Ian Bogost

A Pessimist’s Guide to the Future of Technology

in Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

In this moment that we’re in today with tech­nol­o­gy, where we’re I think shift­ing final­ly into a mode where it’s pos­si­ble to be crit­i­cal with­out get­ting sneered at, if we kind of look back at the…I don’t know, the opti­mistic aspi­ra­tional­ism that we’ve been using to encounter tech­nol­o­gy in the broad­est sense, and we look back on those moments of the recent past or even the dis­tant past, we can see how we knew how things were going to turn out, actu­al­ly. We just weren’t pay­ing them heed.

What Should We Know About Algorithms?

in The Tyranny of Algorithms

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.

Photo of Ian Bogost during presentation,with a slide displaying the word "Fun" in large letters.

Fun

in UX Week 2013

What if we arrive at fun not through expand­ing the cir­cum­stances that we’re in in order to make them less wretched, but actu­al­ly by embrac­ing the wretched­ness of the cir­cum­stances them­selves? What if, in a lit­er­al way, fun comes from impov­er­ish­ment, from wretchedness?

Reverse Engineering Netflix

in Bot Summit 2014

But most inter­est­ing was just going bonkers with this data in gonzo mode” and incor­po­rat­ing as much as pos­si­ble: Viral Plague Sci-Fi Movies Based on Children’s Books Set in Europe for Ages 8 to 10; or First Love Slice of Life Musicals Set in Europe From the 19820s For Hopeless Romantics; Bounty-Hunter Fantasy Movies Based on Books About Cats.