It is a weird time to be an AI Ethicist. Last Autumn, I began a part-time M.Phil. at the University of Cambridge’s prestigious AI Ethics & Society program, joining its second cohort. Since then, my social interactions have been colored by unsolicited questions, advice, and dismissals about everything related to…

Notes on a New Senator, News Morale, and Emotional Clarity. — On Wednesday, an astronaut was sworn into Congress. To me, this felt like a big deal; sending a man of science into a group that has spent more than a year denying empirical reality and exploiting opportunities to profit from it. So, we have an astronaut in Congress. What’s next…

How Platforms are Redefining UI, UX, and Content Strategy — With the new normal of today’s e-commerce and endless streaming, we may feel that there is too much choice. Yet, it seems like the right choice often eludes us. Those who research “choice” have found that satisfying a checklist has little to do with what we really want. …

Investigating the Claims of Big Tech — The grand premise of innovation is that everyone benefits from it: technology not only yields great opportunity; it constructs great equality. The image of innovation is a redemptive one — but for whom? Originally published by The Republic on March 6, 2020. 15 years ago, then-senator, Barack Obama, addressed a…

Big Tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, exhibit a new stage of corporate power. These organizations are so large, our views on them are inconsequential - they have effectively become too big to like. — Originally published by The Republic on August 20, 2019. ‘I don’t know why. They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.’ You may be surprised that this message was written by Mark Zuckerberg during his Harvard University years. He was speaking of his classmates who were Facebook’s first users. Zuckerberg would become the…

Between America’s Blackness and Whiteness — Originally published by The Republic on March 1, 2019. How would one describe America now? How could one? To do so is as much an exercise in contradiction as self-incrimination. From which stories, which facts, which heroes and villains should the collective American story be narrated? Where does truth reside…

Election season means that zombies resurface. Founding fathers and past luminaries are brought back to life, spoken on behalf of, and turn in their graves, apparently due to the state of our politics. This according to political pundits hoping to score some points for their party from the grave. There…

Originally published in The Republic on August 12, 2017. In 1958, as a senator in the United States, John F. Kennedy published the book, A Nation of Immigrants. His brother, Robert F. Kennedy, who later became Attorney General, wrote a foreword to the book. In it, he reflected, “Our attitude…

Originally published on November 8, 2016. American mythologist Joseph Campbell had once said, “Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.” But, abnormal public frustration about this year’s election campaign suggests that “public nightmare” proves a better description. …