Latest from Greg Epstein
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So you want to talk about race in tech with Ijeoma Oluo
“A lot of people denigrate the value of talking about race and racism in technological spaces,” said Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race, which has surged to the top of the New York Times best sellers list in paperback nonfiction, two and a half years…
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Is tech socialism really on the rise?
Ultimately, it’s a question of human dignity. To what degree are people given the opportunity to realize their potential, to create themselves?
Featured Article
‘Capitalism generates a lot of wealth depending on the situation’
When you think about how a technology is designed, whether in Facebook or, let’s say, with industrial automation robots, engineers are not talking to the workers for obvious reasons.
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Justin Kan opens up (Part 2)
“I like to talk about things that I’m learning that I think are applicable to other people.”
Featured Article
Justin Kan opens up (Part 1)
In a free-wheeling interview, the serial entrepreneur covers a number of topics, including spirituality, stress and therapy.
Andrea Thomasz of Diligent Robotics and Prayag Narula of LeadGenius spoke to Greg Epstein at EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review.
In this interview, Greg Epstein talks to Meili Gupta, a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Walter Erike, an independent consultant and SAP Implementation Senior Manager.
Excerpts from conversations with Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of the MIT Technology Review, and Karen Hao, its artificial intelligence reporter.
Greg Epstein interviews economist David Autor and Susan Winterberg, an academic who studies business and ethics.
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Will the future of work be ethical?
Will tomorrow’s leaders, despite good and ethical intentions, ultimately use their high-tech tools to exploit others ever more efficiently, or to find a better path forward?
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‘People fix things. Tech doesn’t fix things.’
Veena Dubal is an unlikely star in the tech world. A scholar of labor practices regarding the taxi and ride-hailing industries and an Associate Professor at San Francisco’s U.C. Hastings College of the Law, her work on the ethics of the gig economy has been covered by the New York…
Media & Entertainment
Silicon Valley’s competing philosophies on tech ethics with The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz
“If Silicon Valley is going to keep telling itself the story that the only uses of their technology will be the most optimistic, the most hopeful, the most salubrious, the…
When Elizabeth Warren took on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook earlier this week, it was a low moment for what New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz calls “techno-utopianism.” That the progressive, populist…
Featured Article
TC’s Greg Epstein and Kate Clark talk mental health startups and the ‘Cult of the Founder’
Some weeks, tech ethics is in the news. And some weeks, it IS the news. This week was one of the latter. There were so many ethically fraught news stories about technology companies over these past few days, I had trouble keeping track of them all. So I’m delighted that…
Featured Article
‘Am I as brave as I think I am?’ MIT Media Lab student Arwa Mboya on the aftermath of a scandal
It’s been another hard week at MIT. Our campus has been divided by revelations of inappropriate fundraising, coverups, and the harboring of far too many tech geniuses who seemingly put their own interests and careers over the safety of women, among other marginalized groups. As a chaplain to students and…
Media & Entertainment
The MIT Media Lab controversy and getting back to ‘radical courage’, with Media Lab student Arwa Mboya
People win prestigious prizes in tech all the time, but there is something different about The Bold Prize. Unless you’ve been living under a literal or proverbial rock, you’ve probably…
The new fall semester is upon us, and at elite private colleges and universities, it’s hard to find a trendier major than Computer Science. It’s also becoming more common for…
If you’re like me, chances are good you just distractedly clicked on this article while scrolling through your feed in, or while waiting for, a Lyft. Maybe, like me, you…
The phrase “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” was originally meant sarcastically. It’s not actually physically possible to do — especially while wearing Allbirds and having just fallen off…
Sometimes it does seem the entire tech industry could use someone to talk to, like a good therapist or social worker. That might sound like an insult, but I mean…
As I wrote for TechCrunch recently, immigration is not an issue always associated with tech — not even when thinking about the ethics of technology, as I do here. So…
Biotech & Health
How Carl Pope helped drive a $500 million pledge to push the U.S. “Beyond Carbon” (Part 2)
Billionaire businessman and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg recently pledged to rapidly spend $500 million in a bid to push the U.S. “Beyond Carbon,” aiming to end this country’s use of coal…
Michael Bloomberg is an unrepentant capitalist who, as he says in his 2017 book A Climate of Hope, is “not exactly your stereotypical environmentalist.” Yet over the past decade, Bloomberg…
Media & Entertainment
Unraveling immigration politics and Silicon Valley ethics with Jaclyn Friedman
Immigration may not seem to be a tech issue. But for Americans with some personal or family experience with the idea of separated families and/or concentration camps, it can be…
AI
Climate change, AI and ethical leadership in ‘big tech’, with Amazon principal UX design lead Maren Costa
“I just want to be proud of the company that I work for,” Maren Costa told me recently. Costa is a Principal UX Design Lead at Amazon, for which she…
Nearly 8,000 Amazon employees, many in prestigious engineering and design roles, have recently signed a petition calling on Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors to dramatically shift the…
In this second of my two-part conversation on the ethics of technology with Jessica Powell, the former head of PR at Google turned author of the wonderful satirical novel, The…
Jessica Powell, Google’s former head of PR from 2012-2018 (years in which Google required a not-insignificant amount of PR leadership), is now a rock star writer whose 2018 debut book,…
Tech ethics can mean a lot of different things, but surely one of the most critical, unavoidable, and yet somehow still controversial propositions in the emerging field of ethics in…
“Feminism,” the writer and editor Marie Shear famously said in an often-misattributed quote, “is the radical notion that women are people.” The genius of this line, of course, is that…
