Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern Commencement Address

If manipulative bots and inscrutable algorithms come to dominate the public conversation, this could cause democratic debate to collapse exactly when we need it most. Just when we must make momentous decisions about fast-evolving new technologies, the public sphere will be flooded by computer-generated fake news, citizens will not be able to tell w

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Now, though, I realize that this confusion stems from making the same mistake I did in that old analysis of Facebook: I was looking to the real world as a guide to understanding the Internet, when it was in fact inevitable that the Internet would, over time, come to impact the real world. Some of that impact will be fleeting, like many of the prote... See more

Reflecting on the Myanmar tragedy, Pwint Htun wrote to me in July 2023, “I naively used to believe that social media could elevate human consciousness and spread the perspective of common humanity through interconnected pre-frontal cortexes in billions of human beings. What I realize is that the social media companies are not incentivized to interc

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I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless, i... See more