This is the first episode of my new video series entitled ‘conversations with Gerd’. This one explains what my new book is all about, in around 2 minutes :) 

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“The dilemma is, of course, that we don’t want to hamper or stop the progress of technology (even if we could) but we certainly should make sure that all that technology still serves us i.e. that it still contributes to human flourishing rather than its own. We will therefore need a pretty ingenious mix of precaution and proaction (a good chunk of my book is about that, too). We will need wisdom not just information or knowledge…”

A nice podcast covering some of the key topics in the book

Hard-hitting stuff such as: “technology promised to set us free. Instead it has trained us to withdraw from the world into distraction and dependency”  5*

Contemplate this, via Noah: “Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data. This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it…”  (hopefully the FT’s magnificent paywall will actually allow you to read this:)  5*

“The technical potential for automation differs dramatically across sectors and activities” Good resource, even though I’m not sure I’d agree with all of it…

Loads of things I highlighted in this one:) 5*

Vivek makes a lot of good points here - He’s one to follow! 4*

The good old trolley problem revisited

Governments have much to gain from applying algorithms to public policy, but controversies loom…  4*

Huge list… don’t read this before going to bed!

Give me a few more weeks to find an answer to this question:)

A big topic on my new techvshuman blog

“The smart city is, to many urban thinkers, just a buzzphrase that has outlived its usefulness: ‘the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people’. So why did that happen – and what’s coming in its place…”

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Never a boring moment ;)