CERN is a place where we try and understand where the universe comes from. And to do that we need technology. This is why we developed the Web.
Barry had a remarkable ability to bring together diverse people, organizations, to help make decisions and the plans that became the Internet as we know it today.
I guess I’m supposed to say how historic things happen, but what I’d like to do is actually paraphrase a comment that is fairly traditional in mathematics and was first taught to me by Dick Hamming, that I have done good things (I’m paraphrasing) because I’ve stood on the shoulders of great people that preceded me.
This is a very great honor and I’m proud, honored, but not so little surprised to be here. But still, even though I’m not a troublemaker, I may well not be an evangelist, but I’m a really really stubborn lady.
There’s already a kind of cognitive investment that we make, you know. At a certain point, you have years of your personal history living in somebody’s cloud. And that goes beyond merely being a memory bank, it’s also a cognitive bank in some way.
So, thirty years ago if you wanted to get a new computer and use it you had to surrender your freedom by installing a user-subjugating proprietary operating system. So I decided to fix that by developing another operating system and make it free, and it’s called GNU, but most the time you’ll hear people erroneously calling it Linux.
In many countries, the very ability to eat a food like avocado is a direct benefit of international trade. We are eating on an interconnected planet. Food trade now shapes land use worldwide and is reshaping the food supplies of many nations.
Cities form a vast global network connected by flows of energy, food, information. This global network is the challenge of the 21st century. How do we make more sustainable cities, with smaller ecological footprints and more equitable human wellbeing?
When it comes to a field as fast-moving and as high of stakes as genetic engineering, how do we proceed wisely? How do we balance our own wildness and civility as we develop increasingly powerful ways to interact with the living world?
The best justification we have for killing fifty-six, fifty-seven, whatever billion land animals and a trillion sea animals every year is that they taste good. And so, in a sense how is this any different from Michael Vick, who likes to sit around a pit watching dogs fight, or at least he used to?
Lincoln spoke of the United States as the last best hope on earth because the United States was the last, and only, and first, successful Democratic Republic in the world. Read more →
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. Read more →
Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet. This... Read more →
I never compared notes with the other people about what they thought, though I do remember talking about it maybe two days later at a lunch that we usually had at the New York Institute for the Humanities. And people like Ronald Dworkin were there, and people like that. And I remember talking about this, just very briefly, that it felt like I was thinking about that building rather than the people and all that had happened inside. And I remember a couple of these people at the lunch really were offended. And that is when this new moralism began. I began to notice this new moralism that set in in the case of Manhattan. Read more →
A lot of these things were predicted, and we were told about them—we were warned about them. Things like loss of privacy and malevolence on the Internet and malware. We were warned, and a lot of us um, put on our rose-colored glasses and said oh well, let's go chasing waterfalls anyway. Read more →