Open Transcripts

What Sci‐Fi Futures Can (and Can’t) Teach Us About AI Policy, open­ing and clos­ing com­ments

presented by Ed Finn, Kevin Bankston

AI Policy Futures is a research effort to explore the rela­tion­ship between sci­ence fic­tion around AI and the social imag­i­nar­ies of AI. What those social mea­sures can teach us about real tech­nol­o­gy pol­i­cy today. We seem to tell the same few sto­ries about AI, and they’re not very help­ful.

The Sci‐Fi Feedback Loop

presented by Kevin Bankston

We’re here because the imag­i­nary futures of sci­ence fic­tion impact our real future much more than we prob­a­bly real­ize. There is a pow­er­ful feed­back loop between sci‐fi and real‐world tech­ni­cal and tech pol­i­cy inno­va­tion and if we don’t stop and pay atten­tion to it, we can’t har­ness it to help cre­ate bet­ter fea­tures includ­ing bet­ter and more inclu­sive futures around AI.

AI in Reality

presented by Elana Zeide, Kevin Bankston, Lindsey Sheppard, Miranda Bogen, Rumman Chowdhury

When data sci­en­tists talk about bias, we talk about quan­tifi­able bias that is a result of let’s say incom­plete or incor­rect data. And data sci­en­tists love liv­ing in that world—it’s very com­fort­able. Why? Because once it’s quan­ti­fied if you can point out the error you just fix the error. What this does not ask is should you have built the facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy in the first place?

How Sci‐Fi Reflects Our AI Hopes and Fears

presented by Kanta Dihal

We came up with the idea to write a short paper…trying to make some sense of those many nar­ra­tives that we have around arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and see if we could divide them up into dif­fer­ent hopes and dif­fer­ent fears.

AI in Sci‐Fi

presented by Andrew Hudson, Chris Noessel, Damien Williams, Kanta Dihal, Lee Konstantinou, Madeline Ashby

What I hope we can do in this pan­el is have a slight­ly more lit­er­ary dis­cus­sion to try to answer well why were those the sto­ries that we were telling and what has been the point of telling those sto­ries even though they don’t now nec­es­sar­i­ly always align with the pol­i­cy prob­lems that we’re hav­ing.

Untold AI — What AI Stories Should We Be Telling Ourselves?

presented by Chris Noessel

How peo­ple think about AI depends large­ly on how they know AI. And to the point, how the most peo­ple know AI is through sci­ence fic­tion, which sort of rais­es the ques­tion, yeah? What sto­ries are we telling our­selves about AI in sci­ence fic­tion?

Bridging AI Fact and Fiction

presented by Ed Finn, Kristin Sharp, Malka Older, Molly Wright Steenson, Stephanie Dinkins

This is going to be a con­ver­sa­tion about sci­ence fic­tion not just as a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non, or a body of work of dif­fer­ent kinds, but also as a kind of method or a tool.

Compassion through Computation: Fighting Algorithmic Bias

presented by Gideon Lichfield, Joy Buolamwini, Justine Cassell

I think the ques­tion I’m try­ing to for­mu­late is, how in this world of increas­ing opti­miza­tion where the algo­rithms will be accu­rate… They’ll increas­ing­ly be accu­rate. But their appli­ca­tion could lead to dis­crim­i­na­tion. How do we stop that?

What We Really Mean When We Say ​“Ethics”

presented by Molly Wright Steenson

The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University has some real­ly use­ful think­ing and cur­ric­u­la around ethics. One of the things they point out is that what ethics is not is eas­i­er to talk about than what ethics actu­al­ly is. And some of the things that they say about what ethics is not include feel­ings. Those aren’t ethics. And reli­gion isn’t ethics. Also law. That’s not ethics. Science isn’t ethics.

John Perry Barlow’s Usenix 1994 Keynote Address

presented by John Perry Barlow

I hon­est­ly believe with­out hyper­bole that peo­ple in this room are doing things which will change the world more than any­thing since the cap­ture of fire, in terms of what it is to be a human being. And I’ll jus­ti­fy that very broad state­ment here as I go along.

