Umbria is known as the "Green Heart of Italy," Umbria brags untouched landscapes in its verdant hills, mountains, and valleys. Etruscans, Romans, and medieval feuding families have left an incredible artistic and cultural heritage, while priests and monks have given a fascinating religious imprint on its towns. During my visit to Umbria in late summer, I met a couple from New York at their marvelous farmhouse. I had a short yet fascinating conversation with the husband, a distinguished anthropologist and university professor, while my wife and our friends were getting the tour by the wife - a famous Journalist. The couples were in their mid-80s. 

The husband asked about my profession, and I said, "I'm in AI Education." He immediately asked: "Can AI understand irony?" That question still puzzles me today. 

I put the answer to this question on one side and started focusing instead on the question itself. I focused on a more fundamental question I have been thinking about lately. I have been thinking about "consciousness," the complicated problem and even more complex question in the field of AI. Exploring a bit into philosophy, the complex problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is truly the problem of explaining why there is "something lit is like" for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states "light up" and directly appear to the subject. The usual methods of science involve an explanation of functional, dynamical, and structural properties—an explanation of what a thing does, how it changes over time, and how it is put together. But even after we have explained the conscious mind's functional, dynamic, and structural properties, we can still meaningfully ask why it is deliberate. This suggests that an explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the usual methods of science. Consciousness presents a complex problem for science, or perhaps it marks the limits of what science can explain. Explaining why consciousness occurs at all can be contrasted with the so-called "easy problems" of consciousness: the problems of explaining the function, dynamics, and structure of consciousness. These elements can be described using the usual methods of science. But that leaves the question of why there is something it is like for the subject when these functions, dynamics, and structures are present. This is a complicated problem.

But let's, for a moment, assume a conscious being is one capable of having thought and not disclosing it. This means consciousness would be the prerequisite for irony or saying one thing while meaning the opposite, which happens in my Persian culture. We know we are being ironic when we realize our words don't correspond with our thoughts. The truth is that most of us have this unique capacity - and most of us certainly and regularly convey our unspoken meanings in this way - is something that, I think, should surprise us more often than it does. It indeed seems almost discreetly human. Animals can be funny but not deliberately so. So how about computers or machines? Can they deceive? Can they keep secrets? Can they be ironic?

The truth is that anything related to AI is already being studied or researched by an army of obscenely well-resourced computer scientists and AI researchers. This is also the cares with the question of AI and irony, which has recently attracted significant research among academia and private companies. Of course, since irony involves saying one thing while meaning the opposite, creating an intelligent machine that can detect and generate it is not a simple task. But if the AI community could make such an intelligent machine, it would have many practical applications, some more sinister than others. In the age of Google online reviews, among others, retailers have become very keen on so-called "opinion mining" and "sentiment analysis," which utilize AI to map the content and the mood of reviewers' comments. Knowing whether the product is being praised or becoming the butt of the joke is valuable information. And this is what Amazon is doing currently. Or even consider content moderation on various social media platforms. If let's say, Twitter or Facebook wants to limit online abuse while protecting freedom of speech, would it not be helpful to know when someone is serious or when they are just joking?

Or what if someone tweets that they have just done something crazy and illegal? (don't ever tweet crazy or illegal stuff, by the way). Imagine if we could determine instantly whether they are serious or whether they are just "being ironic." 

The truth is that given irony's proximity to lying, it's not hard to imagine how the entire shadowy machinery of government and corporate surveillance that has grown up around new communications technologies would find the prospects of an irony-detector extremely interesting. And that goes a long way toward explaining the growing literature on the topic in the AI field. 

To better understand the state of current research into AI and irony, it is beneficial to know a little about the history of AI in general. That history is broken down into two periods. In the 90s, AI researchers sought to program computers with a set of handcrafted formal rules for how to behave in predefined environments. For example, if you used Microsoft Word in the 90s, you might remember the annoying office assistant Clippy, who was endlessly popping up to offer unwanted advice. 

