Back to Navigation

Rob Reich Dialogue | Munk Debates

September 9, 2022

Rob Reich Dialogue

Do we need to reboot our relationship with technology?

Guests
Rob Reich

About this episode

Technology has quietly taken over our everyday lives and the idea of living with less, not more, technology is almost unimaginable. As a result, its growth and impacts are being felt well beyond the realms of work and play and it reshapes our politics, culture and ethics. The rapid and pervasive influence of technology over human society today raises important questions: are we still in control of technology, or are we letting it control us? How has Big Tech’s focus on the “optimization of everything” impacted our own sense of ourselves as agents of our future? Is there any merit in the fear of robots replacing workers, the erosion of privacy and disinformation? Just how worried should we be? And maybe most important of all, what could, or should, be done to reform technology in society today?

 


Share:

Guests

Rob Reich

"Technology in my view, in its worst aspects, flattens the radical diversity and pluralism of humans to our great detriment. Inefficient solutions to problems sometimes are better because they reflect the grand diversity of ends that human beings have long had."

Rob Reich

"Technology in my view, in its worst aspects, flattens the radical diversity and pluralism of humans to our great detriment. Inefficient solutions to problems sometimes are better because they reflect the grand diversity of ends that human beings have long had."

Professor of Political Science, director of the Center for Ethics in Society, co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and associate director of the Institute for Human-Centered AI. He is the author of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (with Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein) and Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (2018); Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (edited with Lucy Bernholz and Hélène Landemore, 2021). His teaching and writing these days focuses on ethics, policy, and technology.

Comments