Our latest Big Idea Initiative article, “Anticipate: Augmenting Thought Processes by Uncovering Hidden Assumptions Through AI,” explores how AI — particularly large language models — can become a powerful tool for deeper thinking and more innovative solutions.

What if…

• instead of replacing human creativity, AI could be used as a tool to enhance it?
• AI could help designers & decision-makers become aware of their own biases and mental models, leading to more objective and innovative solutions?
• AI could push the boundaries of the design process by encouraging reflection, challenging assumptions, and revealing those “unknown unknowns”?

Written by Niklas Muhs, strategic designer and researcher at the MIT Media Lab, this article argues that AI, particularly large language models, can help us do all of that. It's not about replacing human creativity, but rather enhancing it by providing new insights and perspectives.

Intrigued? Read the full article here.

Got questions, feedback, or just want to shoot the breeze? We’re all ears! Let us know :)

It’s been a couple of months since I last wrote, and what a time it has been. As the crises mount, our old assumptions about how the world works seem less certain than ever before.

Despite the challenges we face, there is hope on the horizon. As a collective humanity, we hold the means and potential to extend our intellect, thinking, and reasoning — and to amplify them. Through the creation of innovative tools and ideas, we can expand our understanding of the world, encourage collaboration, and address complex global crises. This is the driving force behind the inception of Big Idea Initiative.

A few weeks back, we hit the publish button on our first idea, Circles, and I’m excited to share it with you:

In a world of likes, shares, and fleeting attention spans, we often forget the sheer power of connecting with another human being. It’s those genuine sparks that can set off profound change. So, we asked ourselves: Can we imagine ways to restructure our digital experience to help us stay in touch with people, and to make those connections better and easier to maintain? Read all about it here.

Got questions, feedback, or just want to shoot the breeze? We’re all ears! If you’ve got the next big idea brewing in that genius brain of yours or fancy tweaking ours, give us a shout. We’re open to collaboration, improvement, and, of course, high-fives. 😀

But wait, there’s more! We’re currently in the process of brewing up more ideas to share with you soon, so stay tuned.And if you’re feeling inspired, check out how you can contribute your own stroke of genius here. For the full scoop on our grand vision, dive into the details here.

That was me a year ago.

Many have been asking me about the whereabouts of my letters, and I am truly grateful for your interest. Well, here I am.

For a long time, I’ve been writing and speaking about long-lasting, sustainable technological change that benefits all of humanity.

But as a friend of mine so aptly said: “That’s all well and good, Daniel. But what can I do now?”

And that’s how Big Idea Initiative came into being.

In this era of likes, shares, and fleeting attention, we often overlook the power of a single connection with another human being. It’s these genuine sparks that have the potential to ignite profound change.

Big Idea Initiative is a platform dedicated to fostering connections and sharing knowledge, thoughts, and ideas that support deep thinking and collaboration. We firmly believe that the world is not a zero-sum game; rather, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To truly serve the greater good, we must forge connections — between our knowledge, thoughts, ideas, and most importantly, with each other. By identifying and nurturing these connections, we can bring forth the big ideas our world desperately needs.

I would be thrilled to have you on board. Join us in creating a platform for innovative exchange. Let’s shape the big ideas our world needs. Together, we can build a better future.

And sometimes, all it takes is a spark.

As many of you know, I’ve been an airplane addict since childhood, and I’m an avid pilot. I recently had the chance to meet with the Chief R&D Officer of a major airline. Naturally, we started talking about airplanes and the role of computers in airplanes. We asked ourselves if there will ever be commercial self-flying airplanes. We agreed the answer is “almost never”.

Experience has shown that a computer can significantly increase, or guarantee, safety in familiar situations. The limiting factor is not computing power, which is getting better, but the development of decision-making scripts: even the best programming teams cannot foresee all possibilities. A computer simply lacks the ability to make unconventional decisions or deal with anything unfamiliar or out of the ordinary. This fundamental problem has not changed in the last thirty years.

