. . . you achieved the best ever score for a plenary speaker at our event--a staggering 4.91 out of 5.0 based on 100 responses. In fact, quite a few of the respondents wanted to give you 6 out of 5 (but we had to mark their scores down to 5/5)!
David Weinberger
Expert in Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, and Ethics Related to Policy and Use
Fee Range
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Boston, Massachusetts, United States
David Weinberger
Biography
David Weinberger anticipates tomorrow's consequences from today's technology in his long-time role as fellow, senior researcher, and Advisory Board member at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. A prolific thinker and author originally trained in philosophy, David is known as a visionary for tech trends shaping our world, our businesses, and how we think.
Now David turns his watchful eye towards artificial intelligence and the ethical issues AI poses for business as well as life. He points to the life-changing positives of AI, as long as everyone recognizes and addresses the parallel risks. His recent studies extend to the significance of chatbots, not only in how we work and communicate, but also in what we consider knowledge, the importance of creativity, and even what humans believe makes us special.
Chatbots are sentence generators, not truth machines. They know literally nothing, spewing seemingly plausible sentences without attention to meaning or reference. Currently the most visible tip of AI, chatbots are happening. Whether for better or worse depends on the decisions we make now.
A genius in foretelling the impacts of innovation emerged in David's iconic book, The Cluetrain Manifesto. During the earliest days of the internet, he predicted web-based community spaces long before Facebook and the explosion of social media. In his most recent book, the award-winning Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We're Thriving in a New World of Possibility, David offered strategies for managing our times amped up by intricate systems.
David's reach continues through affiliations with leading centers for research excellence—Harvard, MIT, as well as top tech companies. His ideas have been showcased in the New York Times, Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, the Economist, The Atlantic, Wired, NPR, and hundreds more. As a Franklin Fellow at the US State Department, he worked to advance digital applications in diplomatic matters. Additional achievements include the Harvard Shorenstein journalism fellowship and multiple writing awards.
Using engaging wit and easy humor, David delivers dynamic and entertaining presentations plus hands-on advice for navigating technology. Expert at discussing fresh perspectives from breakthrough discoveries, his insights emerge based on real-world experience across the board, from industry giants to startups. By coupling complex thoughts with clear understanding, David brings memorable lessons to audiences and pulls the future closer to our grasp.
David Weinberger
Featured Keynote Programs
AI and Ethics
While AI raises important ethical issues that business must take seriously, in this one-of-a-kind workshop David has business managers probe beneath the tech to see how those issues arise from the very nature of machine learning, how to address them, and how AI is changing our ideas about what's fair and ethical.
Takeaways: Understand why bias is machine learning's “original sin.” Learn how our engagement with AI is forcing us to confront issues in our current idea of fairness. In a series of vivid hypotheticals, work through the trade-offs implementing AI systems demand of us.
Everything is Miscellaneous:The Power of the New Digital Disorder
Everything is Miscellaneous:The Power of the New Digital Disorder
For thousands of years, we've organized our ideas the same way we've organized our laundry, separating them into neat piles. In the digital age, this unnecessary limitation keeps companies from getting maximum value from their knowledge and frustrates customers.
In this talk, we look at the four new principles of organization and how businesses are learning that they do best if they include every piece of information they can find and allow their customers to organize the information the way that works for them.
The audience learns:
- How to get more value from organizational knowledge
- Why customers are rejecting traditional authorities, including businesses and the media and who they are learning to trust
- The 4 new principles for organizing ideas and information
Web 2.0
The Myth and the Meaning
The term "Web 2.0" entered our vocabulary so quickly because we were eager to find a way to acknowledge the Web's rapid evolution. But it's important to separate the myth from the reality, and then -- even more crucially -- we should recognize what the truth about Web 2.0 means for business and culture.
From hugely successful Web-based collaborative projects we learn that sometimes centralized control gets in the way of rapid growth.
From online businesses that "mash-up" information from many sources, we learn that sometimes a company's information asset has the most value when the company lets it go.
From social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, we learn that not only is the line between the public and the private changing, but their very nature is changing.
From the popularity of social tagging, we learn that customers are now in control not just of the content of product information, but the way that information is organized and accessed.
From the amazing growth of blogging, we learn that sound of marketing - and politics - will never be the same.
In this presentation, David Weinberger goes far beyond the usual chatter about Web 2.0 and exposes its deepest meaning for our business and our lives.
The audience learns:
- What Web 2.0 is, and how to separate it from the hype
- The business importance of the latest Web trends
- The new expectations of their customers and employees
- Why "user-generated content" is less important than "user-generated organization"
- The advantages of loosening control over data
What Blogging is Not
Business and the media have insisted on misunderstanding weblogs so seriously that they can't see what's valuable in them and how they are changing their basic relationship with customers and audiences. Despite what you may have heard, blogs are not like columns written by irresponsible people. The most important bloggers are not the handful with hundreds of thousands of readers but the tens of millions with only a few readers. And they're important not because businesses can do one-to-one marketing to them - it won't work and it will make your company look foolish - but because weblogs are a new type of social group.
If your business can get past the misunderstands this talk lays out, you have a way of building a new relationship with your customers that will see you through hard times - blogging is great for crisis management - and reward you in good times.
The audience learns
- The five most common misperceptions about blogs - and how they get in the way of your business
- How blogging can help increase customer loyalty, innovation, employee retention and work for crisis management
- Why blogging can be powerful medicine when taken internally
- The two mistakes every business makes when it starts to blog
David Weinberger
Featured Book
Everyday Chaos
by David Weinberger
David Weinberger
Featured Reviews
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