When many of the people in this room were beginning to lay the groundwork for the network in the 60s, I was working as a political scientist and worrying about communications patterns and how those worked.
When I first started on the Internet in 1972, I joined Doug Engelbart’s group, Augmentation Research Center, and I didn’t know exactly what a network information center was but I thought we were going to be handling information in a very different way, and it was very addictive.
About 1988, I was running a regional development information system at the United Nations economic commission for Africa in Addis Ababa. It was based on exchange of information with nodes in virtually every African country, and it was to be based on satellites for the exchange of that information. Unfortunately the satellites weren’t there.
We mean well, but we also do good and we also do damage. Well-meaning Americans did something called the Leland Initiative, which broke networking in the indigenous networks in ten African countries and empowered the PTT monopolies.
In 1992…I had a plan. And that plan was to set up the first regional Internet registry, and in April 1993 to be done with the Internet and move on to the next interesting thing.
The people who really get the credit are the people who built the Internet, including a lot of people we never hear about. The credit also goes to people who help each other out every day, sometimes in large numbers, who never get any recognition at all.
Back in 1980, working with the artificial intelligence guys, we had this idea we were going to make smart machines. But it needed to read good books, don’t you think?
Today, in America right now, we only can think of growth in quantitative terms. And in a resource-constrained environment, how frickin’ stupid is that? You’re actually imposing your own death sentence by not being able to get over the grip of this quantitative dynamic.
This idea of finding a communist under the bed seems me all nonsense. And the result of the whole thing is that Americans now are so timid about expressing themselves that we’ve practically given up democratic methods and free speech. … The result is that we act as one and even on controversial subjects we don’t find any debate in public life. And don’t dare.
I think we are groping towards this idea of truth. And even the word truth can be defined in multiple different ways. So we are by its very nature dealing with a very slippery topic.
Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet. Malamud:... Read more →
I'm going to be talking about how the arts engage ethically and politically with the technization of the food chain, the chain or flow of sustenance from field to dinner plate. This is an inter-disciplinary talk but don't worry, I won't be claiming quite that poems and paintings are computational machines for working out social policy, because that would be crazy. But if I'm not willfully misunderstanding Joscha's excellent talk on the computational universe, it seems that a likely candidate for the substrate of consciousness is the numinal, the realm of ideas, and that's precisely where art and literature lives. So it's the ideal place for deep processing of ethical issues, the big issues like food and tech. Read more →
Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, town crier to the global... Read more →
Pretty much anything that Lucifer says in Paradise Lost, you could probably imagine the CEO of Uber saying. They're just disrupting the Heavenly orders, you know. They really needed it. Read more →
I often try to tell people that Google is not providing information retrieval algorithms, it's providing advertising algorithms. And that is a very important distinction when we think about what kind of information is available in these corporate-controlled spaces. Read more →