There’s always something lurking around the corner

There’s always something ominous lurking around the corner and the corporate media (or some politician) will always be eager to point it out for us. After all, they need to get your attention, and we all know that bad news sells better than good news.

While I do think it’s occasionally beneficial to think about all the bad stuff that could happen to us, I don’t think it’s healthy to constantly worry about disastrous things. I hope the media would also adopt this philosophy.

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On the universality of UBI

our societies and cultures will have to change when there are fewer jobs available and in general less work for humans to perform. In order to avoid total chaos, new mechanisms are needed for redistributing the ever-increasing amount of wealth and prosperity our machines and algorithms will be producing. UBI could be a part of the puzzle, but I sincerely hope no-one thinks it’s a magic wand that’s going to solve everything. I also believe that the fairness problem needs to be addressed in one way or another, but I’m just not sure yet how.

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Labour Day thoughts on Automation and the Future of Work

To summarize, for a long time I have been very optimistic about technological innovations and about the future in general. I’ve often even described myself as a tech enthusiast and optimist. While that’s still largely true, I’ve come to share similar worries that Kevin Roose described in his book. Making the societal and political changes needed for enabling us to live good lives in the future will be a monumental challenge. One that I sincerely hope we will succeed in solving, but knowing how incredibly irrational humans occasionally can be, it’s not at all certain that we’ll be able to rise up to the challenge.

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A few thoughts on the AI Black Box problem

As we’re seeing more and more solutions around us leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), typically some form of machine learning (ML), many have begun to wonder how those solutions actually work. Especially when it comes to processes like medical diagnostics and credit scoring, people have started to ask the question: how did system X reach conclusion Y?

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How to cut through the AI hype

Unless you’ve been living on a desert island you can’t have avoided the recent hype around Artificial Intelligence, AI. Everybody is talking about the importance of it: business leaders, politicians, technologists, startup founders, and investors. Consequently almost all startup pitches contain some references to AI, and more or less all investors claim to be looking for AI opportunities.

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