daniel g. siegel's personal website
What if, instead of simplifying away complexity, AI could actually empower designers and decision-makers to navigate uncertainty and make more informed decisions? Our latest Big Idea Initiative article, “ Anticipate: Augmenting Thought Processes by Uncovering Hidden Assumptions Through AI ,” explores how AI — particularly large language models — can become a powerful tool for deeper thinking and…
Long time no talk! It’s been a couple of months since I last wrote, and what a time it has been. As the crises mount, our old assumptions about how the world works seem less certain than ever before. Despite the challenges we face, there is hope on the horizon. As a collective humanity, we hold the means and potential to extend our intellect, thinking, and reasoning — and to amplify them. Through…
Whenever I feel like I understand what’s going on, life seems to hit me in the strangest ways. It has this peculiar way of reminding us that there is always more to learn. And then we find ourselves caught in a cycle of discovering more about ourselves, the world, and realizing that there are countless unknowns still waiting to be explored. That was me a year ago. Many have been asking me…
As many of you know, I’ve been an airplane addict since childhood, and I’m an avid pilot. I recently had the chance to meet with the Chief R&D Officer of a major airline. Naturally, we started talking about airplanes and the role of computers in airplanes. We asked ourselves if there will ever be commercial self-flying airplanes. We agreed the answer is “almost never”.…
There’s a monumental mismatch: we’ve never had more money for innovation, we’ve never had more knowledge about technology, and we’ve never had more anticipation about the next big thing. Yet at the same time we’re failing to solve some of the most fundamental questions on the planet. In other words, we’re most interested in the present, not interested in the…
The computer was going to change everything. The smartphone was going to change everything. The internet was going to change everything. VR was going to change everything. AI was going to change everything. Blockchain was going to change everything. The self-driving car was going to change everything. And so on and so forth. But computers did not change everything. Smartphones haven’t made…
In many ways, we are better off than ever before. We’re healthier. We live longer. We have more technology, and we’re more efficient. We have easier access to food and shelter, and we have knowledge at our fingertips. It’s better to be alive now than it has been at any other point in human history. Yet we are also in the middle of a global crisis of our own creation. You’d…
It is easy to get the impression that the current state of the computer world is the pinnacle of progress. At any tech conference you will find celebrations of innovative solutions, frameworks, or apps that generate, store, transform, or distribute data more conveniently, easier, and faster than ever. We celebrate technology for freeing us from our work, giving us more time with our families,…
It’s hard to think about computers without some notion of applications. You use apps whenever you turn on a computer, use your phone, or surf the web. There’s an app for writing essays and documents, one for sending messages to friends, one for organizing and editing photos, one for watching movies, one for readings news, one for finding plane flights or hotels, one for planning and…
There’s a video clip I keep coming back to. It’s part of a documentary, showing the reaction of legendary filmmaker and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki to a demonstration of AI-generated movements of a model of a human body, which — lacking any sense of self-preservation — drags itself along using its head as a foot. After seeing the brief demo of this grotesque…