I attended the first six hours of the  Decentralized Web Summit   on Wednesday (I had to leave early to attend a family event). Great talks and panel sessions and it was fun to have conversations with Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf, and also say hello to Cory Doctorow. I would like to thank all of the people I talked with during breaks, breakfast, and lunch: good conversations and shared ideas. The basic theme was what can we as technologists do to "lock open the web" to prevent governments and corporations from removing privacy and freedoms in the future. There was a lot of discusion why the GPL is a powerful tool for maintaining freedom. The call to action for the summit was (quoting from the web site) "The current Web is not private or censorship-free. It lacks a memory, a way to preserve our culture’s digital record through time. The Decentralized Web aims to make the Web open, secure and free of censorship by distributing data, processing, and hosting across millio...

I have been using AI technology on projects since the 1980's (first using mostly symbolic AI, then neural networks and machine learning) and in addition to the exponentially growing progress the other thing that strikes me is how a once small AI developers community has grown by perhaps almost three orders of magnitude in the number of people working in the field. As the new conventional wisdom goes AI services will be like cloud computing services and power: ubiquitous. As AI systems decide what medical care people get, who gets mortgages and at what interest rates, the ranking of employees in large organizations, nation states automatically determining who is a threat to their power base or public safety, control of driverless cars, maintain detailed information on everyone and drive their purchasing decisions, etc., having some transparency in algorithms and software implementation is crucial. Notice how I put "Libre Software" in the title, not "Open Source....