In the book are 16 short portraits of people whom I find admirable. They embody, exemplify, or champion specific virtues. They can function as exemplars and inspire you to cultivate and express relevant virtues.
Below are links to talks or interviews with them. You can see and hear them; and model their ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. You can try-out relevant virtues in your work and projects–learn by doing.
Please note that I do not expect that you view all of these exemplars admirable in the same way that I do. Maybe you even do not admire some of them. Still, I hope that you can learn from some of them.
(Here are other online resources that accompany the book Ethics for people who work in tech.)
Greta Thunberg
The Guardian: Greta Thunberg responds to Asperger’s critics: ‘It’s a superpower’, 2019
Financial Times: Greta Thunberg: ‘All my life I’ve been the invisible girl’, 2019
Tristan Harris
The Center for Humane Technology: About and Take Control
How technology is designed to bring out the worst in us, Vox podcast, with Ezra Klein, 2018
Kate Raworth
Doughnut Economics; several Animations; and a short video: What is Doughnut Economics
Kate Raworth inaugurated as first Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences Professor of Practice
Otto Scharmer
Theory U on Wikipedia
Cathy O’Neil
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, 2016
Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy | Podcast, 2022
Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff: Team Human vs. Team AI: To make artificial intelligence live up to its promise, we need to understand and reframe the values implicit in the technology
Team Human, host of a long-standing podcast, e.g., this episode: Kibbitz Room II live, 2022
Marleen Stikker
De Digitale Stad (The Digital City), nominated as Unesco World Heritage
Jaron Lanier
You will love this conversation with Jaron Lanier, but I can’t describe it, Vox podcast with Ezra Klein, 2018
The New York Times: Jaron Lanier fixes the internet, 2019
The New Yorker: There is no AI: There are ways of controlling the new technology—but first we have to stop mythologizing it, 2023
Sherry Turkle
Some of her books: The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit(1984), about how computers affect how we look at ourselves, and think and act; Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), about how people can go into virtual worlds and explore multiple identities; Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011), about how our obsession with connectivity corrodes natural, organic, genuine communication; and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), which deals with how being ‘always on’ made us forget the benefits of solitude and how to connect to others.
Sherry Turkle in conversation with Douglas Rushkoff, on the Team Human podcast, 2022
Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari Reveals the Real Dangers Ahead | The TED Interview, 2022
The New Yorker: Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever, 2020
The Economist: Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation, 2023
Mariana Mazzucato
Wired: This economist has a plan to fix capitalism. It’s time we all listened, 2019
John C. Havens
John Havens: The ethics of AI: how to stop your robot cooking your cat, 2015
The IEEE Planet Positive 2030 Initiative, under the leadership of Maike Lukenn and John Havens
Safiya U. Noble
The Intersection of Technology, Power and Society, Safiya Umoja Noble, co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, is committed to re-imagining technology and championing racial and economic justice
John Tasioulas
John Tasioulas: The role of the arts and humanities in thinking about artificial intelligence (AI), 2021
The University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI: Confronting the ethical implications of AI from a philosophical and humanistic perspective
Timnit Gebru
Wired: What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru, 2021; and Ex-Googler Timnit Gebru Starts Her Own AI Research Center, 2021
Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute
Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden on Wikipedia
The Freedom of the Press Foundation, which ‘protects, defends, and empowers public-interest journalism in the 21st century’