I think one of the things I want to say from the start is it’s not like AI is going to appear. It’s actually out there, in some instances in ways that we never even notice.
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.
I think there are countless amazing opportunities for artificial intelligence and its impact on society. I think one of the areas I’m truly the most excited about is education.
I think developments in artificial intelligence do pose a strong challenge for humanity. I think at a very fundamental level, people don’t quite understand what artificial intelligence is, yet it’s used as a buzzword that’s going to solve every single problem.
Some of the long-term challenges are very hypothetical—we don’t really know if they will ever materialize in this way. But in the short term I think AI poses some regulatory challenges for society.
To me…we all draw our satisfaction from what we ourselves have been able to do with our lives. And if somebody, some government or someone else is just giving to me, I’m not going to be a happy person.
We have basically lost control over our network. All of the advances that have made our lives more productive, more accessible, more connected, have fundamentally disintermediated our ability to protect our environments. The democratization of information, of technology, of goods and services, of banking, of financial transactions with blockchain etc., means every aspect of our lives has become accessible and therefore vulnerable.
The culture gap at the center of the debate we’re having today is a culture gap between people who build hardware and people who build software. And those cultures have been diverging since the 1950s.
I use my body, as a lot of people do that work in public, as a kind object of commerce, frankly. When I go out and do a gig, somebody has to pay for the presence. And that’s a certain gig. When you’re still pushing a hype like that, you lack cultural weight until you get to the end of that story where everybody knows you really don’t have to anymore except for an interior reason.
The future is on the whole a wonderful thing because it will bring us new things that we haven’t seen before. And that’s why we stick around.
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It's not a technology imposed from above. It really is a technology developed from the ground up, where you don't need permission to come up with a new application or a new idea. And we hear a lot about sort of simple technologies that enable new economic models in the developing world. And that would not come about if a whole bunch people in suits were sitting in Geneva or New York, or even Beijing, trying to think of "What will we allow people to do." Read more →
Lo and behold humanity is fairly consistent. We would mention mornings in the mornings. We get tired sort of towards the evenings. Talk about coffee more frequently in the morning. These are the sort of normal diurnal patterns that we see on Twitter, right. As expected. But when interesting events happen and events that are out of the ordinary happen it's very clear that they happen. Read more →
When we talk about rebellion, we're usually talking about thought that is couched against the supposed rationality of the great revolutions of the modern era. Read more →
A decade on, the violence of September the 11th, 2001 still haunts the liberal imaginary of threat. And I guess by this what I mean is that the violence of that fateful day now underwrites all forms of liberal security governance, globally. And I think this in many ways is of course understandable. I personally find myself sometimes deeply troubled by that fateful predicament faced by those people who decided to take their own lives on that horrifying day. However in spite of this, I think our response represents nothing short of a profound failure of the political and the philosophical imagination. Read more →