Open Transcripts

Deducing the Cognitive Basis of Attempting to Influence Others

presented by Bahador Bahrami

In the course of Donald Trump’s rise to power, people have repeatedly been asking, “Why did he tweet that? What was he thinking about?” Our fascination with his mental states highlights a very important question for us: What happens in our minds and brains when we try to influence others?

Analyzing the Limits of Rational Choice in Political and Cultural Conflict

presented by Scott Atran

With our team of policymakers, academics, former military, of playwrights, we explore why people refuse political compromise, go to war, attempt revolution, or resort to terrorism, focusing on what Darwin called “those virtues highly‐esteemed and even sacred,” that give immense advantage to any group with devoted actors inspired to sacrifice for them.

Alternate Futures

presented by Tracy Fullerton

The unrelenting pace of technologies is deeply ironic, given the original intent of them to make our lives more efficient and give us more time. But we can all attest that the actual effect of this escalation of efficiency has been to increase the pace of work and play in our worlds.

The Conversation #67 — Aengus Anderson

presented by Aengus Anderson

The strange thing about writing a headstone is that you’re simultaneously writing a conclusion, and an introduction.

The Conversation #66 — Lisa Gray‐Garcia

presented by Aengus Anderson, Lisa Gray-Garcia, Neil Prendergast

As a person who’s been criminalized and arrested for the sole act of being poor in the US, it’s probably something I’m always walking with, speaking on, and trying to effectively change just by…in some ways not so much raising awareness, which seems very passive to be, but more about sparking people’s understanding and change.

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.

What Algorithms Taught Me About Forgiveness

presented by Julia Angwin

I decided I wanted to do some accountability studies about algorithms in our lives. And it’s hard to study the newsfeed in a quantitative way, and I also wanted something with higher stakes. So I started with an algorithm that is used in the criminal justice system to predict whether a person is likely to commit a future crime.

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.

The Conversation #59 – Charles Hugh Smith

presented by Aengus Anderson, Charles Hugh Smith, Micah Saul

We’re in an era of overlapping crises, and I think that’s what makes it sort of unique. We’re aware of the financial aspect, which is sort of exponential increase in debt. We’re also aware that energy, the cost is going up because we’re reaching to deeper and more expensive reserves of energy, at least fossil fuels. So that’s another if not crisis then um… Well, actually it is a crisis, because the world we’ve constructed is based on cheap fossil fuels.

…And the Disability Revolution Will be Tweeted

presented by Robin Wilson-Beattie

I do disability and sexuality education. And activism and advocacy around sexuality and disability issues, and reproductive health issues. And I want to teach the world that people with disabilities have the right and ability to give and receive pleasure.

The Conversation #58 – Jason Kelly Johnson

presented by Aengus Anderson, Jason Kelly Johnson, Micah Saul

I think our work is much more interested in questioning the notion that architecture is a static entity. Part of our thinking in terms of architecture is how we make a building breathe. How do we give a building a kind of like, almost a nervous system.

The Conversation #57 — Joan Blades

presented by Aengus Anderson, Joan Blades, Micah Saul

What I’ve seen as a founder of MoveOn is that we’ve become increasingly polarized. And in fact we have gotten to the point where we have separate…realities? when it comes to a whole raft of facts. And so how can we possibly make good decisions together when we don’t even share basic facts? You first have to have a relationship, and you have to have shared values.

Virtual Futures Salon: Beyond Bitcoin, with Vinay Gupta

presented by Luke Robert Mason, Vinay Gupta

Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the people have gone from not having it around to having it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a little younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t really need to be explained. It does however need to be contextualized.

How an Algorithmic World Can Be Undermined

presented by danah boyd

All they have to do is write to journalists and ask questions. And what they do is they ask a journalist a question and be like, “What’s going on with this thing?” And journalists, under pressure to find stories to report, go looking around. They immediately search something in Google. And that becomes the tool of exploitation.

Parenting a Mind

presented by Jennifer Kumura

BJ Copeland states that a strong AI machine would be one, built in the form of a man; two, have the same sensory perception as a human; and three, go through the same education and learning processes as a human child. With these three attributes, similar to human development, the mind of the machine would be born as a child and will eventually mature as an adult.

Living in Information

presented by Jorge Arango

The framing of what we design is very important to how we go about it. We have not been framing these things as contexts. We’ve been framing them as products, services, and a whole other series of terms that are— Tools, for example. And these are things that are mostly transactional. They’re not things that are meant to be inhabited.

Virtual Futures Salon: Fucking Machines

presented by Dan O'Hara, Ian Pearson, Kate Devlin, Luke Robert Mason, Trudy Barber

We are here to talk about fucking machines. In London, on a foggy evening, on a Tuesday, for yet another debate about fucking machines. Another curated discussion underlined by our own human insecurity about versions of us in silica. Fucking anthropomorphic fucking machines. Machines that fuck us. And let’s face it, machines are already fucking us, or so we seem to be told.

The Conversation #56 — Aengus Anderson and Micah Saul at SXSW
A Sheep in Wolf's Clothes: The Myth of Disruption

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul

As the show advanced, we realized that there are a lot of people really really worried about the future, and they’re worried about big, big things. We’re talking things like inequality. We’re talking things like overconsumption of resources and environmental collapse. Social collapse. Community breakdown. General feelings of powerlessness against massive systems. And this seems to be universal.

Design for Diplomacy: Breaking Down Cultural Divides

presented by James Keller, Marcelino J. Alvarez

We as designers have an ability to provide perspective, to bring focus, and to share the tools that we use on a daily basis to align a group of disparate voices for a cause that is greater than our own.

