Yesterday, in a slightly wine-infused haze, I wrote to my favorite Instagram dogs. I hadn’t anticipated a response. They’re dogs. But their owner responded. After a shameless fangirl moment (these are proper celebrity pooches!), we had a brief back and forth exchange.

I told him how people on our online neighborhood platforms were offering dog walking services: primarily to help out those in high risk groups, but also, admittedly, to have some companionship. We exchanged a few more funny messages. I apologized to one of his dogs for misspelling his name. …

“Do you want your children to grow up to be Uber drivers for Chinese tourists?”

That was the opening question posed by an ethicist at Q Berlin, a conference on freedom and responsibility. This quickly segued into a doomsday scenario of AI weapons run amok and the dangers of universal suffering triggered by artificial consciousness.

Anyone with just a limited understanding of artificial intelligence most certainly left his talk with a palpable sense of dread. This can hardly be considered a responsible approach to the debate around AI.

And it is certainly not the tactic one would have expected from…

As we roll by ‘my uncle*’ points out the quarry.

“It’s filled with stones but there are never any lorries. That’s why we say the trolls are throwing them down from the mountain”.

This is a big part of the magic of Iceland. The way history, saga, Norse myth, and folklore weave together to tell the stories of people and places. How the lines between fact and fiction are blurred. Or perhaps just irrelevant.

The rest of the magic is of course Iceland itself.

If the world was indeed birthed from the giant Ymir through the cunning of Odin, then…

Check your rings!

Three of the cringe-worthiest words in my digitally-dictated “smart” life. It’s the reminder that pops up about midday if I haven’t progressed as far as predicted with my daily goals.

Even though it’s ultimately just measuring me against myself — how I’m faring today versus my average — it always feels a bit judgmental. Like my watch expects better of me. Like it knows that I’m not trying as hard as I could be. And though I know that just a few clicks would turn off all notifications, there is something deeply gratifying about complying. Like some…

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Whereas chit chat around the water cooler revolves around the inane: the weather, vacation plans, that new Netflix series. We reserve one of life’s most fraught questions for children, deeming it perfectly normal to pepper them for insight into their future professional aspirations.

For the most part — I hope — we do this for our own amusement. Children are working with a very narrow scope of knowledge about career paths: hence the ubiquity of would-be child astronauts, ballerinas, firefighters…So it can indeed be entertaining to delve into their brains…

It is with a sort of helpless resignation that we have spent so many decades bearing witness as imbalanced power, wealth, and race and gender dynamics have skewed access to our most fundamental basic rights: freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, jobs, and even a roof over our heads. And with economic disparity, racial profiling, and gender discrimination so intrinsic, we often forget to see them for what they are: the result of systematic biased decision-making stemming from centuries of inequality, racism, and misogyny.

So… ages of faulty data accumulated in the ‘data sets’ that have trained our human thinking.

…

Foreign language. Black and white. No-name cast. This is the perfect storm of descriptives to turn me off a film. But, Netflix matched it to me with a score in the 90s.

Although the online streaming behemoth is privy to all my dirty viewing secrets (full disclosure: superheroes and space wars), so am I. And I would not have opted for Roma of my own volition. But, Netflix was presuming to know something about me that not even I did. So I gave Roma a go. I was not disappointed.

Now I don’t profess to understand the inner magic behind…

Dear President Trump,

This might be difficult for you to imagine. As you putt around on your golf courses. As people in your administration rampantly abuse taxpayer dollars for unnecessarily lavish trips. As you play a real life game of Risk with one of the world’s most troublesome and unpredictable dictators.

Nevertheless, try to fathom a life in which everything has been stripped from you. Not just the luxuries. Your home, a means of transport, clean clothes. Compound that further. You have no electricity and limited means of communication. It is near impossible for you to contact your family and…