Science has been my mother tongue when people weren’t, in that it moved with me and my thoughts no matter what place I was. No matter how happy or sad or lost I was, I knew that at least where I stood, it was there around me.
Hacking, originally, is a technical practice. It’s an ethos of technologists, but it’s increasingly becoming a metaphor for a new kind of social activism, which is all about distributed democracy, distributed power, distributed decision making.
We should not judge the work of AI on the basis of whether it can be distinguished from work done by us, because what’s the point. We want AI to produce work that we presently cannot even imagine. That may seem to us meaningless—and even nonsensical—but it may be better than what we can produce.
When I said that humans are obsolescing, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to become extinct or irrelevant to the future. It just means that their activities will be less significant.
I think people are asking the question, “What are we going to become? What does it mean to be human?”
I would like to see a future in which we all still have agency, and my concern is that we are getting further and further away from a future in which each one of us has the ability to make decisions.
iSlavery is more about workers and consumers losing their autonomy, losing their freedom. They become enslaved in different ways. One looks more pleasant than the other, but in the end it’s about reducing our options; reducing our freedom.
Calm technology is the idea that the scarce resource in the 21st century is not technology, it’s our attention. And how technology takes advantage—or not—of our attention, is something that we can change.
The cool thing about VR is you can do things that you can’t do in the physical world. Leveraging this paradox, which is that the brain treats it as real, but you can do the impossible—you can do anything—is a really neat way to use VR.
We rarely think about the link between trust and progress and innovation, and how societies move forward. But when you start to think of it like that, you realize that trust is actually the key component not just for companies but any organization that wants human beings to try new things.
In a world of conflicting values, it's going to be difficult to develop values for AI that are not the lowest common denominator. Read more →
If you do anything generative on computers and don't know what to do with whatever you just made, turning that into a little tool that people can use to do stuff like tweak values, play around with some visuals, and just export whatever they make goes a long way. Coming from more of a game design angle, it's easy to overthink interactivity and want to build on the systems in ways that get really complicated. If you look at tool design, often the opposite mindset is the most rewarding. Read more →
I don't think ecological awareness is a sort of "happy happy joy joy, we are all earthlings" thing. I think it's actually a kind of uncanny realization. On the one hand there's no away, on the other hand what the hell is this? "This is not my beautiful waste. This is not my beautiful toilet. This is not my beautiful Pacific Ocean." You know, all of a sudden these things become somehow not exactly what we thought they were. Read more →
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. Read more →
When I first learned about being named for this award, I listened to the acceptance speeches of prior awardees and I noticed the central theme was "I just happened to be in the right place at the right time." And in fact I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Read more →