A Pessimist’s Guide to the Future of Technology




Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl show

Summary: Since the rise of the web in the 1990s, technological skeptics have always faced resistance. To question the virtue and righteousness of tech, and especially computing, was seen as truculence, ignorance, or luddism. But today, the real downsides of tech, from fake news to data breaches to AI-operated courtrooms to energy-sucking bitcoin mines, have become both undeniable and somewhat obvious in retrospect. In light of this new technological realism, perhaps there is appetite for new ways to think about and plan for the future of technology, which anticipates what might go right and wrong once unproven tech mainstreams quickly. In this conversation, author and an award-winning game designer Dr. Ian Bogost considers a technology that has not yet mainstreamed—autonomous vehicles—as a test case on how we should think about the future of tech. More info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/luncheon/12/Bogost