The Precariat: A Disruptive Class for Disruptive Times

presented by Guy Standing

In a book that I wrote in 2011, on page one I said that unless the inse­cu­ri­ties, and the fears, and the aspi­ra­tions of the pre­cari­at were addressed as a mat­ter of urgency, we would see the emer­gence of a polit­i­cal mon­ster. You will not be sur­prised that in November 2016 I received a lot of emails from around the world from peo­ple who said, ​“The mon­ster has arrived.”

The Case Against Computers: A Systemic Critique

presented by Chet Bowers, Jerry Mander, Richard Sclove, Ted Roszak

We all know there’s a com­put­er rev­o­lu­tion. But very few peo­ple are ask­ing whether it’s a right‐wing rev­o­lu­tion or a left‐wing rev­o­lu­tion. In fact this rev­o­lu­tion is unlike most ear­li­er ones because all facets of the body politic are in gen­er­al agree­ment. They all think it’s good.

Can We Talk Long‐Distance? Removing Impediments to Secure International Communications

presented by A. Michael Froomkin, Ira Rubinstein, Phil Karn, Ron Lee, Stephen Walker, Stewart Baker, Tim May

So, here we are to talk about this prob­lem. How do we do it? How do we talk secure­ly with peo­ple abroad? And in par­tic­u­lar what can we do…what’s fea­si­ble to do, to progress mat­ters from where we are today? And with the help of some of the mem­bers of the pan­el, I draft­ed the three ques­tions.

Transaction Records in Interactive Services: Who Watches the Servers?

presented by Alan Westin, Charles Marson, Janlori Goldman, Michael Stern, Ron Plesser

First of all, let’s rec­og­nize that the pri­va­cy of trans­ac­tion records is not a brand new issue at all. We have many decades of expe­ri­ence, and I think it helps to under­stand that we have two types of con­sumer trans­ac­tion records that we’re talk­ing about.

His Master’s Voice

presented by Geoff Sears, Kathleen Watkins, Ross Stapleton-Gray

What we’ll be cov­er­ing is just the gen­er­al issue of polit­i­cal infor­ma­tion on the net. And actu­al­ly I think prob­a­bly all three of us are in some­what agree­ment that the gov­ern­ment on the net is maybe the least best‐poised to make use of this, or the most chal­lenged by polit­i­cal speech on the net, the pol­i­tics of the infor­ma­tion flow­ing around the net.

A Net for All: Where are the Minorities?

presented by Armando Valdez, Art McGee, Cynthia Harvey, Deborah Runkle, Randy Ross

It’s an his­toric moment. I think it’s very impor­tant that we look and we think about the kind of infor­ma­tion soci­ety we would like to par­tic­i­pate in and that we would like to cre­ate. And that to me is why this con­fer­ence is so impor­tant. I think we need to not make assump­tions but rather be crit­i­cal of where we are as a soci­ety, be crit­i­cal of what we are as indi­vid­ual pro­fes­sion­als, as well as indi­vid­ual mem­bers of the soci­ety.

Greta Thunberg’s World Economic Forum 2019 Special Address

presented by Greta Thunberg

At places like Davos, peo­ple like to tell suc­cess sto­ries. But their finan­cial suc­cess has come with an unthink­able price tag. And on cli­mate change, we have to acknowl­edge that we have failed. All polit­i­cal move­ments in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to cre­ate broad pub­lic aware­ness. But Homo sapi­ens have not yet failed.

Decentralize, Democratize, or Die

presented by Cory Doctorow

You might be more com­fort­able think­ing about deploy­ing math and code as your tac­tic, but I want to talk to you about the full suite of tac­tics that we use to effect change in the world. And this is a frame­work that we owe to this guy Lawrence Lessig.

We Need to Tell a Better Story Than Cyberpunk

presented by Pawel Ngei

We have a lot of pro­pos­als on how tech­nol­o­gy should work in this soci­ety, how we want to avoid all the dan­gers we can see that oth­ers can­not see. But we do a very very bad job at com­mu­ni­cat­ing it.

The Principles of Citizen Behavioral Science

presented by J. Nathan Matias

In a series of short talks we’re going to share exam­ples of some of our past and upcom­ing work, along­side exam­ples from our par­ent orga­ni­za­tion Global Voices. But I want to start by say­ing some­thing about how we go about our work.

