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A Pessimist’s Guide to the Future of Technology

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.

A Future with­out Waste

What I want to tell you is that in 2050 we don’t even have waste any­more. There will be no waste in 2050. Everything will be seen as a trea­sure, because we will have cre­at­ed what some smart peo­ple call a cir­cu­lar economy.

Virtual Futures Salon: Radical Technologies, with Adam Greenfield

I am pro­found­ly envi­ous of peo­ple who get to write about set­tled domains or sort of set­tled states of affairs in human events. For me, I was deal­ing with a set of tech­nolo­gies which are either recent­ly emerged or still in the process of emerg­ing. And so it was a con­tin­u­al Red Queen’s race to keep up with these things as they announce them­selves to us and try and wrap my head around them, under­stand what it was that they were propos­ing, under­stand what their effects were when deployed in the world.

Ethical Machines episode 1: Mark Riedl

Computers can tell sto­ries but they’re always sto­ries that humans have input into a com­put­er, which are then just being regur­gi­tat­ed. But they don’t make sto­ries up on their own. They don’t real­ly under­stand the sto­ries that we tell. They’re not kind of aware of the cul­tur­al impor­tance of sto­ries. They can’t watch the same movies or read the same books we do. And this seems like this huge miss­ing gap between what com­put­ers can do and humans can do if you think about how impor­tant sto­ry­telling is to the human condition. 

The Spawn of Frankenstein: Unintended Consequences

Victor’s sin was­n’t in being too ambi­tious, not nec­es­sar­i­ly in play­ing God. It was in fail­ing to care for the being he cre­at­ed, fail­ing to take respon­si­bil­i­ty and to pro­vide the crea­ture what it need­ed to thrive, to reach its poten­tial, to be a pos­i­tive devel­op­ment for soci­ety instead of a disaster.

Designing AI to Complement Humanity

I think one of the things I want to say from the start is it’s not like AI is going to appear. It’s actu­al­ly out there, in some instances in ways that we nev­er even notice.

Artificial Intelligence: Challenges of Extended Intelligence

Machine learn­ing sys­tems that we have today have become so pow­er­ful and are being intro­duced into every­thing from self-driving cars, to pre­dic­tive polic­ing, to assist­ing judges, to pro­duc­ing your news feed on Facebook on what you ought to see. And they have a lot of soci­etal impacts. But they’re very dif­fi­cult to audit.

Artificial Intelligence: Society in the Loop

Some of the long-term chal­lenges are very hypothetical—we don’t real­ly know if they will ever mate­ri­al­ize in this way. But in the short term I think AI pos­es some reg­u­la­to­ry chal­lenges for society.

Verifying and Validating Machine Intelligence

We’ve been build­ing autonomous vehi­cles for about twenty-five years, and now that the tech­nol­o­gy has become adopt­ed much more broad­ly and is on the brink of being deployed, our earnest fac­ul­ty who’ve been look­ing at it are now real­ly inter­est­ed in ques­tions like, a car sud­den­ly real­izes an emer­gency, an ani­mal has just jumped out at it. There’s going to be a crash in one sec­ond from now. Human ner­vous sys­tem can’t deal with that fast enough. What should the car do?

Making an Ethical Machine

The idea of putting a robot sim­u­la­tor inside a robot, well, it’s not a new idea but it’s tricky and very few peo­ple have pulled it off. In fact, it takes a bit of get­ting your head round. The robot needs to have, inside itself, a sim­u­la­tion of itself and its envi­ron­ment, and oth­ers in its envi­ron­ment. And run­ning in real-time as well.

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