Joi Ito's Web

Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

Conversation with President Obama for November 2016 WIRED Magazine PhotologConversation with President Obama for November 2016 WIRED MagazineMon, Sep 12, 10:32 UTC

The "there goes the neighborhood" Law »

Joi
Sep 14, 2016 - 16:28 UTC »

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There seems to be some sort of general rule that technologies and systems like conversations on the Internet, the US democracy (and its capture by powerful financial interests), the Arab Spring movement and many other things that were wonderfully optimistic and positive at the beginning seem to begin to regress and fail as they scale or age. Most of these systems seem to evolve into systems that are resistant to redesign and overthrow as they adapt like some sophisticated virus or cancer. It's related to but harder to fix than the tragedy of the commons.

I want to write a longer post trying to understand this trend/effect, but I was curious about whether there was some work already in understanding this effect and whether there was already a name for this idea. If not, what we should call it, assuming people agree that it's a "thing"?

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Conversation with Adafruit »

Joi
Sep 13, 2016 - 18:38 UTC »

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I recently visited and had a conversation with Limor "Lady Ada" Fried and Phil Torrone of Adafruit. I first met them about ten years ago at SxSW.

Limor is an MIT grad that we're super-proud of and Phil is an amazing pioneer in communications, hacking and many other things. Phil and Limor are two of my most favorite people and I aways get giddy just getting a chance to hang out with them. We discussed making, electronics, business, manufacturing, hacking, live video and more.

They've been doing live video daily for the last 10 years or so and are real pioneers in this medium as well. We used their setup to stream the video to Facebook Live and Periscope and posted the recordings on YouTube and the audio on SoundCloud and iTunes.

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Conversation with Seth Godin »

Joi
Sep 13, 2016 - 18:32 UTC »

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Seth Godin has taught me so much about communications, leadership, publishing and life that I thought that it was important to stream my conversation with Seth. As usual, it was a great conversation.

Seth is on the Media Lab Advisory Council.

I streamed it to Facebook Live and posted the video to YouTube and audio to SoundCloud and iTunes.

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Conversation with Danny Hillis »

Joi
Sep 13, 2016 - 18:12 UTC »

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Danny Hillis is the inventor of the Connection Machine, Co-Founder of the Long Now Foundation and visiting professor at the Media Lab. We were at a dinner recently where Danny asserted that the world could be simulated by a computer. I asked him to come to my office so I could extract this idea from him into a video. We talked about the ability to simulate the universe digitally which obviously leads into the future of artificial intelligence, quantum physics, "why are we here" and lots of other interesting questions. Apologies for the crappy sound and video. My default...

Conversation with Bob Langer »

Joi
Sep 13, 2016 - 17:53 UTC »

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Bob is the most cited engineer in the history of the world. He is an MIT Institute Professor (there are usually only 12). He is also (lucky for me), a friend and a great mentor of mine since I met him in 2013 at my first Red Sox game with David Lucchino who introduced us and invited us to the game. Bob is a great example and mentor for so many people. I recently got a chance to catch up with him and hear about his story and talk about things like peer review and the future of science....

Conversation with Sultan Al-Qassemi »

Joi
Sep 13, 2016 - 17:40 UTC »

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Sultan is the most interesting person I know in the United Arab Emirates. I met him in 2010 or so, soon after I had moved to Dubai. He had just been asked to "take a break" from his job as a journalist at The National, the main national newspaper, for being controversial. I helped him get started on Twitter and he taught me about the culture and politics of region. He is now a Director's Fellow at the Media Lab and a good friend and advisor. I recently had the opportunity to catch up with him and get an...

Conversation with Julia Reda, MEP and Pirate Party of Germany »

Joi
Sep 13, 2016 - 17:23 UTC »

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I learned about Julia Reda reading Kaz Taira's blog post about her visit to Japan for a Movements for Internet Active Users (MIAU) meeting. Julia Reda is a Member of the European Parliament representing Germany, and she also serves as a Vice-President of the Greens/EFA group, president of the Young Pirates of Europe and a member of the Pirate Party of Germany. She is was the rapporteur of the Parliament's review of 2001's Copyright Directive. We set a Skype call and some of the EU's secret conversations about copyright leaked just as the call was starting so we used...

Conversation with Daiko Matsuyama and The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi »

Joi
Sep 13, 2016 - 17:14 UTC »

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Daiko Matsuyama is the Deputy Head Priest of the Taizoin Zen Buddhist Temple. Tenzin Priyadarshi is the president and CEO of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT and Director of the Ethics Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. The three of us are all friends but had never had met together so we decided to try a 3-way Skype streamed on Facebook Live to talk about Daiko's new book he was asking me to blurb. Unfortunately, the book is only in Japanese so far. We talked about meditation, Zen, the mindfulness movement and Buddhism....

Conversation with Martin Nowak »

Joi
Sep 13, 2016 - 17:05 UTC »

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Martin Nowak runs the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard. At a recent meeting at his Lab, I heard him describe the history of life on earth in fascinating way using evolutionary dynamics. At another meeting over dinner, Danny Hillis and he disagreed on whether you could model the universe on a Turing machine - in other words, can we simulate our "run" our brains or the universe digitally. I decided to ask Martin over to my house to see if I could extract these two stories. I streamed the conversation on Facebook Live and tried to clean it...

Society in the Loop Artificial Intelligence »

Joi
Jun 23, 2016 - 20:37 UTC »

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Photo by wp paarz via Flickr - CC BY-SA Iyad Rahwan was the first person I heard use the term society-in-the-loop machine learning. He was describing his work which was just published in Science, on polling the public through an online test to find out how they felt about various decisions people would want a self-driving car to make - a modern version of what philosophers call "The Trolley Problem." The idea was that by understanding the priorities and values of the public, we could train machines to behave in ways that the society would consider ethical. We might...

Credit for Help on Blog Posts »

Joi
Jun 18, 2016 - 21:59 UTC »

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Copyright xkcd CC BY-NC Back when I first started blogging, the standard post took about 5 min and was usually written in a hurry after I thought of something to say in the shower. If it had mistakes, I'd add/edit/reblog any fixes. As my post have gotten longer and the institutions affected by my posts have gotten bigger, fussier and more necessary to protect - I've started becoming a bit more careful about what I say and how I say it. Instead of blog first, think later - agile blogging - I now have a process that feel a...

The Fintech Bubble »

Joi
Jun 14, 2016 - 19:05 UTC »

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Photo by Martin Thomas via Flickr - CC-BY In 2015, I wrote a blog post about how I thought that Bitcoin was similar in many ways to the Internet. The metaphor that I used was that Bitcoin was like email - the first killer app - and that the Bitcoin Blockchain was like The Internet - the infrastructure that was deployed to support it but that could be used for so many other things. I suggested that The Blockchain was to finance and law what the Internet was to media and advertising. I still believe it is true, but...

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