The role of the pilot will become even more demanding in the future: in a few exceptional, and difficult to predict, situations, an innovative solution must be found very quickly. An individual pilot might encounter a situation like this only once in their career. Successful crash landings are a prime example of this.

In effect, the machine helps when help is not necessary and leaves us in the lurch when it is. Human beings remain the decisive safety factor in the cockpit, despite their faults. As the saying goes: The most important switch of the autopilot is the off-switch.

Not only is this true for airplanes, but many experts have come to the conclusion that there are narrow limits to so-called artificial intelligence. Even common sense can only be imitated by a computer to a very limited extent. A computer is not innovative — it can only measure and calculate. Artificial intuition — or the digital development of creative and new ideas — is still a long way off.

But we’ve been hearing a different story for decades. AI is still the rising hero, beating the world’s top humans at chess, Jeopardy, or Go. And many fear that AI will take our jobs, or even take over humanity itself.

Instead of bashing and criticizing, I want to take a different approach: After chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s computer Deep Blue, he wondered if a human could work together with a computer. He invented a new form of chess in which humans and computers cooperate, instead of contending with each other. Kasparov named this form of chess “advanced chess”.

One interesting insight came up in a tournament of advanced chess, where all kinds of contestants were invited, from amateurs to grandmasters, and from simple computers to the most powerful AIs, or combinations thereof. The match between a single human and a single computer was already decided, so it was clear that a human with a computer would beat a single human as well.

Interestingly, a human grandmaster with an older laptop was able to beat a world-class supercomputer. Many were certain that the grandmasters with powerful computers would prove superior, so it was a real surprise that an amateur playing with three weak computers won the tournament. The three computers were running three different chess programs, and when they disagreed on the next move, the amateur guided the computers to investigate those moves further.

It’s not enough to have a computer, or technology, or human culture alone. To make real progress, we need the co-evolution of technology (tools, inventions, and physical artifacts) and culture (our practices, skills, or methodologies). Real magic happens when technology and culture co-evolve and support each other.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The amateur chess player succeeded because he combined the strengths of three computers with skills he excelled at. In other words, he complemented, or augmented, his skillset.

Today’s computers can be used to make decisions in almost all aspects of life. They can flip coins in much more sophisticated ways than the most patient human beings. They can steer our lives, make business decisions, or fly airplanes. They may even be able to arrive at “correct” decisions, in some cases. We all know they can do that.

It’s not about what objectives, goals, and purposes can be delegated to computers. That would be the wrong question to ask. The relevant issues aren’t technological, they are ethical. They cannot be settled by asking questions beginning with “can”. The real question is not whether it can be done, but whether it is appropriate to delegate important questions to a machine.

The limits we apply to computers should be stated in terms of what they ought to achieve. It’s not a matter of what a computer can do, but what a computer ought to do. If we don’t have a way to make a computer intuitive or wise, we should not give computers tasks that demand wisdom.

There’s a monumental mismatch: we’ve never had more money for innovation, we’ve never had more knowledge about technology, and we’ve never had more anticipation about the next big thing. Yet at the same time we’re failing to solve some of the most fundamental questions on the planet.

In other words, we’re most interested in the present, not interested in the past at all, and only slightly interested in the future. On a societal level, this means that both resources and attention have tended to go towards companies, and prolific individuals, that live up to the hype, rather than towards solving urgent problems.

All this effort has somehow made us believe that things are okay, that everything is in hand, and that the big companies and influential individuals out there playing idols of the public will magically solve all the problems for us.

We live in a time in which we congratulate ourselves about being innovative, while only posing as a disruptive and creative society. But we are at a rushing standstill. We emphasize short-term competition over long-term collaboration. We think in terms of winning for ourselves, not in terms of what might be beneficial for society. We simply don’t have time for “big ideas”.

And yet “big ideas” are exactly what we need in the face of complex, global problems like climate change, inequality, and overpopulation.

