Aza Raskin

Is it too late to re-align technology with humanity’s best interests? Artificial intelligence offers massive increases in productivity, expression, and problem-solving. But these capabilities can easily lead to a world with bot-manipulated democracies, massive unemployment, exploitation of children and other vulnerable populations, and a world where no one can tell synthetic media from reality.

Tech visionary Aza Raskin is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, working to align technology with humanity’s best interests. He believes that causing harm to individuals and society does not need to be the “cost of doing business”; we do not need to accept the current adverse effects we are facing.

Trained as a mathematician and dark matter physicist, Raskin has taken three companies from founding to acquisition, has been a co-chairing member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Al, briefs heads of state, and helped found Mozilla Labs. He was also named FastCompany’s Master of Design and listed on Forbes and Inc. Magazines 30-under-30. He was the subject of the documentary The Social Dilemma and is the co-host of the popular podcast Your Undivided Attention.

Raskin is a National Geographic Explorer, and he also heads up the Earth Species Project, an international nonprofit dedicated to using AI to decode animal languages, a development that could unlock the mysteries of the animal kingdom, profoundly altering the future of the ecological world forever.

Raskin has done dark matter research at Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, where he graduated with a B.S. in math and physics.