Open Transcripts

Page 82 of 107

Rip it Up and Start Again

presented by Simon Bendall

So, why am I doing this? Rip it Up is such a rich resource, espe­cial­ly in the ear­ly years. Nothing else was real­ly doc­u­ment­ing pop cul­ture, let alone the nascent alter­na­tive cul­ture that was start­ing to boil up. The pre­vail­ing atti­tude in the main­stream media of the day seemed to be that pop music was kid’s stuff.

Talking About Visual Thinking

presented by Chris McDowall

Sometimes I think about these sorts of work­ing graph­ics as a sort of men­tal scaf­fold­ing. In the act of ren­der­ing data, or draw­ing our thoughts, we assem­ble a con­struct to hang oth­er con­cepts from. So it’s a con­struct that can be extend­ed or mod­i­fied or dis­as­sem­bled and turned into some­thing new.

Douglas Rushkoff WebVisions Portland 2016 Keynote

presented by Douglas Rushkoff

Google just has to grow. It has to keep grow­ing. But Google grows at its own per­il. Google grew so much that what hap­pened? It out­grew Google. Google had to become what? Alphabet. Now what is Alphabet? Alphabet is not Google. Alphabet is a hold­ing com­pa­ny. So Google’s new busi­ness as Alphabet is to do what? It’s to buy and sell tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies. So, once a com­pa­ny becomes just too big to flip any­more, it becomes a flip­per of oth­er companies.

What Our Algorithms Will Know in 2100

presented by Ed Finn, Lee Konstantinou

A lot of the sci­ence fic­tion I love the most is not about these big ques­tions. You read a book like The Diamond Age and the most inter­est­ing thing in The Diamond Age is the medi­a­tron­ic chop­sticks, the small detail that Stephenson says okay, well if you have nan­otech­nol­o­gy, peo­ple are going to use this tech­nol­o­gy in the most pedes­tri­an, kind of ordi­nary ways.

What Should We Know About Algorithms?

presented by Ed Finn, Ian Bogost, Jennifer Golbeck

When I go talk about this, the thing that I tell peo­ple is that I’m not wor­ried about algo­rithms tak­ing over human­i­ty, because they kind of suck at a lot of things, right. And we’re real­ly not that good at a lot of things we do. But there are things that we’re good at. And so the exam­ple that I like to give is Amazon rec­om­mender sys­tems. You all run into this on Netflix or Amazon, where they rec­om­mend stuff to you. And those algo­rithms are actu­al­ly very sim­i­lar to a lot of the sophis­ti­cat­ed arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence we see now. It’s the same underneath.

What Do Algorithms Know?

presented by Ed Finn

The Tyranny of Algorithms is obvi­ous­ly a polem­i­cal title to start a con­ver­sa­tion around com­pu­ta­tion and cul­ture. But I think that it helps us get into the cul­tur­al, the polit­i­cal, the legal, the eth­i­cal dimen­sions of code. Because we so often think of code, and code is so often con­struct­ed, in a pure­ly tech­ni­cal frame­work, by peo­ple who see them­selves as solv­ing tech­ni­cal problems.

Behind the Screen: The People and Politics of Commercial Content Moderation

presented by Sarah T Roberts

When I asked my peers and my pro­fes­sors if they’d ever heard of this type of work, two things hap­pened. The first thing is that they said no, they had­n’t. The sec­ond thing they said, which is prob­a­bly what you’re think­ing, is, ​“Well, can’t com­put­ers do that?” And in fact the answer to that is no.

The War Inside: How Will the Human Body be Enhanced for War?

presented by Andrew Herr

I want you to imag­ine the abil­i­ty to take a few drops of some­one’s blood, to com­bine that with some cog­ni­tive and some phys­i­cal test­ing, and to be able to fig­ure out where that per­son is going to be most effec­tive in your military. 

Holding To Account

presented by Anil Dash

I’m glad those social net­works pro­vide those ser­vices. I think it’s impor­tant for the dia­logue to hap­pen that way. But it can’t be the only way for us to have pub­lic dis­course. Online, we only have these spaces that are owned by pri­vate com­pa­nies. We don’t have pub­lic parks.

Page 82 of 107

← Previous

Next →

Common Tags

ethics education Carl Malamud Internet Hall of Fame 2013 Histories of Violence design technology politics Internet Hall of Fame 2014 community infrastructure Berkman Klein Center privacy surveillance open source New America Internet Internet Hall of Fame Internet history Geek of the Week artificial intelligence religion algorithms Twitter art

Some Random Transcripts

Reflection & Synthesis on Truthiness
presented by Urs Gasser

I'd like to cluster my thoughts and structure them into four categories. One is what I will call foundational issues. Second, a few words and observations regarding methods. Third, a few areas of application that we touched upon this morning, and maybe also highlighting one or two that we haven't talked so much about but that I think are increasingly important. And then finally also as a segue to the following sessions, a few words about potential points of intervention. Read more →

Kill Switch episode 2: Taking the Shutdown to Trial
presented by Damar Juniarto, Felicia Anthonio, Natalia Krapiva, Shahad Azim

Your government claims that what it's doing is legal. That they are following the letter of the law. Could you perhaps make an argument against this claim? Could you prove that the Internet shutdown is in fact illegal, unconstitutional, and fundamentally undemocratic? If you could make that case, would they really let you win? Read more →

Interventions for Individuals to Fight Spin
presented by Panagiotis Takis Metaxas

I will tell to you a few things about the first Twitter bomb that with my colleague we found a couple years ago. And there it was a case in which somebody was attacking the candidate Martha Coakley in the last Massachusetts elections. We found out that actually it was easy to detect this kind of attack. Read more →