But it doesn’t have to be so gloomy. I believe that most of the good ideas we need already exist. But they are pieces of an unfinished puzzle. You might have one piece of the solution, and someone in Papua New Guinea has another piece.

In fact, the road to big inventions and innovations was never linear. Our history has always been connected between disciplines, locations, and time. Just think about Gutenberg being a goldsmith, Alexander Graham Bell being a teacher for deaf people, or the Wright brothers being bicycle mechanics. Everything is connected. But if the link has not been noticed, nobody knows it’s there.

If those ideas find each other in ten years, they’ll have an impact, and make a difference in our lives, but if we can help those ideas find each other this year, the impact will be so much more. And what if those ideas never find each other?

The main issue is that most big ideas come from the gaps, and bridges, between our individual boxes of thinking: you’re working on an idea inside your box, and you don’t know what ideas might exist inside another box, where other people are working on their own ideas. Some might have exactly the same idea, or a different take on your idea, or the missing puzzle piece you didn’t realize your idea needed.

But many of our great inventions and innovations came into being in pretty erratic ways. And today’s urgent global problems can’t be solved by good intentions, or by waiting for the right ideas or people to meet.

We need to develop a set of core principles, to help us connect people and knowledge, to collaborate and co-create the foundations of big ideas.

One such practice just might be Doug Engelbart’s model “The ABCs of Organizational Improvement,” which argues that we should not only manage core activities (also known as “A activities” or “business as usual”), or improvements to A activities (“B activities” or “Improving how we do A”), but go one step further, and improve how we improve (“C activities”). This kind of meta-thinking is the shift from an incremental to an exponential improvement. And this is the key to helping humanity to invent powerful ideas and get better at getting better.

When we get fluent in powerful ideas, they are like adding new brain tissue that nature didn’t give us. If you think about it, we’re no smarter than our ancestors, but humanity’s cumulative knowledge has allowed us to expand on the tools and inventions of the past. We live in a world full of technology our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, even though it was built on the backs of their small innovations.

We are bound to the world in which we are born. Our capabilities are limited by the choices of our ancestors. What we do today informs how our children will live, innovate, and build for future generations.

But if we have learned one thing by looking back, it is that the world isn’t zero-sum: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It doesn’t have to be people versus people, or even people versus computers. Humanity is a group of individuals succeeding together, not despite their differences, but because of them.

Our future depends on us coming together to build those big ideas.

The computer was going to change everything. The smartphone was going to change everything. The internet was going to change everything. VR was going to change everything. AI was going to change everything. Blockchain was going to change everything. The self-driving car was going to change everything. And so on and so forth.

But computers did not change everything. Smartphones haven’t made us any smarter. VR did not create a better world. AI has not solved any of our complex global problems. Blockchain did not make the world fairer. Not for the lack of trying, of course.

The revolutionary potential of most technologies has always been vastly overhyped. The hype can be so pervasive that any amount of skepticism is seen as failing to recognize why the hype is deserved. It’s no longer about real transformational power, or change, or potential, but mostly about a kind of superficial pop culture, as Alan Kay so aptly said. And Joseph Weizenbaum, one of the founding fathers and leading critics of modern artificial intelligence, said:

The arrival of the Computer Revolution and the founding of the Computer Age have been announced many times. But if the triumph of a revolution is to be measured in terms of the profundity of the social revisions it entrained, then there has been no computer revolution.

One of the most essential elements of the human condition might be humility — knowing that you don’t know everything. We haven’t learned how to build humility into our technology or the culture that surrounds it. Computers don’t realize the limitations of the answers they give us, while many technologists don’t know what they don’t know, and aren’t willing to accept this reality.

These days, technological innovation is more of a fuss than an honest intention. It seems like everyone wants to have some macarons, but no one really knows what a macaron is, or how to make one. How can anyone want something so much without knowing what it is? Hype. Hype doesn't prepare someone to make macarons. Hype only baits with the idea of a macaron: by what the shape or smell of a macaron might be.

