Dystopias

‘The problem with many scientists is that they want to do things because they want to experiment. That is not a good enough rationale.’

‘The reason for doing these experiments is to understand more about early human development and come up with ways of curing serious diseases, and as a scientist I feel there is a moral imperative to pursue this research.

Human-animal hybrids are also created in other countries, many of which have little or no regulation.

The assumption that one is not being recorded in any real way, a standard in civilization for more or less all of history, is being overturned.

CEOs have become slaves to the PR department in a bizarre inversion of internal corporate checks and balances

“Your word against mine” can be a serious and drawn-out dispute, subject to all kinds of subjective judgments, loyalties, rights, and arguments; “Your word against my high-definition video” gives citizens and the vulnerable a bit more leverage.

It’s the boundaries between our various social identities that give us a sense of comfort and security: we can (and often do) project different parts of ourselves in different spaces.

When data about those roles is explicitly captured, boundaries blur at the point of analysis

“context switcher”

It may be that this future-blindness is simply the inescapable affliction of our modern world. Perhaps at this stage in civilization and technological advance, we enter into permanent and ceaseless future-blindness. Utopia, dystopia, and protopia all disappear. There is only the Blind Now. That is possible. But I am hoping that our current future-blindness is only a passing phase and that we will again begin to generate plausible visions of a desirable future, ones that are slightly better than today. These protopian visions won't be as thrilling as either dystopias or utopias, but they might be thrilling enough to aim towards.

machine learning research mirrors the way cryptography research developed around the middle of the 20th century. Much of the cutting edge research was done in secret, and we're only finding out now, 40 or 50 years later, what GCHQ or the NSA was doing back then. I'm hopeful that it won't take quite that long for Amazon or Google to tell us what they're thinking about today

All the components of the system are thought of as agents — effectively "smart" pieces of software

increased adaptability in the face of asynchronously arriving data