You can tell a lot about a person from their…poop. More specifically you can tell about their health. So if they’re unhealthy, their microbes in their poop would be different than a person who is healthy. So for example what we eat can affect the microbes that live in our gut.
When the film was banned, I was really, really, really surprised. And what surprised me the most about the ban was the reason the Kenya Film Classification Board gave. They gave the reason that the film was not remorseful enough. They said that if I change the ending of the film and make it more remorseful, then they would give me a rating. Because they didn’t like the idea of legitimizing, or normalizing, the LGBT community in Kenya. Which was ridiculous.
History of technology is the history of civilization. The primary concern of all humans throughout history has been not dying. So the way that we have coped to mitigate this risk of not dying is by building infrastructure.
We as a society have to decide whether or not the ability to access and change our brains is something that we want, that we’re going to embrace, or something that we’re going to put limits on.
It’s wonderful to be here in Davos sharing our commitment to improving the state of the world. And the recipe is really I think quite simple. All you’ve got to do is grow the economy, increase participation in that economy, within a rapidly-changing world, with increasing automation and technology, on a planet that’s straining to meet our resource needs. Piece of cake, right?
Why don’t we quantify the brain? What I want to argue today is that we need a shift from diagnosis and treatment, to wellness and prevention. And that we have the data to do it.
In the next ten years we will see data-driven technologies reconfigure systems in many different sectors, from autonomous vehicles to personalized learning, predictive policing, to precision medicine. While the advances that we will see will create phenomenal new opportunities, they will also create new challenges—and new worries—and it behooves us to start grappling with these issues now so that we can build healthy sociotechnical systems.
In my view, what an open city means is that people are exposed to one another. That’s my idea of the open city, that it’s a place where physical presence with the other, and comfort with the physical presence of the other, does the work of allowing people to live together even if they are not engaged in the process of negating their differences.
I’m going to take you back to two key evolutionary innovations that happened early on in our lineage that set us off on a trajectory distinct from that of our closest living relatives, the African great apes, chimpanzees, and gorillas.
America is different than the rest of the countries in the world because it’s the only country I think that’s based upon the idea of team sport. Other countries are based on race, religion, tribe. The United States is the only country in the world that’s based on the idea of a team. Because there’s all these diverse different people, and we all work together for a goal. The problem is that America, because it is a team, its main objective is to win.
Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet. Malamud:... Read more →
Historically, there have been all of these moments, moments of social turmoil where people have come together and they have questioned a lot of the common sense of their eras and they've torn it to bits. And the result has been kind of…truths, like new truths that become common sense later. Read more →
One of the ways that industrial revolutions are interesting to think about is that they look differently depending on how and where you see them from. They look different whether you see them from Europe or Asia or Africa. But regardless of time or place, economists and historians generally tend to look at industrial revolutions through the lens of innovation. And in my short talk today I want to encourage a different way of thinking about this. Read more →
Bill Keller ends his story in the end in The New York Times Magazine as, "If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if WikiLeaks were not suffused with such glib antipathy toward the US, would the reaction to the leaks be quite so ferocious?" Good question. Who's responsible? Half an article before, Keller says, "I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson movie. Read more →
Mary Shelley's novel has been an incredibly successful modern myth. And so this conversation today is not just about what happened 200 years ago, but the remarkable ways in which that moment and that set of ideas has continued to percolate and evolve and reform in culture, in technological research, in ethics, since then. Read more →