At moments when social progress seems stuck, technology can provide an appealing alternative. After all, real progress on serious social issues can be slow and filled with setbacks. At least that new smartphone model is so much better than the old model!

To a large extent, we are stuck in a rushing standstill. We think we’re innovating through technology — fixated by shiny new gadgets — or that technology will always be the solution. Instead, technology keeps us waiting: for the next device, the next app, the next update, or the technology that will finally fix that big problem. We experience technology moving through its iterations, and we feel like we are moving as well. And all the while, we’re stuck in the same world with the same problems that have always existed.

Of course, there have been many moments in our history when technology caused big, significant changes. But few of those changes were immediate; they were usually intertwined with a number of social, economic, or political changes as many historians have emphasized.

And we’re still waiting for the next big technological leap, which is surely just around the corner. This hopeful confidence keeps us sitting patiently while things remain mostly the same — or slowly get worse.

Faced with complex, global problems, we wait for the technological solution which eventually will save us all. A pandemic? Just use a tracing app. Global warming? Just buy an electric car. Racial injustice? Just post about it.

Most importantly, waiting for the next big thing just means that we don’t actually have to do much. We don’t need to act. We don’t need to change. We just need to wait, and technology will do it all for us.

I have a different suggestion: How about realizing that the future — our future — is a choice? We can choose which visions to pursue. We can choose what to fund and research. We can choose how we spend our time and careers.

Sustainable change does not simply happen. It doesn’t emerge spontaneously, pulling us helplessly in the right direction. Sustainable and effective change comes from long, hard thinking, expanding our understanding of the world, and long-term collaboration. Most importantly, it comes from inspired people who are able to spark meaningful change in thinking, collaborating, or problem-solving.

It isn’t enough to just extrapolate yesterday’s technology and then cram people into it. We need to be inspired by the untapped potential of augmenting our most human capabilities.

In many ways, we are better off than ever before. We’re healthier. We live longer. We have more technology, and we’re more efficient. We have easier access to food and shelter, and we have knowledge at our fingertips. It’s better to be alive now than it has been at any other point in human history. Yet we are also in the middle of a global crisis of our own creation.

You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed the recent tsunami of technology and innovation. The rise of robots and the dawn of superintelligence. Quantum computing, automation, and the Internet of Things. Cryptocurrency. Brain–machine interfacing. Autonomous vehicles, and even autonomous weapons.

Each of these is poised to bring transformative change to our society, and not only that — just imagine the change possible when we combine these emerging technologies. The way we work, trade, and even wage war will be unrecognizable from the methods of past generations. The mere existence of 5 billion cell phones bringing telecommunication to far-flung regions is evidence enough. Our world has been forever changed by a maturing technical and social revolution.

It’s interesting, though. Despite half a century spent figuring out how to integrate these great advances and advantages into society, we still experience a vast number of trivial issues.

When was the last time you attended a meeting that began without the presenter awkwardly struggling to get his or her presentation to show up on the screen? How many times has the video conferencing system failed on the first attempt? Have you struggled to find a friend’s updated email address or phone number? Or dealt with the hassle of sharing photos with friends after a joint trip?

And you may think these are small things. Why limit the vast possibilities that technology can bring us by nitpicking such negligible details?

But things don’t look any better if we move back to view the big picture. We must ask ourselves what computer technology has really brought us so far.

There’s been surprisingly little true progress. It’s as though we have leapt forward before fully understanding the implications of our tools. We aren’t using them with finesse or taking advantage of their true potential. Imagine strapping a rocket to a bicycle to get to our destination faster. The result is an out-of-control, barely-contained disaster, not unlike our current times.

