Open Transcripts

Ex Oriente Make
The Future of Maker Culture is Made in China

presented by Silvia Lindtner

Making took rise at a moment when people began— Not just scholars but also media—public media and people working in the tech industry—began critiquing earlier visions and ideas of the knowledge economy and saying the knowledge economy, or ideas like the creative class as propagated by Richard Florida, were sharply critiqued because they did not deliver what they had originally promised.

The Conversation #51 — Phyllis Tickle

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Phyllis Tickle

Historians get really nervous about patterns. That’s changing a bit now. And the truth of it is there’s not much way to avoid the 500-year cycle. You almost have to work too hard to unsay it, it’s so obviously there in every way. And if you say every 500 years we go through one, then you immediately say we’re in the 21^st century and baby are we going through one.

The Conversation #50 — The Future of The Conversation

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul

We’ve got so many new conversations. The project is really involved in a lot of ways. You know, we talk all the time about connections we’re seeing. And we want to talk now about connections that we’re not seeing.

The Conspiracy Trap

presented by Masha Gessen

Conspiracies are perfect for simple thinking. Because conspiracy is by definition something that explains everything. A really great conspiracy explains something that has already happened and something that’s going to happen.

Define American

presented by Jose Antonio Vargas

The reality is we have been so busy calling people names, obsessing over borders and walls, and spreading misinformation that we haven’t even asked hard questions like why do people move? What does US foreign policy and US trade agreements have to do with migration patterns? Remember when those children started walking from Central America to here, and CBS News and a lot of organizations called them “illegal immigrant” children instead of calling them the refugees that they are? What did we do to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala so that their countries got so violent that they have to come here? Who started the drug war? What did NAFTA do not only to the United States but to Mexicans, right?

Justice in the Judiciary

presented by Adam Foss

I was 25 years old when I went to law school. I was 28 when I came out. And I was a bit older than the rest of the kids in law school. And when I came out, I was equally qualified be a tax attorney or a civil litigator or an entertainment lawyer. And I just chose to be a prosecutor. No special training. No special equipment. No special tools.

Pirate in the Empire

presented by Julia Reda

I think in order to understand why the Pirate Party came about as a political party, you have to look at the way that these file sharers—often minors—were being addressed by the political establishment and by the cultural lobbyists in particular. And what kinds of measures were being lobbied for by the cultural industries, especially the surveillance of people’s online behavior, which we’ve only learned probably years later was going to become a much broader problem for a fundamental rights.

The Conversation #49 — Scott Douglas

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Scott Douglas

People think that the Civil Rights Movement and all big epochal movements involve conscience, and they do. They also involve consciousness. I mean, you can’t struggle against what you’re unaware off, right? The Klan as the iconic carriers of violence, the Bull Connor of the iconic southern white male resistance, George Wallace the iconic neopopulist racist. You know, these were historic figures in myth and reality. But we wouldn’t get to what they represented till much later.

I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production

presented by Hito Steyerl

Let’s ask a very simple question. Why are there so many art projects today? Because we live in the world of mass art production. Basically everyone is an artist nowadays. Or at least he or she has an artistic project. We can speak of a surge in the creation of art. The production of art is proliferating.

MIT Media Lab Defiance: Introduction

presented by Ethan Zuckerman, Joi Ito

Part of what’s really interesting at the moment is that most people, particularly young people, don’t have a lot of faith in institutions. They’re not necessarily excited about this idea that we go to the polls, we elect representatives, those representatives speak for us and that is how change happens.

The (Nonviolent) Struggle is Real

presented by Jamila Raqib

Behind-the-scenes planning is often overlooked by observers and by the media because it’s what the cameras often can’t capture. I’ve witnessed it for fifteen years at the Albert Einstein Institution. This quiet capacity-building and structural work. The planning and preparations that make movements more effective.

Rebel Scientists

presented by G. Pascal Zachary

I’m going to make an argument in this talk that dissent is valuable not merely to establish your moral dimension or to make a moral act or moral posture. It’s essential to scientific progress. So we can’t do without dissent; it’s not an affectation.

Ethical Machines episode 4: David J. Klein

presented by David J. Klein, Roelof Pieters, Samim Winiger

One of the most important insights that I’ve gotten in working with biologists and ecologists is that today it’s actually not really known on a scientific basis how well different conservation interventions will work. And it’s because we just don’t have a lot of data.

Data Science Reasoning

presented by Anne L. Washington

During this year that I have been off I’ve been thinking about how to teach both people who are trained in technical parts of data science, and also policymakers, how we could have a common language. And then that way we could have these conversations so we could talk together.

Stats and the City: A Data-Driven Approach to Criminal Justice and Child Welfare

presented by Ravi Shroff

My fellowship project is to understand the development and implementation of predictive models for decision-making in city and state government. So specifically I’m interested in applying and developing statistical and computational methods to improve decision-making in police departments, in the courts, and in child welfare agencies.

Data & Society Databite #101: Machine Learning: What’s Fair and How Do We Decide?

presented by Suchana Seth

The question is what are we doing in the industry, or what is the machine learning research community doing, to combat instances of algorithmic bias? So I think there is a certain amount of good news, and it’s the good news that I wanted to focus on in my talk today.

Ethical Machines episode 3: Alex J. Champandard and Gene Kogan

presented by Alex J. Champandard, Gene Kogan, Roelof Pieters, Samim Winiger

For any artists that are working in this field now, if I was good at painting I’d probably be looking at how to find styles that work well with these kind of representations and make them easily automatable or transferable so that if I had fans as an artist they could say, “Hey, I would like to have a picture of my cat painted.”

Artificial Intelligence: Challenges of Extended Intelligence

presented by Joi Ito

Machine learning systems that we have today have become so powerful and are being introduced into everything from self-driving cars, to predictive policing, to assisting judges, to producing your news feed on Facebook on what you ought to see. And they have a lot of societal impacts. But they’re very difficult to audit.

Ethical Machines episode 2: Jack Clark

presented by Jack Clark, Roelof Pieters, Samim Winiger

If you think about it what we’re doing is we’re turning very high-dimensional mathematic representations of a sort of large knowledge space into intellectual property. Which should be the most frightening idea in the world to anyone. This is from most abstract thing you could possibly try and turn into a capitalist object.

The Stupefying Smart City

presented by Richard Sennett

What I’m worried about is that with the technological tools that we have today, as in the past, our first use of them is the least inventive that we can make. And the issue is how urbanists can actually use these new tools well rather than use them in a way which is harmful.

Evgeny Morozov Keynote at Internetdagarna 2015

presented by Evgeny Morozov

If you look at the appeal that Silicon Valley has to a lot of us, and to a lot of public institutions especially, I think you can understand that the reason for that appeal is very simple. They can offer services that work, that work in a very effective manner, and that are offered more or less either very cheap or are mostly offered for free.

Be Warned: Copy Silicon Valley and You Will Surely Fail

presented by Nilofer Merchant

As I’ve been getting ready to actually return back to Silicon Valley after two years I’ve got this feeling in my gut that something is terribly wrong if Europe adopts Silicon Valley’s metaphor for success.

Ethical Machines episode 1: Mark Riedl

presented by Mark Riedl, Roelof Pieters, Samim Winiger

Computers can tell stories but they’re always stories that humans have input into a computer, which are then just being regurgitated. But they don’t make stories up on their own. They don’t really understand the stories that we tell. They’re not kind of aware of the cultural importance of stories. They can’t watch the same movies or read the same books we do. And this seems like this huge missing gap between what computers can do and humans can do if you think about how important storytelling is to the human condition.