Since the early 2000s, that model has been replaced by data-driven machine learning and sophisticated neural networks. Enormous caches of examples of given phenomena are translated into numerical values, on which computers can perform complex mathematical operations to determine patterns no human could ever discover. Moreover, the computer doesn't merely apply a rule. Instead, it learns from experience and develops new operations independent of human intervention. 

The main difference between the two approaches is between Clippy and facial recognition technology.  

To create a neural network that can detect irony, AI scientists focus initially on what some would consider its simplest form: sarcasm. AI scientists begin with data stripped from social media. For example, they might collect all tweets labeled "sarcasm" with or without # of course, or Reddit posts labeled/s, a shorthand that Reddit users employ to indicate they are not serious. The point is not to teach the computer to recognize the two separate meanings of any given sarcastic post. Indeed, meaning is of no relevance whatsoever. Instead, the computer is instructed to search for recurring patterns, or what researchers call "syntactical fingerprints" - words, punctuations, errors, emojis, phrases, context, and so forth.
On top of that, the dataset is bolstered by adding even more streams of examples - other posts in the same treads, for instance, or from the same account. Each new individual sample is then run through a battery of calculations until we arrive at a single determination: sarcastic or not sarcastic. Last, a bot can be programmed to reply to each original poster and ask whether they were being sarcastic. Any reply can be added to the machine's growing mountain of experience. So, assuming AI will continue to grow and advance at the rate that took us from Clippy to facial recognition technology in less than two decades, can Ironic androids be far off?

It could be argued that there are qualitative differences between sorting through the "syntactical fingerprints" of irony and understanding it. Some might suggest not. If a computer can be taught to behave exactly like a human, then it's immaterial whether a rich internal world of meaning lurks beneath its behavior. 

But I would argue that iron is a unique case; it relies on the distinction between external behaviors and internal beliefs. While AI scientists have only recently become interested in irony, philosophers and literary critics have been thinking about irony for a very, very, very long time. And perhaps exploring that tradition would shed old light, as it were, on a new problem. 

Of the many names one could think about in this context, two are indispensable: the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel; and the post-structuralist literary theorist Paul de Man. As for Schlegel, irony does not simply entail a false external meaning and a true, internal one. Rather, two opposite meanings are presented as equally valid in irony. And the resulting indeterminacy has devastating implications for logic, most notably the law of non-contradiction, which holds that a statement cannot be simultaneously true and falls. De Man follows Schlegel on this score and, in a sense, universalizes his insight. De Man notes that every effort to define a concept of irony is bound to be infected by the phenomena it purports to explain. Indeed, de Man believes all language is infected by irony and involves "permanent parabasis." Because humans have the power to conceal their thoughts from one another, it will always be possible - permanently possible - that they do not mean what they are saying. 

The irony, in other words, is not one kind of language among many; it structures or, better, haunts every use of language and every interaction. And in this sense, it exceeds the order of proof and computation. The question is whether the same is true of human beings in general.​

Technology capitalism is the dominant economic establishment of our time, and it is on a crash course with democracy, and this is more visible than ever in the Western world. Technology capitalism’s giants—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple—now possess, operate, and mediator nearly every aspect of human interaction with global information and communication systems, unconstrained by public law. All roads to economic, social, and even political participation now lead through a handful of unaccountable companies, a state that has intensified during two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.​

The result is a path of social decay:

• The destruction of privacy.
• Extensive corporate concentrations of information about people and society.
• Poisoned discourse.
• Fractured societies.
• Remote systems of behavior manipulation.
• Weakened democratic institutions.

While the Authoritative governments designed and deployed digital technologies to advance their system of authoritarian rule, the West failed to create a coherent vision of a digital century that promotes democratic principles and government.

Rights and laws once codified to defend citizens from industrial capitalism—such as antitrust law and workers’ rights—do not shield us from these harms. If the ideal of the people’s self-governance is to endure this century, then a democratic counterrevolution is the only solution.

U.S. and European lawmakers have finally begun to think seriously about regulating privacy and content. Still, they have yet to consider the far more fundamental question of structure and govern information and communication for a democratic digital future.