We’re facing stark economic inequality fueled by the increasing power of large corporations, relentlessly harvesting our data. Politicians watch helplessly as tech companies break rules that the average citizen struggles to understand. Social platforms perpetuate the spread of fake news, undermining our trust in the free press. Our citizens are surveilled, our elections are skewed, and worker’s rights are almost nonexistent in the sharing economy. Our identities are being stolen. Fully-automated drones drop bombs on civilians. We are harassed and maligned online. We’re addicted to drugs, to speed, to change, to the idea of better/faster/more, and forgetting about the preservation of our humanity.

We’ve built this machine, yet the reality has turned out to be very different from what we expected.

This is not the new world that technologists promised. It’s the same world with the same problems that have always existed.

The only difference is that those problems are now hidden away inside algorithms, data, and code. We get Facebook’s view on the world, we get Google’s view, we get Twitter’s view. But we have no perspective, and no tools, to develop a view of our own.

We fetishize technology. We push each hype cycle to the absolute maximum, only to replace it with the next big thing when our current technology doesn’t deliver on its promise. We don’t adjust for system failures — we move on. And in moving on without assessing our shortcomings, we learn nothing.

We believe that newer technology is always the solution, that it can end our human social problems and leave a utopia powered by computers. We’ve somehow decided that computers are the pinnacle of technological achievement, the most important invention ever made, and perhaps the only thing we should consider when moving into the future.

We’ve missed something. There is too much technology and not enough humanity.

As Neil Postman puts it, a technology always has “a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others”. We are wrong to believe that any technological innovation has a one-sided, positive effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing. It is never a matter of either/or. It will always be both.

Technology changes how we think. It shapes us, just as we shape it. And the real question, which we must ask with urgency, is whether we will manage the machine or it will manage us.

Technology doesn’t solve humanity’s problems, and it’s naive to think it will. We can enable, augment, and improve with technology, but, in the end, humans must deal with human problems.

It is easy to get the impression that the current state of the computer world is the pinnacle of progress. At any tech conference you will find celebrations of innovative solutions, frameworks, or apps that generate, store, transform, or distribute data more conveniently, easier, and faster than ever. We celebrate technology for freeing us from our work, giving us more time with our families, making us more creative, getting us from A to B faster, and making the world a better place.

With all this recent tech development and innovation, shouldn’t we be living in an amazing world? We are automating more and more of our work, becoming wealthier and more connected. We keep trying to make everything faster, smoother, more compelling, even addicting.

So why do we always feel short on time, overwhelmed, and overworked? Why are people so connected, yet so isolated and lonely? Why are we enclosed in filtered news bubbles and social media feeds attuned to our ideological affinities, losing the ability to have our own opinions? Why are so many people worried about losing their jobs? Why is education in deep confusion about how to educate our children? Why are we spied upon by governments, big corporations, employers, and schools?

Let’s pose the question differently: When was the last time you felt real joy when using a computer?

The hard truth is that our immersion in technology is quietly reducing human interactions.

From an engineer’s mindset, human interaction is often perceived as complicated, inefficient, noisy, and slow. Part of making something frictionless is getting the human part out of the way. The consequences of this are dire, and visible for everyone.

Here are a few examples.

While waiting for the next train we stare at our devices and avoid talking to the person next to us, possibly missing out on a genuine connection.

We use online ordering and delivery services to avoid sitting alone in a restaurant, because we think that would be weird, and people might wonder why we don’t have any friends.

We want driverless cars, because they will eventually drive more safely than humans, which will also eliminate taxi, truck, and delivery drivers. Meanwhile ride-hailing apps tell the driver our address or preferred route, freeing us from needing to have a conversation with them.

We use online stores to avoid awkward conversations with shop assistants when we don’t want to buy an item after trying it on.

We use social media, where everybody seems to have a perfect life, in order to avoid the harsh conversations of real life, increasing envy and unhappiness at the same time.

We use video games and virtual reality to lose ourselves in virtual worlds where we don’t have to talk to our friends. And yes, some games allow you to interact with friends or strangers, but the interaction itself is still virtual.

We use robots in our factories, which means no personalities to deal with, no workers agitating for overtime, and no illnesses. No liability, healthcare, taxes, or social security to take care of.

