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We live in an interconnected world of volatility and disruption. Systems are linked in a web of dizzying and only partially visible complexity, and change in any one domain has a swift impact on many others. Join Andrew Zolli in a walking tour of emerging tools – such as next-generation satellite imagery, social media, and advanced analytics – that allow us to make sense o...
Pope Francis has praised the internet as "a gift from God," extolling the possibilities it provides for "encounter and solidarity." But on many days, the internet doesn't feel so much like a gift as a curse. Increased access to information through new technologies that connect us has changed the way we live – from our need to immediately respond to emails to our constant p...
Artificial intelligence is working its way deeper into our lives. Intelligent systems are reading and responding to human emotions, playing a critical role in medicine, and gathering vast amounts of data, often without us knowing. Does this kind of technology share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity? How can big tech companies and users of AI ste...
In the age of big data and the rise of the digital economy, no government agency plays a more central — or less understood — role than the mysterious National Security Agency. For years, the so-called Puzzle Palace was so secret that officials joked its acronym stood for “No Such Agency,” — until Edward Snowden published many of its biggest secrets online. Hear one of the...
A large, unsettling question looming among Washington regulators, lawmakers, and now state Attorney’s General across the US is whether the time has come to break up the big five: Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Apple. Have these powerful tech companies, once the darlings of the start-up community not twenty years past, become so dominant that they are stifling competiti...
COVID-19 vastly accelerated vaccine skepticism, such that even routine childhood immunizations, including shots that had largely eliminated measles, are now being questioned. Misinformation can be as contagious as disease, undermining faith in institutions, jeopardizing public health and safety, and distorting clinical decision making. Come watch a live demonstration that...
More and more, the decisions that rule our lives are made by algorithms. From the news we see in our feeds, to whether or not we qualify for a mortgage, to the rates we pay for health insurance. And while there are demonstrable biases against marginalized communities caused by algorithms, some say the machines are innocent — they’re just doing math. But as more systems rel...
A technological future where our brain waves could be monitored and our thoughts decoded and analyzed — sometimes against our will — is not as far away as we think. But our existing legal protections and conception of human rights around cognitive liberty are trailing innovations in neurotechnology. Brain hacking tools and devices could bring massive benefits, for people s...
Meet Neale Batra, a 2022 Aspen Ideas: Health Fellow who's on a mission make the field of epidemiology more efficient, collaborative, and equitable through open-source software and training resources.
Trust is fundamental to almost every action, relationship, and transaction in society, but we live in an era when technology is rapidly changing who and how we trust. The trust we used to place in traditional institutions such as governments, banks, media, and charities has hit an all-time low, and trust now flows horizontally through systems and networks that are as likel...
Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. Big tech companies may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity. Is it too late to change course and realize a human-centered future for a...
Computer systems don’t anticipate all the types of people who might use them. What are the innocuous, and more problematic, consequences of this?