Archive

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. 

The Conversation #41 — John Fullerton

I actu­al­ly think you can trace many many of these big sys­temic crises to being symp­toms of the flawed idea that eco­nom­ic growth can go on indef­i­nite­ly, expo­nen­tial­ly, on a finite plan­et. That’s sort of my North Star. And then as a finance per­son, why do we think we need eco­nom­ic growth? Well, because the way our cap­i­tal sys­tem works is that cap­i­tal demands that growth.

Why Black Lives Matter

Black folks have con­sis­tent­ly been denied the rights to priv­i­lege that come with cit­i­zen­ship that so many of us take for grant­ed. And that’s why so many of us are no longer sat­is­fied with the com­pro­mis­es and nego­ti­a­tions that hap­pen behind the scenes, that con­tin­ue to leave out too many peo­ple whose lives depend on the abil­i­ty to par­tic­i­pate in the deci­sions that impact their lives.

The Conversation #33 — Priscilla Grim

I was at a par­ty one time where I was talk­ing to some guy who had been pro­filed by Adbusters because he was a big cli­mate change guy. And he basi­cal­ly told me…that I need­ed to be mak­ing my own food, I need­ed to be mak­ing my own clothes. So you’re telling me that as a work­ing moth­er going to school full-time, along with those respon­si­bil­i­ties in which I am at home study­ing most the time, I should be mak­ing my daugh­ter’s clothes. I should be whip­ping up meals from scratch. Um…no.

The Conversation #14 — John Zerzan

I always won­der about peo­ple that are very pro-tech on the Left, for exam­ple. Oh, we’ve got to keep all this. Of course. That’d be crazy.” You know, you want to pre­serve all of the lev­el of tech­nol­o­gy. The ques­tion that occurs to me is, oh so you want to keep how many hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple in the mines, in the smelters, in the foundries, in the assem­bly lines? I would like to see them be able to do some­thing else. But you’re going to have to keep them there one way or anoth­er if you want to have all this stuff.