Tag: technology

“Physics has seen some of its greatest breakthroughs result in some of our greatest tragedies,” says Radhika Dirks. And while carrying the burden of a post-nuclear physicist may be heavy, it’s not without its advantages. Namely, it allows Dirks to see things a little bit differently: “Unlike most people in [artificial intelligence], when I’m building AI, or quantum, or biotech, I dwell in these really difficult questions,” she explains, noting that it helps her identify where things are missing.

 

The way Dirks sees it, we have lost the link between physics and philosophy, and it's showing up in the technology we’re building today. “Science is nothing but applied philosophy,” Dirks says. Yet nearly all the innovations we’re seeing emerge from Silicon Valley have been made without a consideration of the big questions; without a consideration of meaning. It’s no wonder the dissonance between tech and humanity is so pronounced. As Dirks says, when science left the humanities, it appears to have left humanity too. With captivating storytelling, historical examples, and real-life parallels to today’s tech industry, Dirks shows us why it's so necessary to shift our thinking—for our progress, our well-being, and our society as a whole.

 

Watch her full talk below.

 

“For several years now, we've been living in a time of intense backlash against the technology industry,” writes Nicholas Thompson. The Cambridge Analytica scandal rocked a nation and raised difficult ethical questions, some coming from within the tech organizations themselves. Suddenly, everything was chaos, and Silicon Valley was to blame. “Antitrust law, disdained for decades, suddenly became exciting. Worries that had been playing as background music in society for years—online privacy, the fears of artificial intelligence taking jobs—began to crescendo. Ad targeting was redefined as surveillance capitalism. […] The reputation of an entire industry tanked, just as had happened eight years earlier to finance.”

 

It’s been a murky few years for software companies, to say the least. Because though they might operate in the digital realm, their actions still have consequences in the physical world, says Thompson. In order to move forward, we’ll have to come together—builders, users, people inside Silicon Valley—to fix the mess we’re in. “And that's what this issue is about: the builders who understand the consequences of their choices. It's about people who recognize the awesome responsibility of the technological powers bequeathed to us by our predecessors.”

 

Read the full article here.

 

To book speaker Nicholas Thompson for your next speaking engagement, contact The Lavin Agency and talk to a member of our sales team.

 

 

Barack Obama named The Age of Surveillance Capitalism one of his favorite books of 2019. It’s been called “an epoch-defining international bestseller,” (Guardian) and “…the rare book that we should trust to lead us down the long hard road of understanding,” (New York Times Book Review).  Shoshana Zuboff’s international bestseller is also one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2019, one of both the New Yorker’s and Bloomberg’s Best Books of 2019, and one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2019. Zuboff explores the dangerous era we’ve entered, where the price on private data is a serious threat to democracy, and ultimately, our shared humanity.

 

All of the books on Fast Company’s list “provide an opportunity to reflect on living life online and how this grand experiment has failed,” and perhaps none moreso than Zuboff’s and Marantz’s compelling, urgent, and timely contributions.

 

You can see Fast Company’s full list here.

 

To book technology speakers Andrew Marantz, and Shoshana Zuboff, contact their exclusive speakers bureau, The Lavin Agency.

Facebook invented one of the smartest business models in the history of the world—a platform that incentivizes users to give up their personal data, which is then used to target better, more effective advertising to them. “The story of Facebook, and the way that people think about privacy, and the way people worry about the targeted ad model, is that, from the beginning of Facebook, Facebook essentially expands the boundaries of what they can collect. And they often do it without the user’s knowing. And they’ll often say ‘we’re just collecting this much,’ but they actually collect a little bit further,” Nicholas Thompson explains. Initially, targeted ads were no cause for alarm; most people considered them better product recommendations and little else. But then Cambridge Analytica scandal happened. “It suddenly seemed like Facebook was selling all of our personal information to the Russians for the sake of disrupting democracy.”

