(The following 3 paragraphs are taken word for word from the About the Author page on aibluedot.com.)
My career took me through Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Software Engineering, and more recently, Data Science. Without me planning for it, it turned out that all these threads converged naturally into a toolbox for designing and implementing large Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. When you work on these AI systems and see their power, some questions start popping up. One of them was the question of identity. If your combined digital twin (= the as-of-now-idealized conflict-free aggregation of all the information available about you online, through Facebook, Google, Amazon, banks, credit agencies, 23andme, medical records, Social Security, etc.) knows more about you than yourself, it seems logical that the identity of this digital twin has to be secure and it has to be under your control. Not under a control which is spread between many corporations and government agencies. And this is when my alarms went off.
In this website I am trying to bring a few threads from my work experience in AI together. I am kind of hopeful and apprehensive at the same time about the whole thing. AI is a different kind of technology, no parallels with past technologies seem to do it justice; it has unprecedented upside and downside potentials. Undoubtedly, that stark difference between the up and the down will push us into the voting booth. These days AI is mostly framed in the media as a sort of next level of robotic prowess. Robots are a small concern of mine, my concern is with more powerful forms of AI, housed in large data centers around the world and working on large graph data about people. You will have to read some of the articles to see what I mean by that.
Most of the material I present here comes from rough, sometimes technical, other times more philosophical, notes taken while I was working on strictly technical AI projects. Those original notes were dry, and they were not much fun to navigate through. So I began structuring them as a website, because a website lights up the words with visual and auditory information, adding playfulness to the subject and easing the digestion. Then I began thinking of making the notes available to colleagues, relatives, and friends, so I toned down my personal opinions and rewrote the entire material in a more popular, less technical style. As I was musing about putting those notes online, the topics and the connections between them took a life of their own; I began to get more creative and inserted music videos, and some eye-candy scripts, in order to provide a pause, my wish being to make reading the articles more fun and accessible (even for myself), not just a bunch of explanations. I don't aim to be right, and many times I insert opposing viewpoints, even points of view I disagree with; I aim to provoke the reader.
