Archive

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. 

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.

Rise of the Hacker Industrial Complex

We have basi­cal­ly lost con­trol over our net­work. All of the advances that have made our lives more pro­duc­tive, more acces­si­ble, more con­nect­ed, have fun­da­men­tal­ly dis­in­ter­me­di­at­ed our abil­i­ty to pro­tect our envi­ron­ments. The democ­ra­ti­za­tion of infor­ma­tion, of tech­nol­o­gy, of goods and ser­vices, of bank­ing, of finan­cial trans­ac­tions with blockchain etc., means every aspect of our lives has become acces­si­ble and there­fore vulnerable.

Hardware, Software, Trustware

The cul­ture gap at the cen­ter of the debate we’re hav­ing today is a cul­ture gap between peo­ple who build hard­ware and peo­ple who build soft­ware. And those cul­tures have been diverg­ing since the 1950s.

The Conversation #42 — Gary L. Francione

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?

Experimental Anthropology

In exper­i­men­tal archae­ol­o­gy, we could for instance try to make the kind of shoes that our hunter-gatherer ances­tors might have had, and test how long they last in use. 

But what if we are inter­est­ed in com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent kinds of ques­tions. Like, did they have rules for whom you’re allowed to have sex with? How did they raise their kids? We could always look at exist­ing hunter-gatherer cul­tures and guess that the cul­ture might have been sim­i­lar. But could we attempt to test our hypothe­ses, someway?

Sin in the Time of Technology

Social media com­pa­nies have an unpar­al­leled amount of influ­ence over our mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions. […] These com­pa­nies also play a huge role in shap­ing our glob­al out­look on moral­i­ty and what con­sti­tutes it. So the ways in which we per­ceive dif­fer­ent imagery, dif­fer­ent speech, is being increas­ing­ly defined by the reg­u­la­tions that these plat­forms put upon us [in] our dai­ly activ­i­ties on them. 

Senongo Akpem at The Conference 2015

Over the past few years, I’ve start­ed to expose, both in my work and also in giv­ing talks and writ­ing and so on…this idea of what it means for design to be respon­sive to the cul­ture that it’s speak­ing to, that it’s com­ing from is what I’d like to go over today.