some of the big questions that people are facing right now is how do we live with AI what does that mean for our governance for our institutions another problem is who holds the power we don't like the idea that only certain companies have all the data and seem to control an unreasonable amount of power how do we make a more distributed Society what we've seen is a great centralization over the last few decades and it has to do with who controls the data who controls the AI and what we have to do I think is
come up with a more distributed way of managing ourselves that doesn't involve these single points of failure these overly powerful Central authorities the goal of decentralized society is to create shared Prosperity among entities that may be disconnected and distrusting the biggest challenge in decentralized society is how do we take the two conflicting goals of these distrusted entities to work together on one hand you want to encourage individual entities to participate on the other hand you have to address the concerns and risks of participation a very important element of our work is a problem we see
with social media is that these platforms have become a significant part of our public sphere and yet they are centrally controlled and the whole idea of a public sphere is that it is a place for people to come together and contest the institutions that serve them and have a place where civil society and and the political structures can actually interact in in a space that is controlled by no one that is decentralized in in fundamental ways and so we're pursuing approaches to Bringing technology and people together in systems that are fundamentally decentralized for control over
the space control over voice and how people's voices are lifted up and interpreted and brought into contact with power structures uh is not controlled by any Central Authority we actually could change the way our financial system works and we could make it a lot more Equitable and fair we're all about empowering individual users making sure that users can control their own data uh we think a lot about things like privacy as well and we are incredibly committed to open source software and open and accessible systems I really think that the media lab is one of
the only places on the planet that we could actually work on this and work on this well and it's in part because of all the different types of expertise that we bring together being in a place where you don't have to be firmly entrenched in one discipline where you can be a computer scientist but you can also think about financial inclusion or where you can be a scientist who also makes art and having all of these different types of people together and having the freedom to explore problems from different disciplinary angles is really important it's
applying these ideas of network systems incentives and economics and decentralized systems to some of the most important things that we're facing as a society today