We use online dating apps so we don’t have to learn or practice our dating skills, and don’t have to be in uncomfortable situations where yes means no or no means yes. We even seem to lose the ability to say “hi” to a stranger on the street or in a bar — just swipe right, and you’re a stud!

We get our movies, music, and books from digital media providers which offer algorithmic recommendations, so you don’t even have to ask your friends what music they like. Recommendation engines know what you like and will suggest the perfect match, or at least perfect for spending the weekend at home alone.

I’m sure the creators of these solutions only had our best interest in mind, and people really do benefit from technical solutions, so I’m not trying to pick on them. But there is a built-in assumption that whatever a computer can do, it should do. And we aren’t supposed to ask the purpose or limitations. So everyone uses computers — and is used by them — for purposes that seem to know no boundaries.

Instead of augmenting humans as imagined by the fathers of early personal computing, our computers have turned out to be mind-numbing consumption devices. What happened to the bicycle for the mind that Steve Jobs envisioned? We’ve forgotten that the computer is a tool that was meant to make our lives better, not to transform us into cogs in the machine.

The sad implication is that our technology is driving us apart. But humans don’t exist as segregated individuals. We’re social animals. We’re part of networks. Our random accidents and behaviors make life enjoyable. Instead, we are moving further away from technological solutions that could bring us together, away from each other as people, and away from humanity.

These days more than ever, people are desperate to have real connections. To feel heard, understood, cared about, and maybe even loved.

Why don’t we use our technologies to augment our most human capabilities, to make us better humans?

It’s hard to think about computers without some notion of applications. You use apps whenever you turn on a computer, use your phone, or surf the web.

There’s an app for writing essays and documents, one for sending messages to friends, one for organizing and editing photos, one for watching movies, one for readings news, one for finding plane flights or hotels, one for planning and tracking projects, and many more. For each and every activity you might want to do, or get done, there’s an app for that.

When you think about it, though, whenever you are trying to solve a problem, you’re not really using a single app to do it, but several. Writing an essay includes researching, reading and sharing. Booking your travels includes checking your calendar, looking at maps, comparing schedules and prices, and talking to the people you want to visit. Most activities include plenty of other tools and information.

But if we want to combine apps, we are forced to do it manually. And most apps come with a fixed range of actions, speaking no common language. They can’t be extended, composed, or combined with other applications without considerable effort.

The limitations we impose on applications are really limitations on what we are able to do in the real world. Like a stovepipe, we’re stuck with app-centric thinking.

When we’re working on a project, what we really want to have is a way to get every object and every kind of information you need for it, and then do things with them, and to them. Each project needs to connect to different people, contacts, notes, documents, calendars, to-do lists, and so on. Wish lists, photos, or calendars might be relevant in the context of your vacation. To-do lists, documents, and emails might be relevant in the context of work projects. Most importantly, there’s almost no way to add both relevant content and context to our existing data, such as combining our calendar with our address book or flight schedules.

And if you think about it, most people work on more than one project on any given day. So we’re stuck in a situation where we build our workplace up, stay inside these separate applications that are not able to integrate, and then tear everything down to switch to a different project. Operating systems and phones don’t really have a notion of the state of your work.

We have been conditioned to think this is how computers work — to get a new app for every new thing we want to do. But what truly matters to people is to be able to solve their problems and complete their tasks. It’s not in any way essential that problems and tasks are handled in the context of an application. Things don’t have to be as they are. The rigid boundaries between applications don’t need to be there. Just imagine if every app could be seamlessly extended, composed, or combined with the functions of other apps in any way we wanted.

This isn’t some kind of utopia I’m talking about here — it’s what programmers do all the time with their own systems. But if you look at the usual interaction of people with computers, we don’t see any of that. These days, phones and computers are more like more a shape sorting toy, where only specific actions are possible: The round block will only go in the circular hole.

