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Disposable Life: Zygmunt Bauman

In pre-modern soci­eties there was no idea of waste; every­thing was going back into life—recycled, as we would say today. If there were more chil­dren com­ing into the world in a fam­i­ly, then obvi­ous­ly there was room for them, and extra work some­where in the farm­yard, in the field, in the sta­ble. And of course a place around the table. So the idea of being redun­dant, hav­ing no place in soci­ety, sim­ply did­n’t occur. 

Living in Information

The fram­ing of what we design is very impor­tant to how we go about it. We have not been fram­ing these things as con­texts. We’ve been fram­ing them as prod­ucts, ser­vices, and a whole oth­er series of terms that are— Tools, for exam­ple. And these are things that are most­ly trans­ac­tion­al. They’re not things that are meant to be inhabited.

Postcapitalism

Neoliberalism is bro­ken. The eco­nom­ic mod­el of the last thir­ty years. It worked for a bit, dragged the bot­tom two thirds of the world’s pop­u­la­tion up the income scale dra­mat­i­cal­ly, facil­i­tat­ed the tech rev­o­lu­tion. But it’s stopped working.

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.

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. 

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.

The Conversation #47 — Oliver Porter

To me…we all draw our sat­is­fac­tion from what we our­selves have been able to do with our lives. And if some­body, some gov­ern­ment or some­one else is just giv­ing to me, I’m not going to be a hap­py person.

Evgeny Morozov on the Kingdom of Geeks

There is this very bizarre alliance between world-changing geeks on the one hand and pol­i­cy­mak­ers who only care about out­comes. They no longer care about how those out­comes are arrived at. They have stripped pol­i­tics of all mean­ing. All they want is to get peo­ple to do the right thing. They don’t care why they do it.

Parag Khanna on the Ideal World

For most peo­ple on an indi­vid­ual lev­el most the time, their future still feels very dif­fer­ent from that of oth­er peo­ple. We live in a world, for exam­ple, of enor­mous income inequal­i­ty, right. So even though there is a glob­al econ­o­my, it cer­tain­ly does­n’t feel like one’s sort of day-to-day fate or des­tiny is linked to those of peo­ple around the world, even if it is in very invis­i­ble kinds of ways.

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