Full Q&A: Y Combinator’s Sam Altman and Recode’s Kara Swisher discuss tech ethics, addiction and Facebook

Their conversation, moderated by the bars owner Manny Yekutiel, touched on the diversity of Silicon Valleys employees, the future of artificial intelligence, whether Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should fire himself and much more.

You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts and Overcast.

For those in the audience that havent been to conversations with you already and havent met you, talk a little bit about the utopia that the early technologists were thinking about when they thought about how technology and the World Wide Web would interact with politics.

And so you imagine that people had great thoughtfulness towards what was gonna happen or the implications, and they absolutely did not.

And wasnt there this kind of undercurrent of folks who thought of technology as a way to break down the systems of power?

Because part of it was this feeling that the Russians co-opted our technology in order to make it so that Donald Trump would win, right?

He had done some of the early digital stuff for Howard Dean, which was effective initially, but the problem was not everybody had a cellphone, not everybody was online, and things like that.

Because one of the things thats interesting if you think about it is, for much of the 20th century, most of the media outlets were liberal; were liberal or left-center, center-left, centrist, but certainly not conservative. And the right-wing did not have a place to talk until online, and so they got very good at it very early because they were the out-of-power people.And if you just get out and meet very different people with even a little bit of an open mind, your biology will take over a lot of the rest.

Original article
Author: Eric Johnson

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