Open Transcripts

Artificial Intelligence and the Internet

presented by Vint Cerf

I have a few examples of things that are starting to happen. And you can see that AI normally stands for artificial intelligence, but I’ve often concluded it stands for “artificial idiot.” And the reason is very simple. It turns out that these systems are good, but they’re good in kind of narrow ways.

Forbidden Research: Rites vs. Rights — Islam, Women’s Rights, and Global Security

presented by Alaa Murabit, Saeed Khan

If we look at a lot of the things we’ve been speaking about today, be it genetic engineering or the things that occur in our daily lives, the challenge of reproductive rights, or global peace and security, a lot of the stagnation, a lot of the challenges, are actually rooted either in the perception of religion or in the political manipulation of religion.

Amdahl to Zipf: The Physics of Software

presented by Dylan Beattie

There are all of these wonderful laws that people have discovered and refined and proposed and proved over the years. And some of these laws can apply to the software projects and the teams and the communities that we work in every day.

Tim Berners-Lee Announces the World Wide Web Foundation

presented by Tim Berners-Lee

I wrote a memo saying, “We should have a global hypertext system to fix this.” The memo, I distributed it to a few people but there’s nowhere really to distribute it to at CERN because CERN is a physics lab. It didn’t have committees for building programs and hypertext systems.

So what happened was basically nothing for eighteen months.

Happiness and Money

presented by Elizabeth Dunn

Much of economics and public policy rests on the assumption that increasing the wealth of individuals and nations provides a route to increasing their wellbeing. So why does money fail us?

The Conversation #44 — John Seager

presented by Aengus Anderson, John Seager, Micah Saul

In 1962, the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill. I would submit that that’s one of the four or five most transformative technological changes of the last millennium. Not just the last century. Because for the first time in the history of the world, half the people on Earth no longer have to depend on the other half for the arc of their lives.

Celebrity Chefs, Past and Present

presented by Paul Freedman

There’ve always been celebrity chefs whose skill and creativity made them famous. But the passage of time usually means we know little more about them than their names. From ancient Greece and Rome there’s only one cookbook that survives in full, that attributed to the Roman cook Apicius, which dates actually from the end of the Roman Empire.

Does the Apple Fall Very Far from the Tree?

presented by Madhur Jaffrey

What is cooking? We are all born into certain cultures. And the culture is like a mother. We run away, we experiment. We are modern people, we try and find new things, we want to find the best lobster, the best crayfish. We want to cook it in amazing ways with something we’ve just foraged from the forest.

Online Platforms as Human Rights Arbiters

presented by Rikke Frank Jørgensen

What does it mean for human rights protection that we have large corporate interests—the Googles, the Facebooks of our time—that control and govern a large part of the online infrastructure?

The Conversation #43 — Roberta Francis

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Neil Prendergast, Roberta Francis

Generally people don’t see the skirmishes that are always always always going on in the background to preserve where we are now in terms of laws against sex discrimination or laws that would promote sex equality. But compared to where we were when the ERA came out of Congress in 1972, we are very much better off in terms of equality of rights being guaranteed by the law, because so many laws that did discriminate on their face are off the books as a result of the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment.