaluative framework.
What do you think is the relevance of this app in current time?
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called domestic violence a national crisis in 2024. A UK feminicide census in 2024, recorded 2000 women killed by men since 2014.
That is one woman every three days.
These kinds of acts raise awareness of sexism as a pervasive feature of society. But it is difficult to devise strategies that win against it decisively. Comeback CatZ targets the sexism alive in our everyday interactions and uses of language e.g. exchanges between colleagues in the workplace.
It does so by empowering survivors to disarm everyday toxicity in a very doable way.
This catches out and transforms routine sexist behaviours that otherwise fly beneath the radar and sow the seeds of more extreme harms. And, in turn, these daily transformations stitch together a safer and more inclusive social fabric. This is how Comeback CatZ translates our awareness of sexism into something actionable.
How do you think tech can be used for social good?
Given that digital technologies are embedded in most aspects of our everyday lives, I would argue that many of our social accomplishments tend to also be technological achievements. Consequently, we must build technologies adequate to social goods that we demand. Some digital technologies are actively hostile to our societal foundations e.g. chatbots that spread dis/misinformation. Equally, there are digital technologies that seek to do good, but they are built in a way that ultimately disempower the user. So we need to think carefully the approach we take to building our technological assistance.
In this respect, the Sophia chatbot and the ComebackCatz app have a lot to teach us:
Both technologies succeed because they target how survivors encounter sexism in an everyday and sadly routine way.
A takeaway for altruistic tech developers might be to start with how we actually experience the obstacles to our cherished goods in the everyday.
Some commercial apps also do this very well.
And both apps demonstrate a human-centric approach to a user’s interaction with their technological tools.
Their functions are built to increase a user’s capacity to engage in their everyday environment, as opposed to a digital crutch that subdues them. We should choose this as the viable alternative to the proliferating digital products that undermine the user’s agency and lead to over-dependency.
What advice would you give someone looking to become involved in activism and social justice work?
I remember feeling very personally about working on constitutional recognition for indigenous Australians. It was about coming to terms with an unfathomably deep injustice to which we Australians daily avert our eyes. I feel similarly about SpringACT’s mandate to combat sexism: I’ve been incredibly lucky to have strong female mentors (both friends and family) who carefully and tenderly educated me about the normalisation of certain sexist attitudes and behaviours. This leaves much wanting of men to find their role in overcoming this toxicity. So I think that some kinds of work can call out to you in this way.
In contrast, I found that volunteering at the community radio station felt more like an experiment in living, even if I do feel passionately about the duty to inform the public. That curiousity seems to me just as worthwhile as deciding to unsettle the terms of your position in society, both as an Australian and as a man in my case.
What’s your vision of an injustice-free world?
I think the final lines of Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope get at the right spirit:
“Humankind still lives in prehistory everywhere, indeed everything awaits the creation of the world as a genuine one. The real genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it only begins when society and existence become radical, that is, grasp themselves at the root. The root of history, however, is the human being, working, producing, reforming, and surpassing the givens around him or her. If human beings have grasped themselves and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation, founded in real democracy, then something comes into being in the world that shines into everyone’s childhood and where no one has yet been—home”.
I think that an injustice-free world involves this hunger to build new things, intolerance of mediocrity, and the feeling that becoming ourselves is just within reach.
What are your goals going forward?
Presently I am researching how we may better harness the potential of advanced AI systems to bolster human agency. This involves certain technical obstacles as well as rethinking how we govern the development and use of AI systems. As a researcher in phenomenology and cognitive science, I ask how insights into the experiential dimensions of human agency can improve alignment science. As an international legal scholar, I ask what sort of global governance arrangements can facilitate the building of truly beneficial AI systems, while also dissuading the very risky “AI race” between the US and China.
Empowering human-AI interaction must be worked out, in part, by pursuing pro-social technological initiatives dedicated to tackling our everyday problems. SpringACT is a superb example. I hope to gain firsthand experience in forging these human-centric technological systems.
And, lastly, the present public conversation about artificial intelligence is too narrowly focused on the “race to AGI” and its prospective perils. The more sensationalist conversations in that space draw our focus away from asking how AI may practically benefit us.
A good starting point to remedy this would be fostering a new public literacy about how AI systems are embedded in our everyday lives. In particular, we must become more sensitive to how and when AI ‘assistants’ are taking away our agency. I hope to bring the insights from my research to this new public conversation on forging technologies in the public interest.