Three principles could offer a starting point. First, the democratic rule of law governs. There is no so-called cyberspace immune to rights and laws, which must apply to every domain of society, whether populated by people or machines. Publishers, for example, are held accountable for the information they publish. Even though their profit-maximizing algorithms enable and exploit disinformation, technology capitalists have no such accountability.

Second, unprecedented harms demand unprecedented solutions. Existing antitrust laws can break up the tech giants, but that won’t address the underlying economics. The target must be the secret extraction of human data once considered private. Democracies must outlaw this extraction, end the corporate concentration of personal information, eliminate targeting algorithms, and abolish corporate control of information flows.

Third, new conditions require new rights. Our era demands the codification of epistemic rights—the right to know and decide who knows what about our lives. These fundamental rights are not codified in law because they have never come under systemic threat. They must be codified if they are to exist at all.

We can be a technology capitalist society or a democracy, but we cannot be both. Democracy is a fragile political condition dedicated to the prospect of self-governance, harbored by the principle of justice and maintained by collective effort. Each generation’s mission is always the same: to protect and keep democracy moving forward in a relay race against anti-democratic forces that spans centuries. The liberal democracies have the power and legitimacy to lead against technology capitalism and do so on behalf of all peoples struggling against a dystopian future.

The most influential architect of the U.S. political system, James Madison, was deeply fascinated by the Enlightenment thinkers who saw politics as a science. They imagined a system of checks and balances producing good government almost as a machine with wheels and pulleys could have motion or transfer energy. They did not expect people to be wise or virtuous. “If men were angels,” Madison famously wrote in the Federalist Papers, “no government would be necessary.” Madison built a system, he believed, that did not require virtue to function. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he urged, and from this conflict of interest would come ordered liberty and democracy. This American model became the template for much of the world.

In the United States and worldwide, we are now witnessing experiments in politics without angels—and they aren’t working so well. Democratic institutions have weakened in many places, broken in others, and feel under stress where they are still functioning. Those countries that have not faced the full furies of populism and nationalism—Germany and Japan are the most striking examples—have escaped these dangers because of their culture and history rather than some better democratic design. Everywhere, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s truth seems to hold: Institutions are merely lengthened shadows of men. If such men fail and misbehave, venally or irresponsibly, the democratic system is endangered. We enter the 21st century asking one of the oldest political questions, much older than the Enlightenment ideas that democracy was built on. It is a question the ancient Greeks and Romans debated more than two millennia ago: How do we produce virtue in human beings? 

We all know that Zoom (or Google Meet, which I often use) causes fatigue, social media spreads misinformation, and Google Maps wipes out our sense of direction. We also know, of course, that Zoom allows us to cooperate across continents, that social media (Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok) connects us to our families and friends, and Google Maps keeps us from being lost. Today's technological criticism concerns whether a technology is good or bad or judging its various applications. But there’s an older tradition of criticism that asks a more fundamental and nuanced question: How do these technologies change the people who use them, both for good and bad? And what do the people who use them — all of us, in other words — actually want? Do we even know?
L.M. Sacasas explores these questions in his great newsletter, “The Convivial Society.” His work is marrying the theorists of the 20th century — Hannah Arendt, C.S. Lewis, Ivan Illich, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and more — to the present day's technologies. This merging of past thinkers and contemporary concerns is revelatory in an era when we tend to take the shape of our world for granted and forget how it would look to those who stood outside it or how it looked to those who were there at the inception of these tools and mediums.

Sacasas recently published a list of 41 questions we should ask of the technologies and tools that shape our lives. What I admired about these questions is how they invite us to think not just about technologies but about ourselves, and how we act and what we want, and what, in the end, we actually value.  I highly recommend listening to L.M. Sacasas's conversation with Ezra Kline.