Understanding Systems and Creating Change

presented by Ethan Zuckerman, J. Nathan Matias, Karrie Karahalios

One of the things I found inter­est­ing about both of your con­ver­sa­tions is that as we start to see code becom­ing a pow­er­ful force in soci­ety, we’re no longer just try­ing to change laws but we find ourselves—just as we’re cit­i­zens try­ing to encour­age the gov­ern­ment or con­gress­peo­ple to change laws—we’re now stand­ing out­side of com­pa­nies say­ing well, there’s code that affects our lives.

Managing Online Partisan Conflict in r/politics with CivilServant

presented by J. Nathan Matias, Mason English

Liberal users com­prise a larg­er per­cent­age of these r/politics users, while con­ser­v­a­tives will com­prise a small­er per­cent­age. Through those users and through their vot­ing, they can con­trol what is seen and what is not seen. So a lib­er­al user, as a block, will down­vote more often than not some­thing they don’t agree with nec­es­sar­i­ly.

Preventing Online Harassment in r/science

presented by J. Nathan Matias, Nathan Allen, Piper Below

r/science is real­ly the largest sci­ence forum on the Internet. We say that we have more than 18 mil­lion sub­scribed users. For a point of ref­er­ence, the total com­bined sub­scriber base of the top ten news­pa­pers in the United States is around ten mil­lion.

Public Accountability in Research Ethics

presented by Jonathan Zong

Experimentation is so com­mon­place on the Internet now that if you use a plat­form like Facebook you’re prob­a­bly part of many exper­i­ments all the time.

Reducing Side‐Effects of Copyright Bots on Twitter

presented by Jonathon Penney, Merry Mou

Underlying this project is a pret­ty sim­ple and we think pow­er­ful idea that pro­vides a solu­tion to a com­plex chal­lenge that’s fac­ing online com­mu­ni­ties like Twitter, like Reddit, with­in the CivilServant uni­verse. That chal­lenge is the increas­ing automa­tion of the enforce­ment of legal rules and norms online.

Auditing Algorithms

presented by Christo Wilson

I con­sid­er myself to be an algo­rithm audi­tor. So what does that mean? Well, I’m inher­ent­ly a sus­pi­cious per­son. When I start inter­act­ing with a new ser­vice, or a new app, and it appears to be doing some­thing dynam­ic, I imme­di­ate­ly been begin to ques­tion what is going on inside the black box, right? What is pow­er­ing these dynam­ics? And ulti­mate­ly what is the impact of this?

Discrimination Audits & Challenges to Discrimination Studies

presented by Karrie Karahalios

By using these tools like the sock­pup­pets, and scrap­ing, and using bots, and using APIs, we can look at a site for hous­ing and maybe try to fig­ure out if some dis­crim­i­na­tion is hap­pen­ing. Are these homes pri­or­i­tized dif­fer­ent­ly for dif­fer­ent peo­ple based on their age, on their sex, and so forth? And it’ll help us actu­al­ly under­stand why some of this might be hap­pen­ing.

Custodians of the Internet

presented by Tarleton Gillespie

What I’d like to do just with the few min­utes that I’m up here is to set the stage. This is a huge set of ques­tions, and I think a set of ques­tions that are explod­ing into pub­lic view in a way that they hadn’t even just a few years ago. So I want to sort of like, set the broad place that some of these ques­tions kin­da live.

Using Data to Create Social Change

presented by Ethan Zuckerman

I think that it’s becom­ing hard­er for many peo­ple to feel like they can achieve social change either through the bal­lot box, or through protest, which is sort of our main mech­a­nism where when we can’t win argu­ments at the bal­lot box we stand up and show that we’re not hap­py about things. I want to make the case that both of those meth­ods are actu­al­ly suf­fer­ing as a form of social change.

Managing the Internet’s Dumpster Fires: CivilServant Community Summit 2018

presented by J. Nathan Matias

I want you to know that in this slide there is more than just a dump­ster fire. There are also peo­ple in suits who are train­ing and ded­i­cat­ed to man­age that fire.

Automating Inequality
How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

presented by Virginia Eubanks

I start the sto­ry in 1819 rather than 1980. And that allows me to do some very spe­cif­ic work, which is to talk about what I think of as the deep social pro­gram­ming of the tools that we’re now using in pub­lic ser­vices across the United States.