 

And so came the backlash, coming in fresh off the heels of growing resentment towards Silicon Valley and Big Tech. How did Facebook find itself in such a position? And what is its true potential to disrupt Western democracy? Thompson notes, “[…] I’ve always wondered, on sort of a core philosophical level, whether the way the Facebook business model works, which is dividing people into ever smaller groups, helps foster a political system in which we are divided into ever smaller and more resentful groups.”

 

Listen to the full conversation here.

 

To book speaker Nicholas Thompson for your next speaking engagement, contact a sales representative from The Lavin Agency.

That book is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power—an international bestseller that explores an international problem. As our right to privacy erodes in tandem with technological development, it’s hard for regulators to keep up. Surveillance capitalism—a concept coined by Zuboff herself—defines the current age in which we’ve all opted into the commodification of our personal information.

 

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has been wildly acclaimed by The Wall Street Journal, praised in the New York Times in three separate features, and Naomi Klein has urged readers to read it “as an act of digital self-defense.” In her Guardian feature, Zuboff’s history and path to writing this vital work for the current conversation are explored; as are her theorems that have struck a timely cultural chord.

 

Zuboff’s book—and her fight for a more thoughtful digital revolution—is not just about our individual lives and minds. The new economic order of surveillance capitalism is shaping democracy anew—in ways that threaten our hard-fought freedoms like never before. From the Guardian: “Every time Zuboff speaks in public, she asks the audience: “What are the concerns that bring you here?” People call out words: privacy; dystopia; control; monopoly; manipulation; intrusion; exploitation; democracy; misinformation; fear; freedom; power; rebellion; slavery; resistance. Everywhere the words are virtually the same.”

 

Surveillance capitalism is encroaching worldwide, and Zuboff’s work is a vital force, urging us all to wake up and protect ourselves—from ourselves—before it’s too late.

 

To book speaker Shoshana Zuboff, contact her exclusive speakers bureau, The Lavin Agency.

 

 

“Silicon Valley now no longer believes that if you let everyone talk, the best ideas will come out. Now, they’re worried about toxicity,” Nick Thompson explains. Social networks may have enabled broader communication, but they have also led to greater extremes and less moderation. Ten years ago, we weren’t having this conversation; today, it’s a shift we feel compelled to examine, as our digital lives become increasingly important—rivalling even our real lives in their significance.

 

Yet the way we think, feel, and use technology changes significantly depending on our generation.“Babies and kids have a different relationship to technology,” says Thompson. “Kids who grow up with it have a different way of relating to it.” Leaders today need to understand that technology’s presence in our everyday lives will not only yield both positive and negative effects, but will change significantly depending on who you’re talking to.

 

To book speaker Nicholas Thompson for your next event, contact The Lavin Agency today.

 

There are a variety of reasons why mind-reading technology has captured our attention; some altruistic, some not. Regardless of the motive, the technology may be apart of our lives sooner than we think. And at  the moment, there are no safeguards to our private thoughts, even the most intimate.

 

“There’s a significant societal interest in being able to listen to the brain activity of, say, a trucker or a pilot,” says Nita Farahany, a Duke professor and scholar in the field of bioethics. “But we need space for mental reprieve. It’s fundamental to what it means to be a human. Governments are starting to adopt broad privacy legislation, and some of that may implicate when and if companies can track this information. This is data like any other type of data, but I don’t yet see governments focusing on brain data, in particular. It’s something we need to be thinking about.”

 

Farahany predicts the early adopters of mind-reading tech will be in healthcare, aviation, gaming and trucking, to name a few industries. Farahany, who works as the principal investigator at Duke University’s SLAP Lab, recently ran a study to determine how sensitive people considered their brain information. “Participants treated their Social Security number or phone conversations as most sensitive,” she explains. “People don’t yet understand both what’s possible with brain technology and then the negative implications if that information was accessible by others.”

 

You can read the full article here.

 

To book Nita Farahany for your next speaking event, contact The Lavin Agency, her exclusive speakers bureau.