Here is the list of those 41 questions.  I'd love to hear your answers to some of these questions:

1. What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?
2. What habits will the use of this technology instill?
3. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?
4. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?
5. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?
6. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?
7. What practices will the use of this technology cultivate?
8. What practices will the use of this technology displace?
9. What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
10. What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?
11. What was required of other human beings so that I might be able to use this technology?
12. What was required of other creatures so that I might be able to use this technology?
13. What was required of the earth so that I might be able to use this technology?
14. Does the use of this technology bring me joy?
15. Does the use of this technology arouse anxiety?
16. How does this technology empower me? At whose expense?
17. What feelings does the use of this technology generate in me toward others?
18. Can I imagine living without this technology? Why, or why not?
19. How does this technology encourage me to allocate my time?
20. Could the resources used to acquire and use this technology be better deployed?
21. Does this technology automate or outsource labor or responsibilities that are morally essential?
22. What desires does the use of this technology generate?
23. What desires does the use of this technology dissipate?
24. What possibilities for action does this technology present? Is it good that these actions are now possible?
25. What possibilities for action does this technology foreclose? Is it good that these actions are no longer possible?
26. How does the use of this technology shape my vision of a good life?
27. What limits does the use of this technology impose upon me?
28. What limits does my use of this technology impose upon others?
29. What does my use of this technology require of others who would (or must) interact with me?
30. What assumptions about the world does the use of this technology tacitly encourage?
31. What knowledge has the use of this technology disclosed to me about myself?
32. What knowledge has the use of this technology disclosed to me about others? Is it good to have this knowledge?
33. What are the potential harms to myself, others, or the world that might result from using this technology?
34. Upon what systems, technical or human, does my use of this technology depend? Are these systems just?
35. Does my use of this technology encourage me to view others as a means to an end?
36. Does using this technology require me to think more or less?
37. What would the world be like if everyone used this technology exactly as I use it?
38. What risks will my use of this technology entail for others? Have they consented?
39. Can the consequences of my use of this technology be undone? Can I live with those consequences?
40. Does my use of this technology make it easier to live as if I had no responsibilities toward my neighbor?
41. Can I be held responsible for the actions which this technology empowers? Would I feel better if I couldn’t?

When we think about technology’s moral implications, we tend to think about what we do with a given technology. We might call this the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” approach to the ethics of technology. What matters most about technology on this view is the use to which it is put. This is, of course, a valid point. A hammer may indeed be used to either build a house or bash someone’s head in. On this view, technology is morally neutral, and the only morally relevant question is this: What will I do with this tool?

But is this really the only morally relevant question one could ask? For instance, pursuing the example of the hammer, might I not also ask how having the hammer in hand encourages me to perceive the world around me? Or, what feelings having a hammer in hand arouses?

As our world's more prosperous and fully vaccinated countries like the United States begin to come out from the Pandemic, there's a lot of talk about "the office." I have been thinking about "the office" as I spent most of the week at our Pittsburgh office preparing for one of our artificial intelligence camps at Winchester Thurston by ReadyAI.

Many business executives say that they expect employees to split time between working from home and the office, according to the latest report by McKinsey. (Click here to read the report). Savvy entrepreneurs are even making special speakers for remote workers to feel like they are in the office even when they aren't. They're also sending them care packages and subsidizing part of childcare services.

I agree that office debate is an essential one. In fact, I am writing this piece from my home. But billions of people around the world, this debate is not relevant to their work and lives. 

Mainly because billions of people have jobs that cannot be done from a distance, for example, giving haircuts, tending to seriously ill or injured patients, or serving food. Or, perhaps jobs in occupations like sanitation, farming, deliveries, or transportation are essential but not confined to any specific space. 

The International Labor Organization estimates just 18 percent of the global workforce, or approximately 557 million people, were consistently teleworking during the Pandemic. (Click here to read the report). That's triple what it was before COVID. But it still leaves over 2.7 billion people worldwide for whom the "back-to-the office debate" sounds like something from another planet.

Let's not ignore that those 2.7 billion people and their families have been hit hardest by COVID in terms of hours and wages lost, emotional trauma, and destructive unemployment. 

Today the division between the "Zoom class" and the rest of the world tracks some of the more obvious fault lines of inequality that cut across our communities and societies. 