Disposable Life: Zygmunt Bauman

presented by Zygmunt Bauman

In pre‐modern soci­eties there was no idea of waste; every­thing was going back into life—recycled, as we would say today. If there were more chil­dren com­ing into the world in a fam­i­ly, then obvi­ous­ly there was room for them, and extra work some­where in the farm­yard, in the field, in the sta­ble. And of course a place around the table. So the idea of being redun­dant, hav­ing no place in soci­ety, sim­ply didn’t occur.

Disposable Life: Slavoj Žižek

presented by Slavoj Žižek

Under cap­i­tal­ism, the prob­lem is not there are evil peo­ple here and there. The prob­lem is the basic log­ic of the sys­tem as it was devel­oped by Zygmunt Bauman and many oth­ers. Some peo­ple even claim that if you look in a non­hu­man­i­tar­i­an way just at the pure log­ic of today’s glob­al cap­i­tal­ism, you arrive at a ratio even some peo­ple claim of 20–80%.

Disposable Life: Saskia Sassen

presented by Saskia Sassen

Disposable life. What comes to my mind is a set of dynam­ics, I think, that are mark­ing the cur­rent peri­od, that are mark­ing a dif­fer­ence in the cur­rent peri­od. And it is the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of expul­sions. And once some­thing is expelled (and I’ll elab­o­rate) it becomes invis­i­ble. And that is part of the tragedy, I think.

Disposable Life: Richard Sennett

presented by Richard Sennett

In the world of labor and work, the phrase ​“dis­pos­able life” refers to a new wrin­kle in neolib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism. And that wrin­kle is that it’s cheap­er to dis­pose of work­ers in Europe and America than it’s ever been in the past.

Disposable Life: Max Silverman

presented by Max Silverman

My approach to the ques­tion of dis­pos­able lives is this: In an age of late cap­i­tal­ism, advanced tech­nol­o­gy, and mass media, are lives eas­i­er to dis­pose of now than in the past? And my response is, unfor­tu­nate­ly, yes it is eas­i­er now. And this isn’t sim­ply because of the tech­nol­o­gy that is avail­able today that sim­ply wasn’t avail­able in the past.

Disposable Life: Jean Franco

presented by Jean Franco

I sup­pose Foucault has to be cred­it­ed with talk­ing about dis­pos­able life. And it’s inter­est­ing to me that at the very moment when he was giv­ing the lec­tures on this top­ic, Henry Kissinger in the United States was admit­ting, or pub­lish­ing, the results of the com­mis­sion on ster­il­iza­tion. The idea was that ster­il­iza­tion should be encour­aged in Third World coun­tries in order to reg­u­late the pop­u­la­tion.

Disposable Life: Gustavo Esteva

presented by Gustavo Esteva

It is very per­ti­nent to talk asso­ci­at­ing this with the Zapatistas. Twenty years ago in January 1st, 1994, we had the begin­ning of the Zapatista upris­ing. And to under­stand it we need to see what was hap­pen­ing with these peo­ple before the upris­ing, how they came to that ter­ri­ble deci­sion of start­ing an armed upris­ing.

Disposable Life: Griselda Pollock

presented by Griselda Pollock

At the inter­sec­tion of the pol­i­tics of art or lit­er­a­ture or film and polit­i­cal the­o­ry, I’ve been think­ing about dis­pos­able life through a num­ber of lens­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly through work on the Holocaust and work that I’ve been doing with Max Silverman on a slight­ly dif­fer­ent ele­ment of it called ​“con­cen­tra­tion­ary mem­o­ry.”

Disposable Life: Gil Anidjar

presented by Gil Anidjar

In usages of dis­pose, dis­po­si­tion, dis­pos­ing, there is always a ques­tion of putting in order, and putting things in their place. Which also means of course hav­ing the pow­er to do so.

Disposable Life: Étienne Balibar

presented by Étienne Balibar

It’s not the case of course that any con­tem­po­rary philoso­pher or pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy has been par­tic­u­lar­ly deal­ing with ques­tions of polit­i­cal the­o­ry. I nev­er thought about vio­lence. But I want to recall the moment in which I specif­i­cal­ly start­ed to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly work on that.

