Netizen

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) A car moves faster than a human being, but that is not threat to humanity. Why is the same idea taken to artificial intelligence such a bad idea? Maybe some of our most confounding problems do need artificial intelligence help. That is Ray Kurzweil.

Whereas people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates are alarmist. They think artificial intelligence is more like a nuclear weapon. You don't want to go beyond a point. Stephen Hawking is also in this camp. You can split an atom, but do you want to?

These concerns go to other areas like gene editing.

Coming to the car itself, it has been a culprit that has us now facing what we call global warming. It is a real problem.

These are some existential debates.

Most human beings will be beat by a computer playing chess. What if that computer also had limbs? What if it could replicate? It could figure out all your moves before you made them. And then where are you?

There is obviously nee…

English: Dennis Crowley in Foursquare's New York office, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)English: Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of the social networking site Foursquare, delivering a briefing on "How Companies and Small Business are Using Social Media and Mobile Platforms to Bolster Business". (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I just read about FourSquare yesterday after a long gap. It popped up somewhere because it seems to have had a major haircut. Dennis The Person was not exactly known for haircuts. It is having to raise money at a seriously lower valuation, and it is even seeking to sell itself. It did not have to be this way. At one point it refused to be sold at a billion. I believe Yahoo came knocking.

Location is almost as central to the mobile lifestyle as the search box was to the web when it emerged. At some point I guess FourSquare stopped growing. Granted location has become much more crowded. But there is something to be said of the first mover advantage.

Location i…

A lot of people seem to struggle with the fact that this really is Mark's money, and he may do as he pleases, and he is choosing to serve the needy. The fact that this LLC might invest and grow the money only means it will have more money to give away. Also, I hope he makes smart investments in some of the next big things. The companies getting the investments will also flourish. How is that bad news?

Also, if he is smart enough to create Facebook, he is perhaps smart enough to do good, maybe smarter than most. I read his manifesto, if it can be called that, and I found it mind blowing in its breadth and directness. Senators don't talk like that. And they seldom even talk about global problems.

1% of 50 billion is still a neat 500 million. It is not like Zuck will be starving.

I was never a big fan of Gates until he put forth his foundation. I am also really liking Zuck's move. I hope he starts giving at least 20% of his time to his foundation. There is much to do. …

A letter to our daughter
While headlines often focus on what's wrong, in many ways the world is getting better. Health is improving. Poverty is shrinking. Knowledge is growing. People are connecting. Technological progress in every field means your life should be dramatically better than ours today. ..... Medicine has only been a real science for less than 100 years, and we've already seen complete cures for some diseases and good progress for others. As technology accelerates, we have a real shot at preventing, curing or managing all or most of the rest in the next 100 years. .... Today, most people die from five things -- heart disease, cancer, stroke, neurodegenerative and infectious diseases -- and we can make faster progress on these and other problems...... Once we recognize that your generation and your children's generation may not have to suffer from disease, we collectively have a responsibility to tilt our investments a bit more towards the future to make this…