To be a Technologist is to be Human — Letters to a Young Technologist

And since technology is not value neutral, to be a technologist is to be inherently opinionated about how the world ought to be. Each act of creation is a statement about one particular means to an end being the best possible means. As Saffron Huang writes, “[b]ringing something into existence is in fact endorsing that thing itself. As we hurtle al... See more

The first step is to understand the fundamental difference between humans and AIs. We are analog, chemical beings, with emotions and feelings. Compared with machines, we think slowly—and we act too fast, failing to consider the long-term consequences of our behavior (which AI can help predict). So we should not compete with AI; we should use it. At... See more

If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag everythin... See more

The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumpt

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The first step is to understand the fundamental difference between humans and AIs. We are analog, chemical beings, with emotions and feelings. Compared with machines, we think slowly—and we act too fast, failing to consider the long-term consequences of our behavior (which AI can help predict). So we should not compete with AI; we should use it. At... See more