Carissa Véliz

Someone who's six feet under is very obviously dead, but someone whose heart stopped 10 seconds ago, but whose brain is still functioning, is that person dead?

It gets really tricky when you go in detail to the edges between life and death.

Well, not with mechanical ventilators.

So, for example, there are countries like Japan in which when somebody is on a mechanical ventilator, let's say that their brain seems to be destroyed, although we don't actually have very good methods of knowing to what extent that's true.

But because they're on a mechanical ventilator, they're...

They're still breathing, their heart is beating, their nails are growing, they have hormonal response to pain, their hair is growing, if they are pregnant, the fetus is developing.

And in those situations, the family gets to decide whether to treat that body as dead or alive, because essentially, we don't know.

Exactly.

And you might think, why would an ordinary citizen want to care about this if you're not making big decisions, if you're not a leader, if you don't own a company?

Well, because you're being subjected to predictions all the time, whereas

Whether it's because you're asking for a loan or an apartment or a job, or even if you're on a dating app, you're being classified according to predictions.

Your whole life is being determined by people guessing about who you are and more importantly, who you will become.

And often when we hear predictions from experts or especially from very wealthy people, from a tech executive, they often get reported as if they were facts on the press and people talk about it as if it was a fact.

And I don't know if you've noticed that a lot of the times tech executives describe the future that they are painting as inevitable.

They say, for example, AI agents are going to be used

for everything and this is inevitable and you can feel how that's a conversation stopper it's telling citizens don't question me just accept what i'm saying as the truth and act in accordance and what i'm trying to say is like whoa there's a debate to be had here and and we're not having that conversation and we should

And what's even more scary is when banks and financial institutions use other people's data to compare you to them.

So it might be that an AI finds that there is a correlation between you having, I don't know, four credit cards and driving this way or having this car.

And it's not obviously causally related to your ability to pay back the loan.

And it's just because people who had that same data didn't pay back a loan that you might not get a loan.