David Weinberger and Beautiful Particulars

How AI’s Attention to the Smallest of Differences is Reshaping Our Biggest Ideas

David Weinberger is a writer and pioneer who has never stopped learning, and never stopped sharing what he learns with us. He is is a senior researcher at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

David Weinberger talked with me about his new book, Beautiful Particulars. The subtitle is How AI’s Attention to the Smallest of Differences is Reshaping Our Biggest Ideas. The success of AI reveals the truth and power of the small differences, the particulars that hold us apart so we can hold ourselves together and that make our world possible. His ideas, based on research, are thought-provoking and educational.

From the Cluetrain Manifesto in 2001, to Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility in 2019, and now to Beautiful Particulars, his books have helped shape many people’s ideas about our lives.

I interviewed him over 2 years ago. You can check that out here.

The Podcast (Audio)

Shorts – coming soon

The Transcript (Podcast version)

Setting the stage

A thinking partner

Too early to predict

Beautiful Particulars. Why the title and sub title?

The bigness and the smallness

We in the west – at the peak of technology

How does AI work?

Based around rules and principles and generalizations

Patterns not knowledge

Particular is a thing in its differences

The voice of particulars at least is being heard now

Fairness seems so simple

AI can be very biased

How are we training for success?

Success and relationships with others

Dimensions for AI

What is morality? Human caring.

Telling a lie or maintaining a principle?

Ethics of caring, particulars and the importance of relationships

Machines know nothing about the world.

Writing? A permanent record to build on.

Conversational AI

A thinking partner to explore new fields, an open invitation to curiosity

Can become a thinking partner who will make it so easy to think together that you’ll be able to explore and to explain things

Risks? Dangers of a mainstream.

Wikipedia and conversational knowledge takes us to the source

AI conversations is where the future is going for knowing

How David Weinberger and the Future: Ethical dilemmas to come?

Younger generation better than us?

Optimistic or pessimistic?

What is going to come after this book?

A big disclosure!