Disposable Life: David Theo Goldberg

presented by David Theo Goldberg

I’m not here going to think aloud about these var­i­ous con­tes­ta­to­ry forms of evidence‐giving, although much might be said about that in rela­tion to think­ing about vio­lence. But rather to think about the Michael Brown shoot­ing in Ferguson, Missouri and the kinds of police response to it in rela­tion to the his­to­ry of vio­lence and the way in which race shapes said his­to­ry of vio­lence in a coun­try like the United States…

Disposable Life: Cynthia Enloe

presented by Cynthia Enloe

When I think about dis­pos­abil­i­ty, I think about name­less­ness. I think about whose pic­tures are tak­en in refugee camps. Or whose stones with­out names you look at at a mass grave, or just a ditch for that mat­ter. To be dis­pos­able is to be name­less in somebody’s eyes.

Disposable Life: Carol Gluck

presented by Carol Gluck

I’ve been think­ing about dis­pos­able life and the mean­ing that might have in soci­eties today. And I decid­ed that the kind of dis­pos­able life that most con­cerns me is the kind that we either res­olute­ly don’t see, ignore, or neglect. Or the kind that we do see but can’t seem to deal with.

Disposable Life: Ananya Roy

presented by Ananya Roy

I think what is par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing about the ques­tion of dis­pos­able lives in the 21st cen­tu­ry is what seems to be a new glob­al com­mon sense about pover­ty, the ways in which pover­ty and par­tic­u­lar­ly poor oth­ers have become vis­i­ble. And how that in turn, par­tic­u­lar­ly for mil­len­ni­als in the Global North—college stu­dents, young pro­fes­sion­als, so‐called ordi­nary glob­al cit­i­zens of the world—how this has mobi­lized them to action.

Knutepunkt 2017 Keynote: Present, by Eleanor Saitta

presented by Eleanor Saitta

I think of larp in a cou­ple dif­fer­ent ways. And one of the ways that I think of it is as sto­ry­telling for the net­work age. This is sto­ry­telling in the first‐person present tense plur­al, and it is not very often that human­i­ty comes up with a new tense in which to tell sto­ries. That’s actu­al­ly kind of a big deal.

The Conversation #65 — Rebecca Solnit

presented by Aengus Anderson, Neil Prendergast, Rebecca Solnit

There’s a lot of beau­ti­ful things. And I think if there’s one thing I’m most deeply dis­qui­et about it’s…power. Why are we doing almost noth­ing about cli­mate change? It’s because despite the fact that most peo­ple on earth and many gov­ern­ment on Earth do, the oil cor­po­ra­tions and the gov­ern­ments most close­ly allied to the oil cor­po­ra­tions, notably ours, don’t want to do any­thing.

The Conversation #64 — Peter Gleick

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Neil Prendergast, Peter Gleick

We have even in the United States seri­ous and grow­ing water scarci­ty chal­lenges. We have con­t­a­m­i­na­tion prob­lems with chem­i­cals that we have not ade­quate­ly reg­u­lat­ed here in the United States. We have con­flicts between states in the United States about who gets to use what water to do what. We have evi­dence that cli­mate change is already influ­enc­ing water demand, affect­ing water avail­abil­i­ty, chang­ing extreme events. There are a whole suite of water‐related prob­lems, here, unre­lat­ed to these basic human need chal­lenges that’re press­ing in oth­er parts of the world.

The Conversation #63 — Kim Stanley Robinson

presented by Aengus Anderson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Micah Saul, Neil Prendergast

I vacillate…between think­ing that we’re doomed because we have giv­en our­selves over to a stu­pid sys­tem that’s now backed up by guns. And then a much more utopi­an view that we’ve always lived in stu­pid sys­tems and that we’re always mak­ing them bet­ter.

We Need A New Image of Africa

presented by Wanuri Kahiu

To have the hunter tell it, Africa is full of meek sto­ries about des­per­a­tion and despair. So when artists like myself offer an alter­nate vision, often we’re asked to defend our imag­i­na­tion. Why do we feel we have the lux­u­ry to cre­ate? Shouldn’t we be deal­ing with more impor­tant issues like cor­rup­tion, or war, or AIDS, or pover­ty?