Today even in prosperous economies like the US, only a small portion of workers can telework consistently. Here in the US, it's about a fifth. But the numbers are far lower in middle-income countries as the size of the "laptop class" or "Zoom class" plummets. For example, in India, where more than 470 million people work in retail for agriculture, only five percent can Zoom to the job. The numbers in Africa are alike.  

Let's think about this a bit further. This is because in-person services jobs are more prevalent in less developed countries - you are five times as likely to be a street vendor in a middle-income nation as you are in a wealthy one and 16 times as likely to work in agriculture. This is also about constraints on internet connectivity and internet services. Most countries don't have the internet infrastructure to support massive teleworking populations. On top of that, many of these countries have also experienced the additional blow of losing remittances from their citizens working abroad in jobs that often aren't "remote-workable."

Also, high debt obligations and lack of cash mean that low and middle-income countries cannot roll out the kinds of unemployment benefits or infrastructure rebuilding programs that we've seen in the US or Europe. More flourishing countries have allocated up to 30 percent of their GDP to cushion the pandemic blow. but low and middle-income countries mustered less than six percent. (Click here to read the IMF report.)  

The bad news is that Pandemic has put decades of poverty reduction in reverse. In 2020 alone, more than 120 million people fell below the poverty line globally, and the number of people living in extreme poverty rose for the first time in 24 years (since 1997). (Click here to read the report)

Today even in rich countries, non-remote jobs are overwhelmingly in lower-income, economically vulnerable professions. According to a recent Pew study, more than 3/4 of low-income workers in Americans can't work from home at all. Non-remote jobs have higher proportions of women, ethnic minorities, and younger people - groups went into the Pandemic at an economic disadvantage. All suffered disproportionate financial losses during the crisis itself.

The Pandemic is far from over, but and many things need to be done. Globally, more prosperous countries need to look at the question of debt relief for cash-strapped developing nations. But even within more prosperous countries, better compensation and labor protection for "essential workers" are genuinely essential.​

It is nice to be out on the balcony applauding the essential workers and tweeting about them, but unless we start compensating them more, what happens if another pandemic comes around?

On Sunday, January 31st, 2021, I received a text message from my friend,  Reza Manesh.  Reza informed me that he was 'almost done with his book' and would like me to "review with a critical eye and provide feedback to make it better."  

I did review the draft. But it was the book that made me better at finding joy in life through the fantastic work that is part reflection and part memoir.

Today Reza (as he likes to be called) is a leading voice in medical education.  As he tells in his recently published book - Finding JOY in Medicine - the journey was not easy.  But through learning and developing three essential attributes humanism, humility, and desire for growth - he has discovered joy in medicine, and I would argue in life too.  

(Watch Reza's Journey)

Finding JOY in medicine is not about any particular destination.  Having read the book several times, I am convinced it is not just about medicine.  It is about authenticity, humanity, humility, and vulnerability.  Reza reminds me of Walt Whitman's quote, "I am large. I contain multitudes."  This is a story of multitudes of our shared humanity, humility, and wisdom through the story of Reza.  The wisdom that I have noticed is the one that embodied moral elements out of Reza's very own moment of suffering and learning, which comes from compassionate regard for the fragility of others.   

Finding Joy in Medicine should be required reading for everyone, particularly my generation.  It is a reminder that we should not chase: a job for money, compliments, imitations, job titles, influence, or shortcuts to learn.  Reza reminds us to pursue: quality time with loved ones, a healthy lifestyle, work that brings joy, ways to help others, opportunities to learn and grow and show gratitude.  

The main character in the book is not Reza, or his patients, or other doctors.  It's AGHA JOON (Persian-Farsi for grandfather - Reza's grandfather).  He was not a doctor.  He was an ordinary man, and there was just something extraordinary about him.  

The book starts with AGHA JOON's poem.  This is just a reminder that we read poetry because the world is more than the facts, laws, and realities.  Life is indeed way too short, and AGHA JOON and Reza remind us that perhaps poems will make it last a bit longer. So we can all find JOY...

