Archive

The Breakdown: Jonathan Zittrain Reflects on 20192020 Assembly Program, Disinformation

What would it mean to have peo­ple who weren’t just aca­d­e­mics in an envi­ron­ment true to the high­est ideals of acad­e­mia? Of solv­ing prob­lems, of exam­in­ing ques­tions and our own assump­tions about answers to those questions? 

Defying Faith

The chal­lenge for the Church and for the the­olo­gians was to say okay, per­haps that’s what is writ­ten. But for exam­ple if you con­sid­er that God has deliv­ered the Creation in sev­en days, know­ing that nowa­days Amazon can deliv­er every­thing on Earth overnight, it means that Jeff Bezos has defeat­ed God? Or does it mean some­thing dif­fer­ent? And I think it means prob­a­bly some­thing different.

Jonny Sun and Jonathan Zittrain on Joke Tweets, Memes, and Being an Alien Online

I think I kind of have float­ed through the world feel­ing like an out­sider and feel­ing a bit like an alien, I guess. And along the way I’ve met so many oth­er peo­ple who have felt like that too, and I think this is a cel­e­bra­tion of that kind of diver­si­ty and of that kind of outsiderdom.

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.

Automation and Algorithms in the Digital Age

I want to think more broad­ly about the future of cyber state, and think about accu­mu­la­tions of pow­er both cen­tral­ized and dis­trib­uted that might require trans­paren­cy in bound­aries we would­n’t be used to.