Matt Haig (The Guardian:) I used to think social media was a force for good. Now the evidence says I was wrong (must read)

“Kurt Vonnegut said: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.” This seems especially true now we have reached a new stage of marketing where we are not just consumers, but also the thing consumed. If you have friends you only ever talk to on Facebook, your entire relationship with them is framed by commerce. When we willingly choose to become unpaid content providers, we commercialise ourselves. And we are encouraged to be obsessed with numbers (of followers, messages, comments, retweets, favourites), as if operating in a kind of friend economy, an emotional stock market where the stock is ourselves and where we are encouraged to weigh our worth against others.”

I used to think social media was a force for good. Now the evidence says I was wrong | Matt Haig
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/06/social-media-good-evidence-platforms-insecurities-health
via Instapaper


Read more

Video and slides from my keynote at The Economist Innovation Forum 2017 in Berlin: Technology, Business, Digital Ethics (updated)

Here is the deck, below (PDF 20MB), More about the event here.  Business Technology and Digital Ethics Gerd Leonhard @Economist Innovation Forum Berlin 2017 Public Deck Update August 18th 2017: here is the entire video (presentation and interview with Tom Standage).    Note: you can download audio-only, MP3 versions of most of my talks via … Continue reading "Video and slides from my keynote at The Economist Innovation Forum 2017 in Berlin: Technology, Business, Digital Ethics (updated)"

Read more

CBSi / CNet just published a nice short video with me speaking about the gigabit society and human purpose

Read more

Technology is increasingly cheating the world (not just ‘eating’ it as Mark Andreessen likes to say)

  SaveSave SaveSave

Read more

We’re spending so much time trying to become robots that we’re forgetting how to be human (Scott Hartley via qz.com)

Totally my topic ;)

"The drumbeat of science, technology, engineering, and math has picked up tempo, but a crisis of culture has emerged from its cadence. As we embark ever more aggressively on the path to master machines, we are forgetting the very foundations of what it means to be human.”

We’re spending so much time trying to become robots that we’re forgetting how to be human
https://qz.com/1070296/were-spending-so-much-time-trying-to-become-robots-that-were-forgetting-how-to-be-human/
via Instapaper

Read more