Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley.
My homeland of Belarus is an unlikely place for an Internet revolution. The country, controlled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, was once described by Condoleezza Rice as 'the last outpost of tyranny in Europe.'
Look at something like cooking. Now, you would hear a lot about smart kitchens and augmented kitchens. And what do those smart kitchens actually do? They police what's happening inside the kitchen. They have cameras that distinguish ingredients one from each other and that tell you that shouldn't mix this ingredient with another ingredient.
My fear is that many institutions will eventually alter how they treat people who refuse to self-track. There are all sorts of political and moral implications here, and I'm not sure that we have grappled with any of them.
If we don't like rent control, we ought to oppose it on political and social grounds - and not just by arguing that, thanks to smartphones and social networks, we can create new, more efficient markets for matching short-term renters with tenants.
A faithful lifehacker would use technology to avoid dead time and move on to the entertaining, more gratifying activities as soon as possible.
I want my government to do something about my privacy - I don't want to just do it on my own.
Cybercriminals are usually driven by profit, while cyberterrorists are driven by ideology.
Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.
Cyberattacks have become a permanent fixture on the international scene because they have become easy and cheap to launch. Basic computer literacy and a modest budget can go a long way toward invading a country's cyberspace.
Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of 'open government'; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats.
Faster roads are not always safer roads - and virtually all societies, democratic or authoritarian, prefer safety over speed, even if many of their citizens enjoy fast driving.
For all its shortcomings, Wikipedia does have strong governance and deliberative mechanisms; anyone who has ever followed discussions on Wikipedia's mailing lists will confirm that its moderators and administrators openly discuss controversial issues on a regular basis.
For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.
If China's expansion into Africa and Russia's into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley's ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.
Revolution may not be pro-Western or democratic.
Search without Google is like social networking without Facebook: unimaginable.
The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes.
When it is about technology, there is this tendency to just reject all criticism as being anti-technological and anti-modern. I think this is very unhealthy.
We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy.
Universities ought to be aware of the degree they would want to accept funding from governments like China to work on, say, face recognition technology.
This is the real tragedy of America's 'Internet freedom agenda': It's going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.
Much of the real computer talent today is concentrated in the private sector.
Most other documents leaked to WikiLeaks do not carry the same explosive potential as candid cables written by American diplomats.
Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.