The Conversation #62 – Rebecca Costa

presented by Aengus Anderson, Neil Prendergast, Rebecca Costa

If you were to ask me what the cri­sis in the present is, as an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist I have to go back mil­lions of years and try to con­nect all the dots, going back to man as a single‐celled organ­ism to present time, and say­ing what is it that is caus­ing mod­ern con­ster­na­tion? More impor­tant­ly, is there a pat­tern? Has this hap­pened before? Were there some ordi­nary peo­ple like you and I, shop­keep­ers in Rome, who were stand­ing around and say­ing, ​“You know, our lead­ers don’t seem to be on top of our prob­lems. They seem to be get­ting worse one gen­er­a­tion after anoth­er.”

The Conversation #61 – Rainey Reitman

presented by Aengus Anderson, Neil Prendergast, Rainey Reitman

As we’ve moved into increas­ing­ly dig­i­tal spaces, so online worlds, we’re mov­ing away from your tra­di­tion­al phys­i­cal spaces where you have pub­lic streets; where you have pub­lic squares; where peo­ple can go to protest, and into areas, if you would call them that, that are entire­ly con­trolled by cor­po­ra­tions.

The Conversation #60 – George Lakoff

presented by Aengus Anderson, George Lakoff, Neil Prendergast

Consciousness is lin­ear; goes, you know, one step after anoth­er. And the brain doesn’t work that way. The brain is par­al­lel and has lots and lots of par­al­lel tracks going on at once in thought and in char­ac­ter­iz­ing the sub­strate of what it is you under­stand and express. There’s no way you could pos­si­bly be con­scious of most of or even a small part of what you’re think­ing.

The Oppenheimer Moment

presented by Alan Cooper

Where did this evil stuff come from? Are we evil? I’m per­fect­ly will­ing to stip­u­late you are not evil. Neither is your boss evil. Nor is Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. And yet the results of our work, our best most altru­is­tic work, often turns evil when it’s deployed in the larg­er world. We go to work every day, gen­uine­ly expect­ing to make the world a bet­ter place with our pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy. But some­how, evil is sneak­ing in despite our good inten­tions.

 

Support Open Transcripts

If you find something here useful or interesting, please consider supporting the project monthly at Patreon or once via Square Cash, or even just sharing a link. Thanks.

Common Tags

research technology religion community Internet Hall of Fame 2012 privacy algorithms Internet Hall of Fame open source internet surveillance infrastructure Stephen Chan Internet history Davos 2016 art politics economics ethics design Twitter culture education artificial intelligence AI

Some Random Transcripts

The Computer as Extended Phenotype
presented by Steven Pemberton

The computer is being used for so many things that I claim that we have to consider the computer as part of our extended phenotype. It's just a part of a thing that has evolved with us using memes. Read more →

AI in Reality
presented by Elana Zeide, Kevin Bankston, Lindsey Sheppard, Miranda Bogen, Rumman Chowdhury

When data scientists talk about bias, we talk about quantifiable bias that is a result of let’s say incomplete or incorrect data. And data scientists love living in that world—it’s very comfortable. Why? Because once it’s quantified if you can point out the error you just fix the error. What this does not ask is should you have built the facial recognition technology in the first place? Read more →

Larp as Adaptation
presented by Evan Torner

A larp takes a space and makes a place in which we create fiction with our bodies, and our voices. Although the larp medium certainly shares a lineage with the theater and the oral storytelling tradition, most of the fiction that we consume comes in other forms. Read more →

Srinivasan Ramani’s Internet Hall of Fame 2014 Induction Speech
presented by Srinivasan Ramani

I stand here as a representative of number of groups of colleagues. The work that was described was a part of what I did as part of the Indian academic network project called the Education & Research Network, ERNET, funded by the government of India and supported by the United Nations Development Programme. Read more →

Agri‐tech and the Arts: From Barns to D‐Space
presented by Richard Marggraf-Turley

I'm going to be talking about how the arts engage ethically and politically with the technization of the food chain, the chain or flow of sustenance from field to dinner plate. This is an inter-disciplinary talk but don't worry, I won't be claiming quite that poems and paintings are computational machines for working out social policy, because that would be crazy. But if I'm not willfully misunderstanding Joscha's excellent talk on the computational universe, it seems that a likely candidate for the substrate of consciousness is the numinal, the realm of ideas, and that's precisely where art and literature lives. So it's the ideal place for deep processing of ethical issues, the big issues like food and tech. Read more →