Why Facts Don’t Unify Us

presented by Tali Sharot

Why do you spend precious moments every day sharing information? There’s probably many reasons, but it appears that the opportunity to impart your knowledge onto others is internally rewarding.

REACT to Close the Digital Gender Divide

presented by Nanjira Sambuli

I found that research globally is pointing out that women are 50% less likely to be connected to the Internet. And not just that. Even when they’re connected they’re 30 to 50% less likely to use it for personal empowerment. So much for Web For All, right?

Solving the Economic Generation Gap

presented by Christine Lagarde

I wanted to start off this morning using an American poet and novelist, Langston Hughes. And I quote him to have said, “What happens to a dream deferred?” It is a question now facing millions all over the world, especially young people. Why? Because of poverty. Because of excessive inequality

Virtual Futures Salon: Dawn of the New Everything, with Jaron Lanier

presented by Jaron Lanier, Luke Robert Mason

So here’s what happened. If you tell people you’re going to have this super‐open, absolutely non‐commercial, money‐free thing, but it has to survive in this environment that’s based on money, where it has to make money, how does anybody square that circle? How does anybody do anything? And so companies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a corner. There was exactly one business plan available to them, which was advertising.

The Conversation #55 — Ed Finn

presented by Aengus Anderson, Ed Finn, Micah Saul

The Center, one of our core goals, our mission statement, is to get people thinking more creatively and ambitiously about the future. What I mean when I talk about that is that we need to come up with better stories about the future. If you want to build a better world you have to imagine that world first.

Invisible Images of Surveillance

presented by Trevor Paglen

One of the things I really want out of art, what I see the job of the artist to be is to try to learn how to see the historical moment that you find yourself living in. I mean that very simply and I mean it very literally. How do you see the world around you?

Christian Sandvig and Eszter Hargittai on Tools for Truth Empowerment

presented by Christian Sandvig, Eszter Hargittai

[Stefik’s] four ideas about the Internet is that we think about Internet, number one as a library. And this was the 90s and we had this electronic library, the digital library. That doesn’t mean that we digitized libraries, it means that that’s the metaphor we used to think about the Internet, as a place that has information that we can look up. His second was we think of it as the mail. Or you could say the telephone. And so that’s more about individuals and interpersonally communicating in some way. The third is that we think of it as a virtual world. And the fourth is that we think of it as a marketplace.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

presented by Safiya Noble

One of the things that I think is really important is that we’re paying attention to how we might be able to recuperate and recover from these kinds of practices. So rather than thinking of this as just a temporary kind of glitch, in fact I’m going to show you several of these glitches and maybe we might see a pattern.

The “Monkey Selfie” Case: Can Non‐Humans Hold Copyrights?

presented by Christopher Bavitz, John Kerr, Jonathan Lovvorn, Kendra Albert, Tiffany Li

Naruto, then 3 years old, came up and picked up one of his cameras and started looking at it. And he made the connection… By Mr. Slater’s own admission he made the connection between pushing the shutter release button and the change to his reflection in the lens when the aperture opened and closed.

Gay Science

presented by Frank Lantz, Robert Yang

How do we make gay worlds in video games? Well, I can tell you how not to make a gay world. You should not rely on the AAA game industry to pity you and leave you some table scraps. I’m tired of being 0.1% of a world, right. Why isn’t Dragon Age 100% gay sex, right?

The Conversation #54 — Charles Bowden

presented by Aengus Anderson, Charles Bowden, Micah Saul

I don’t understand the fear. And that’s the biggest threat. And the reason it’s a threat is it makes your judgment bad. You never make good decisions when you’re afraid. And it destroys your ability to clearly look at the facts and do something. You choke, in other words.

Biohackers Die

presented by Jeffrey Tibbetts

So grinders are a community committed to radically altering the body. And so sometimes it’s treatments like transcranial magnetic, or direct current stimulation. It could be through the use of previously untested chemicals like VIP. Often it takes the form of implanted devices. All these approaches come with risks. What I’m going to focus on today is why despite all the risks being taken, a grinder hasn’t died yet.

Artificial Intelligence is Hard to See: Social & Ethical Impacts of AI

presented by Kate Crawford, Trevor Paglen

The big concerns that I have about artificial intelligence are really not about the Singularity, which frankly computer scientists say is…if it’s possible at all it’s hundreds of years away. I’m actually much more interested in the effects that we are seeing of AI now.

The Tyranny of Algorithms and the Use of Predictive Policing by Israel

presented by Marwa Fatafta

We have been documenting and researching into human rights or digital rights violations that are taking place in Palestine and Israel. And one of the most recent case studies or work that we’re looking into is the use of predictive policing by Israel, which is rather a sensitive issue given that there isn’t a lot that we know about the subject.

Big Data Bodies: Machines and Algorithms in the World

presented by Maya Indira Ganesh

I’m interested in data and discrimination, in the things that have come to make us uniquely who we are, how we look, where we are from, our personal and demographic identities, what languages we speak. These things are effectively incomprehensible to machines. What is generally celebrated as human diversity and experience is transformed by machine reading into something absurd, something that marks us as different.

What Do We Do About the Haters?

presented by Jillian C York

A lot of the topics that we’re trying to “tackle” or trying to deal with on the Internet, we’re not actually defining ahead of time. And so what we’ve ended up with is a system whereby both companies, and governments alike, are working sometimes separately, sometimes together, to rid the Internet of these topics, of these discussions, without actually delving into what they are.

The Internet of Agreements

presented by Vinay Gupta

I was looking for the tools that you could use to solve global problems in an environment when the nation‐state has turned out to be a very very ineffective set of machinery at all. So I’m going to talk a little bit about the technology. I’m going to talk a little bit about what it does and where it’s going. And then I’m going to try and tell a story about the kind of global long‐term picture that we could get if this stuff actually works.