Everyday Chaos
05/14/2019 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM in Cambridge (United States of America)
The Internet and AI are not only changing the future, they're changing our ideas about how the future arises from the present. With this comes changes in some of our most basic and ancient strategies for surviving, managing, and thriving.
In his new book, Everyday Chaos, David Weinberger points to accepted ways we work on the Internet that in fact undo our old assumptions about how the future works: rather than attempting to anticipate what will happen and prepare for it, the Internet is training us to flourish by creating more and more unfathomable possibilities. The Net has also lowered the cost of operating without principles, hypotheses, or even hunches about what will work.
AI in the form of machine learning now is providing us with a model -- a model of models -- of how the future happens, with implications that range from how businesses make decisions to how we think about strategy, progress, explanations, morality, and even the nature of meaning itself.
These changes can be "metaphysically terrifying," Weinberger says, but ultimately are an evolutionary step of a Copernican magnitude.
About David
From the earliest days of the Web, David Weinberger has been a pioneering thought leader about the Internet’s effect on our lives, on our businesses, and most of all, on our ideas. He has contributed in a range of fields, from marketing to libraries to politics to journalism and more.
He has contributed in a remarkably wide range of ways as well: through books that explore the meaning of our new technology; as a writer for publications from Wiredand Scientific American to Harvard Business Review and even TV Guide; as an acclaimed keynote speaker around the world; a strategic marketing vice president and consultant; a teacher; an Internet adviser to presidential campaigns; an early social-networking entrepreneur; a strategic marketing consultant and VP; the codirector of the groundbreaking Harvard Library Innovation Lab; a writer-in-residence at a Google AI lab; a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy; a Franklin Fellow at the US State Department; and always a passionate advocate for an open internet.
About Joi
Joichi "Joi" Ito is an activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and scholar focusing on the ethics and governance of technology, tackling complex problems such as climate change, societal inequity and redesigning the systems that support scholarship and science. As director of the MIT Media Lab and a Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences, he supports researchers at the Media Lab to deploy design, science, and technology such AI, cryptography, and synthetic biology to transform society in substantial and positive ways.