After a long so-called winter, artificial intelligence has recently made amazing gains. Tomaso Poggio, Director of MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, explains why this success is still a long way from the dystopian fears of robot overlords, but that the threat to jobs is real.
Psychiatrist, professor, and author David Greenfield, founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction, was one of the first medical professionals to recognize and study the addictive qualities of the Internet. He explains what we know, what it means, and what can be done.
Mathematician Cathy O’Neil shares her insider’s look at how algorithms are gaming our world, with terrible consequences for those who can least afford them.
Julie Brigham-Grette has been studying climate history for decades; she gives it to us straight about what’s happening in the Arctic with warming and sea-level rise.
Journalist and media critic Bill Powers wrote a bestselling book about stepping away from tech; now he’s on the inside trying to make tech better.
Narayan Liebenson, a guiding teacher at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, speaks to us about the benefits of mindfulness and attention. How might smart devices be impacting our ability to be present?
When Nicole Freedman became Boston’s first “bike czar,” the city had been rated worst in the country in bike friendliness by Bicycling Magazine. A decade later, it’s been in the top ten with a growing network of protected lanes and one of the nation’s first major bike-sharing programs. Freedman describes what it takes to change culture around transit and how everyone can benefit.
Danielle Allen is a University Professor and the director of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, a regular columnist for The Washington Post, and author of five books, including most recently Education and Equality. She spoke with us about the current emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, math), the challenges of technology in education, and what it takes to raise an engaged and self-actualized citizenry.
Tim Wu is a renowned scholar on our communications networks, having coined the phrase “net neutrality” and written extensively on the subject both inside and outside of government and academia, including the White House and Columbia University. His latest book, The Attention Merchants, is a history of advertising, and it’s not pretty. He spoke with us about our declining private spheres, the current state of the Internet, and the effects of what he calls The Cycle, as new communications technologies inevitably move from open to closed.
Are we in capitalism’s end days? University of Illinois Professor Robert McChesney thinks we might be, or at least we might need to be, if technology continues to displace workers and concentrate wealth. He is a long-time observer of the interplay between media, policy, economics, and society; he sat down with The Technoskeptic to discuss the ramifications of technological automation on our economic system and our democracy. Professor McChesney has written more than 20 books including Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. His latest, co-written with John Nichols, is People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.