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What Could be Unsettling about New Settlements?

I think we’re already mov­ing into a very—uncom­fort­ably for most of us, into a place where nation-states, gov­ern­ments, are being forced to cede author­i­ty to cor­po­ra­tions. And that is going to, I assume, hap­pen faster and faster. And if you throw in space, if you throw in the lim­it­less­ness of space, then I mean…the sky’s the lim­it so to speak. I don’t know what the…where that takes us. 

Virtual Futures Salon: Beyond Bitcoin, with Vinay Gupta

Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the peo­ple have gone from not hav­ing it around to hav­ing it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a lit­tle younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t real­ly need to be explained. It does how­ev­er need to be contextualized.

Religion and World Politics part 16
Confucius and the Hierarchical State

At the time when he lived in 500 BC, [Confucius] was the epit­o­me of good gov­er­nance. He was the epit­o­me of pro­gres­sive ways towards a peace­ful and just order. And he pio­neered many things that we would regard today still as extreme­ly important.

Computers That Just Work
Trying to Finally Automate Away Bureaucracy

Everybody thinks of bureau­crats as being kind of a neu­tral force. But I’m going to make the case that bureau­crats are in fact a very strong­ly neg­a­tive force, and that automat­ing the bureau­crat­ic func­tions inside of our soci­ety is nec­es­sary for fur­ther human progress.

AI and Human Development

Increasingly we’re using auto­mat­ed tech­nol­o­gy in ways that kind of sup­port humans in what they’re doing rather than just hav­ing algo­rithms work on their own, because they’re not smart enough to do that yet or deal with unex­pect­ed situations.

AI and Ethical Design

I teach my stu­dents that design is ongo­ing risky decision-making. And what I mean by ongo­ing is that you nev­er real­ly get to stop ques­tion­ing the assump­tions that you’re mak­ing and that are under­ly­ing what it is that you’re creating—those fun­da­men­tal premises.

Openness and Oversight of Artificial Intelligence

If you have a sys­tem that can wor­ry about stuff that you don’t have to wor­ry about any­more, you can turn your atten­tion to oth­er pos­si­bly more inter­est­ing or impor­tant issues.

Social and Ethical Challenges of AI

One of the chal­lenges of build­ing new tech­nolo­gies is that we often want them to solve things that have been very social­ly dif­fi­cult to solve. Things that we don’t have answers to, prob­lems that we don’t know how we would best go about it in a social­ly respon­si­ble way. 

AI Threats to Civil Liberties and Democracy

In a world of con­flict­ing val­ues, it’s going to be dif­fi­cult to devel­op val­ues for AI that are not the low­est com­mon denominator.

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.

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