​We all can gain from reading great writers.  Some of the most successful business people and entrepreneurs do a lot of reading and thinking.  

Visionary business minds like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, or Peter Thiel teach us something that is often ignored by most of us. They all read a lot.   The compelling ideas from history, philosophy, literature, and other humanities disciplines can be valuable sources for innovation and success as the more measurable fields of economics, science, and technology.  

The humanities brim with lessons and models for anyone ready and willing to examine them.   

Suppose we want to learn more about effective decision-making. In that case, we can study how President Lincoln kept the  Union together during the Civil War, or perhaps why Ceasar crossed the Rubicon, or how JFK kept the world out of nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  

Suppose we are looking for a fantastic manual on leadership. In that case, we should consider Martin Luther King Jr.'s writing on civil disobedience in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" or Machiavelli's discussion on the nature of power in The Prince. 

This summer, I'll be reading and re-reading the following books, and let me tell you why.

Plato, Apology (c. 399 BC)
I frequently ask myself about my core principles or how I can develop a guiding set of ethics that no promise of money or power can corrupt?  In fact, these are some of the questions that Plato's Apology answers, as it tells us the story of how Socrates faced his accusers at the trial that would end in his death sentence.  Socrates teaches us all about how to craft a thoughtfully considered code of ethics that is the ultimate source of what Socrates called the "good life."

Machiavelli, The Prince (published in 1532)
It is a fantastic text on political power that can help us all in the modern world.  The Prince is written at a time of remarkable change in Florence, and Machiavelli tried to fix the broken political system by whatever means required.    It gets to the core of questions like, is it better to be feared or loved?  or perhaps more advantageous actually to be powerful, or to seem powerful?

Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603)
Shakespeare's legendary Othello is a reminder for all of us that to understand anyone; we must try first hearing his or her particular story.  

Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (published in 1924)
I won't spoil the story, but in life, at some point, we all face a terrible decision like Captain Vere.  Should we follow our hearts? Should we not?

These are the four classics I'll be reading this summer.  Perhaps it might seem unusual, even counterintuitive, that each of these books was written decades and centuries ago.  But I believe the best books remain indispensable for the long haul.  

That is why, as forward-thinking global citizens, we should engage with great writing.  And that is why Plato believed that 'storytellers rule the world."

We read great writings because they teach us; humility, curiosity, collaboration, and perspective.

That's is something we can't learn from Instagram, Twitter, or Netflix.

I remember reading a news headline in 2018 that grabbed my attention. The story of twin girls Lulu and Nana that were delivered in a Chinese hospital. It was big news because the twin girls were the world's first gene-edited babies. Nine months earlier, He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist, edited their embryos to protect them from being infected with HIV, using gene-editing mechanisms called CRISPR. The news was met with horror and outrage in the scientific circles, and He Jiankui lost his job and was sentenced to 3 years in prison.  

I didn't give biotech much attention as a university student. However, this past week, I eagerly woke up around 3 a.m. every day so I can read about the potential and far-reaching consequence of gene-editing technology that was the main themes running through Walter Isaacson's new book The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race.

The book is a real page-turner and served as my morning caffeine in the early hours of the day. Coming in at nearly 500 pages, it dives into the essence of life and the exciting world of genomes and genetic coding, in what the author calls "the 3rd great revolution of modern times," following the atom and the bit which led to the digital revolution. 

Learning the new frontier in the science of DNA and RNA can be a tad challenging. RNA is a molecule in living cells similar to DNA, but it has one more oxygen atom in its sugar-phosphate backbone and a difference in one of its four bases. RNA plays a vital role in the book. The book's main character, Jennifer Doudna, was the co-recipient - with Emmanuelle Charpentier - of the 2020 Noble Prize for Chemistry to discover the CRISPR gene-editing technology.

Some of the book's most exciting parts feature how CRISPR scientists rose to the COVID challenge by developing rapid test methods and vaccine strategies and posted them to an open database to benefit the global scientific community.

