Essays

Pavel Durov is not the world’s most sympathetic detainee. He is a billionaire tech founder whose messaging app, Telegram, has been a safe harbor for school shooters and neo-Nazis. Under his direction, Telegram has operated like a free-for-all, allowing all manner of content to flow through its servers– all

The internet has facilitated a new era of challenges and threats to human rights. While it has enabled e-commerce, it has exacerbated inequality. While it has democratized freedom of expression, it has given a megaphone to hate speech. While it has lowered barriers to access information, it has proliferated misinformation.

It’s critical to confront the reality that AI is just modern data science with one major promise (or peril): It’s our only hope of making sense of the vast quantities of unstructured data produced by ubiquitous sensors and surveillance. It is this underlying motivation that needs our attention.