Edition 023: This Belongs to Everyone
I do not have the answers... No one can, alone. When Pope Leo wrote his encyclical on artificial intelligence this spring, the part that stayed with me was the insistence that the work of governing these technologies belongs to everyone... The questions worth asking are questions about what we owe each other, and those have never belonged to specialists.
Edition OO1: Her Cells, Our Data
What was done to Henrietta Lacks — the extraction without consent, the conversion of a person into a product, the accumulation of enormous wealth and power by institutions that acknowledged no obligation to the individual whose body made it possible — is not a historical anomaly. It is a template that is still running, at a scale and speed, but now to something even more intimate than cells.
Our data is being harvested. Our thoughts. Our languages. Our accumulated knowledge.