The Code Breaker's central point was about genetic destiny. Jennifer Doudna and other scientists delivered us the first practical tools to shape it. If we had the power to free future generations of diseases such as schizophrenia or Huntington's disease, would we? The immoral choice would be not to, clearly? What if we could improve healthy human beings by editing out imperfections or flaws? But could we also lose something along with those diseases and deficiency and weaknesses, in terms of wisdom, kindness, compassion, and, in some way, more challenging to define humanity?​

The Code Breaker is a true page-turner. But Isaacson's main subject is CRISPR and not Jennifer Doudna. Isaacson lets Charpentier have the last words: "At the end of the day, the discoveries are what remain. We are just passing on this planet for a short time. We do our job, and then we leave, and others pick up the work."

Today, CRISPR is the most potent DNA-editing tool humankind has ever controlled, and figured out if and when to edit our genes will be one of the most consequential questions of the 21st century.  

The Code Breaker left me with more questions than answers. The ethical predicaments that CRISPR could unleash if people start editing our very own DNA. The honest discussion is about the tension between individuals and society. Overall, we might believe that society benefits when it includes "people who are short and tall, gay and straight, placid and tormented, blind or sighted." But if CRISPR gave parents the ability to eliminate one option in each case, it's not hard to imagine what would happen. Most of us today, including most geneticists, probably hope to kick these ethical issues down the road and to the next generation.

Coronavirus pandemic will accelerate the acceptance and deployment of CRISPR. After all, CRISPR began long ago as a virus-fighting tool in bacteria, and after more than 120 million COVID cases globally, engineering our bodies to resist disease appears far less radical. If nothing else, CRISPR might have provided the cheap, accelerated testing we lacked last spring to nip the pandemic in the bud.  

We, as a species, step by step, are discovering the secret of how we work. Now that secret has given us a fantastic tool, which is the ability to understand the code of life but with a little bit of discretion, and I hope a lot of wisdom and rewrite the code of life when we need to... Can we do that? Is it playing God? or is it like Prometheus snatching fire from the gods? 

Will the power of genetic modification and CRISPR undermine our experience of life as a gift? Will it produce a loss of humility? An unacceptable increase in human responsibility? a decay in solidarity as the species begin to diverge?  

The Code Breaker is a must-read. It is a story packed with the greatest of questions, from the origins of life to the human race's future. The tale is genuinely gripping, and the implications mind-blowing.

In Greek mythicism, the ancient gods lived on top of Mount Olympus (the highest mountain in Greece).  Empowered with extraordinary capabilities, they convened on the summit and looked down on the ordinary people underneath.  Suppose the humans at the bottom were exceptionally valiant or distinguished. However, they also could become like gods:  in a process the Greeks called apotheosis, they would climb the mountain and take their seat on the summit.  This is what happened to the Greek hero Hercules, for instance.  At the end of his life, he was brought up to Olympus to live alongside the gods, left to continue unhampered and ageless for all his days.  

Today, many of us seem to believe human beings sit on top of their mountain.  We do not think we are gods, but we consider ourselves more capable, intelligent, competent, and able than any other creature in existence.  Many of us also believe that, if a machine at the bottom of the mountain is to join us at the top, it must go through apotheosis as well - not to become more like a god, but to become more like us - human beings.  This implies the purist view of Artificial intelligence.  Once the machine reaches human intelligence, this top capability is achieved, and its rise is over.  

But as the pragmatist revolution has taught us throughout our human history, there are two challenges with this assumption.  The first is those other ways to climb the "Capability Mountains" than to follow the singular path that human beings have taken.  The purist form is just one way to make the ascent;  technological progress has revealed a range of other encouraging pathways as well.  The different vision is that other tips in this mountain range alongside humans proudly sit at the top.  Many of us have become distracted by the view down from the peak:  we spend our time gazing down at the less intelligent machines below or looking at each other and wondering at our abilities, skills, and capabilities.  But if we looked up, rather than downward or beyond, we would see and recognize other mountains towering above us.  