Programmers don’t get this for free either. They have to navigate technical restrictions, system limitations, and other hocus-pocus that has nothing to do with what they’re working on or trying to express.

I imagine the computer as a canvas you can control. A playground where you can leverage the whole system to help you work on your idea or solve your problem. We would need to think in terms of the kinds of data we need for a project, rather than which individual apps we need to use.

The current approach limits our ability to invent more powerful ways to think about the world.

We need to use our computer as a system, combining multiple tools rather than collecting single-use apps, so we become better at thinking and problem solving. We need to get better at collaborating, so we can solve our problems collectively, by sharing our ideas and creations with each other. And we need to think in terms of systems, so we can stop reinventing the wheel with each new app, and begin to raise our collective intelligence.

There’s a video clip I keep coming back to. It’s part of a documentary, showing the reaction of legendary filmmaker and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki to a demonstration of AI-generated movements of a model of a human body, which — lacking any sense of self-preservation — drags itself along using its head as a foot.

After seeing the brief demo of this grotesque figure, Miyazaki pauses, saying that it reminds him of a friend of his with a disability so severe he can’t even high five: “Thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted.”

He expresses his negative feelings and disinterest in the demonstration, telling the creators, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

The stunning scene that follows is why I keep coming back to the clip. The technologists look crushed. And they try to explain their original goals: “This is just our experiment … We don’t mean to do anything by showing it to the world.”

But Miyazaki is crushed as well.

The ensuing suspense shows the clash of two worlds, and, in some ways, crystallizes the point. In the context of computer science, creating such a model is highly complicated and challenging. But the creators didn’t seem to have any clue that what they were doing would inflict any pain on other people outside their context.

From Miyazaki’s point of view, the technical achievement of this demonstration was overshadowed by a lack of compassion, empathy, and humanity that was a travesty to human existence.

And we see these kinds of clashes in computing every day. There’s a notion that computers are objective and unbiased, because they work with discrete numbers, formulas, and evaluation, distilling all questions and answers down to a 0 or 1. Some people believe that if we could just use computers properly, all the world’s problems would disappear. In other words, they think it’s just a problem of adapting technology.

But this point of view completely ignores the question of whether a computer, or its actions, result in good or bad outcomes for humans and society. We wrongly believe that the computer just exists as an entirely neutral technology. There is a built-in assumption that whatever a computer can do, it should do: that it is not our place to ask the purpose or impose limitations. And so everyone uses — and is used by — computers, for purposes that seem to know no boundaries.

But things do happen if boundaries are crossed. We have seen harm caused by tech companies for years. We have seen proof that they choose not to enforce boundaries and choose not to do less harm. And we see so many companies that know exactly what they’re doing, but they keep doing it anyway.

I think the view we have of computers is upside-down. We start with the instrument, thinking it must be good for something, and look for things that we think are well suited to the computer.

But how did we get to this point? For too many years, the computer has been a solution looking for a problem.

I think a much better approach would be to start the other way around — with the question of what we want to achieve in the first place. Then, we could identify some priorities, asking ourselves what the most urgent problems are. And once we identified the urgent problems, we can decide whether the computer would be useful in solving them.

But this is my personal utopia: the world doesn’t work this way, and maybe it never will. Instead of people thinking about advancing humanity, the potential of making quick money, or becoming rich and famous, is too alluring.

But I don’t really think the urgent ethical questions in computing are about machines becoming self-aware or taking over the world. Instead, they are about why and how people exploit each other, or introduce harm through computers and programs.

Maybe it’s time to create a guide to help us use computers in more appropriate ways — a code of ethics for computing. Many other professions have a code of ethics: doctors have their Hippocratic Oath, lawyers have their own professional oaths, and law enforcement officials swear to protect and serve the people.

A code of ethics would not make everything instantly better, but it would surely be better than “move fast and break things”.

As the computer embraces more and more of our world, we urgently need to have a shared culture of what is — and is not — an appropriate use of computers. Most importantly, we should be taught that power must not be divorced from accountability.