Land of Giants, a podcast produced by Vox Media, explores today’s information age and the monolithic companies that dominate it. This season, the podcast is focusing its attention on Amazon: What is the disruptive influence of the e-commerce giant? And how is it changing our lives? The most recent episode covers the robot revolution, automation in the workforce, and what it means for human jobs and working conditions. Martin Ford—the McKinsey-winning author of Rise of the Robots—joins the conversation, addressing the topic of consumer responsibility.

 

“It’s a very hard challenge to get consumers to walk away from low cost and convenience because they’re concerned about what’s happening with workers,” Ford says. “Keep in mind that Amazon delivers enormous value. Your experience as a consumer today, relative to what it was ten or twenty years ago, is dramatically different because of Amazon, and it keeps getting better and better all the time.”

 

How we can continue to progress and optimize, without compromising on equality and fairness? The problem is already bad, and it will only get worse if we don’t address it, says Ford.

 

You can listen to the full podcast here.

 

To book Martin Ford or another Technology Speaker, contact a sales agent at The Lavin Agency for more information.

Rather than a full-on ban on certain tech features, psychologist Adam Alter suggests that we devote “money, time, attention [and] resources to understanding the problem.” The problem, of course, being that we’re devoting a considerable, perhaps worrisome, amount of our attention to our screens. And while some companies have begun to introduce new features that curb usage, Alter is not convinced that it’s enough: “I think they’re doing the very bare minimum they need to do to be able to convince people that they care about our well-being. I’m not totally convinced that they do. And that’s just because they’re part of a model that tries to make as much money as possible and that requires capturing our attention.”

 

While he acknowledges that we, as users, bear some personal responsibility when it comes to how much time we spend on our devices, Alter says the odds are stacked against us. “I don’t think it’s wrong to say that we all have some role to play as individual consumers. But there is really an army of people who are doing everything they can with considerable resources, with access to huge amounts of data, to ensure that we spend every spare minute on our phones. It’s not really a fair fight.”

 

To book speaker Adam Alter for your next event, reach out to a sales agent at The Lavin Agency today.

 

“We are now twice as likely to meet our partners online as we are through a friend,” shares Atlantic editor Derek Thompson on the Here & Now podcast. It’s fascinating, he says, because technology has successfully disrupted one of the oldest marketplaces in human history: “We have been meeting, mating, amd marrying other humans for 200,000 years, mostly through established networks of friends and family. Human history has seen an utter reversal [of that] in just the last decade.”

 

An activity that was once shared between members of a community has now become a solo act. The responsibility of finding a partner now lies on us, and our choices are filtered through an algorithm rather than a network of intimates. But how does an algorithm compare to trusted sources like family and friends? Thompson shares that we’re more likely to meet someone different than us through an app as opposed to our social network, especially when it comes to interracial dating. Evidence suggests that our social network is actually limiting the scope of the dating market for us by filtering people deemed too different.

 

“One of the real benefits of online dating is that it empowers individuals,” says Thompson. “It frees them from some of the biases […] of their social networks.”

 

You can listen to the full interview here.

 

 

 

 

WIRED Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson is the go-to authority on the world’s most important story—how science and tech are changing our lives. His most recent cover story details the scandals, backstabbing, resignations, reboots, record profits and time bombs that characterized Facebook’s 2018—“it’s ultimately a story about the biggest shifts ever to take place inside the world’s biggest social network.” 

 

A Synthetic Biologist, community organizer, musician, and photographer, Kong’s work at MIT and as a keynote speaker is informed by his mission to empower communities through STEM. Co-founder and managing faculty of “How to Grow (Almost) Anything,” an MIT course on synthetic biology, Kong also works to ‘culture hack’ biotech’s narrow public perception. He does this by connecting the discipline with diverse cultural languages, like hip-hop. His Biota Beats project uses a microbial record player to translate microbes from the human body into music.

 

A brilliant, polymathic proponent of STEM, the arts, and radical inclusivity, Kong is a funny, unambiguous speaker, grounding his talks in stories of people he’s worked with as a community organizer and instructor. Watch his appearance at a BioBricks Foundation Summit to get a taste of his natural, intelligent stage presence.