For the moment, we may be the most intelligent machines in existence, but here are a great many other potential designs that machines could achieve.  Imagine a universal warehouse that stores all those different combinations and iterations:  it would be unimaginably big, perhaps infinitely so.  Natural selection has explored one little corner of this vast space, spent its time browsing in one albeit very long course and settled upon the human design.  However, human beings, armed with new technologies, are now examining others.  Where evolution utilized time, today, we employ computational power.  And it is hard to see how, in the future, we will not trip across various designs, uniquely new ways of building machines, ones that will open up mountains and peaks in capability well beyond the reach of even the most competent human beings alive today.

Suppose we assume that machines do not need to copy our intelligence to be highly competent; the vast gaps in science's current understanding of intelligence matter far less than is generally assumed.  We do not need to solve the puzzles and mysteries of how the brain and mind work to build machines that can outperform us.  And suppose intelligent machines and devices do not need to replicate human intelligence to be highly competent and intelligent. In that case, there is no reason to think that what human beings are currently able to do represents a limit on what future machines might achieve.  Yet today, this is commonly assumed - that human beings' intellectual courage is as far as intelligence machines can ever reach.  Nevertheless, it is unlikely that this will be the case.  

​Mohamed Bouaziz was just ten years old when he became the main provider for his family.   When he was 26, he made his money by selling vegetables and fruits off an old wagon in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid.  

Ten years ago this week (December 17, 2010), Sidi Bouzid policemen seized Mohamed's produce for the umpteenth time, but this time the local police also beat and humiliated him in public.  Mohamed walked to the town hall and tried to get his vegetables and fruits back, but no one would talk to him.  He then walked outside, drenched himself in gasoline, and lit himself on fire.  

All around the world, news media and social media started broadcasting Mohamed's story across the  Middle East.  By the time he died on January 4, 2001, protesters who knew the hopelessness and pain that drove Bouazizi to suicide had packed Tunisian streets demanding reform.  Just ten days after Mohamed's death, Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was forced to leave after being in power for over two decades.  The demonstrations spread throughout the Middle East.

Decades of strongman dictatorship in the region left the ground dangerously depleted, but Mohamed Bouaziz lit the match that ignited a revolution.  This week is the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Arab Spring.  What is the legacy of Mohamed Bouazizi?

Aspirations that "people power" revolutions would yield a democratic awakening in the region have been dashed.  Only in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi's home has created a democracy.  Protests in Egypt overthrew  Hosni Mubarak, and elections were held. Still, Egypt's military toppled the elected president after one year in office and restored control of its politics.  

Yemen, Syria, and Libya were all fallen into civil war.  A staggering half of the Syrian population ten years ago have been killed or forced from their homes, and the resulting refugee crisis capsized politics and societies in Western Europe.  

In the past decade, many protestors of the Arab Spring demanded an end to endemic corruption, freedom of expression, and more and better opportunities for young men and women like Bouaziz.  Sadly, the best available evidence shows that there are just as many crooks in power, more jobless young people, and more journalists in jail a decade later. 

Perhaps the most disturbing story of all is that the tools and technologies that drew attention to Mohamed Bouazizi's tragedy and raised hopes for change have contributed to the ensuing devastation.   From Cairo's Tahrir Square, Facebook, Twitter, and other social medial platforms helped protesters spread their message, organize demonstrations, and capture the world's attention.  Unfortunately, Islamic State militants were soon applying these same tools to recruit terrorists to Syria and Iraq and coordinate attacks in Europe and beyond.  

With guidance from Russian engineers, Syria's Bashar al-Assad also used social media to disseminate disinformation and propaganda to tens of millions of people.  The use of bots that didn't exist ten years ago has added to the problem's scale.  

Arab Spring has for now given way to Arab Winter.  The Story of the Middle East is far from over.  The Middle East region has been held together floor centuries by strongmen backed by outside powers -Ottoman, European, American.  With little history of broadly shared power, lasting progress toward individual freedom, if it comes, will take many more decades.  

Mohamed Bouazizi's country, Tunisia, now has a government that, nevertheless imperfectly, must answer to voters.  For now, that's the most I can say for Mohamed's legacy.