Keen On

Few people have a better perch to observe technological change than Kenneth Cukier, deputy executive editor at The Economist and co-author of the best-selling book Big Data. I caught up with Cukier at DLD this year to get his take on the last twenty years of technology disruption. He began by remembering how, in 2005, tech giants like Google and Facebook were viewed simply as successful startups, not as the foundational platforms they would become. Cukier explores the emergence of Big Data, which he identifies as a crucial development that laid the groundwork for artificial intelligence. He notes two major surprises over this period: the unprecedented speed of technological change and the increasing level of social violence and incivility, particularly online. He expresses concern about the deterioration of civil discourse and human dignity in digital spaces. On artificial intelligence, Cukier argues that generative AI was a natural evolution from the big data era, though he's hesitant to call it inevitable.