Project 2019
Perhaps it has something to do with who was in the room. And perhaps even more with who wasn’t. We ask ourselves what we should do differently. And every year, we arrive at some version of what we already have. A little adjustment here. A rearrangement of words there. A newly packaged version of something familiar.
Bottom-up Activism
The battles that began in the 1970s produced “institutional innovations” across the landscape of academic science and industrial research. These innovations were not limited to top-down actors, but also infused bottom-up activism – and state and local experimentation – that effectively democratized science technology and the public interest in ways never envisioned (or even favored) by Vannevar Bush.
Technopolis’ Flat-Earther Problem
Something about the current debate over artificial intelligence felt remarkably familiar: the people building the most powerful systems are also among those warning most loudly that these systems could destroy us. Technological and policy elites are often exceptionally good at seeing two dimensions of change: how fast and in which direction. What they too often flatten is the third dimension: public value.
