About this event
“Enough with the breathless dreams of digital utopias and poisonous polemics about technological dystopias! In System Error, we finally have a book about the digital revolution that is serious rather than sensationalistic. Read this if you want to understand how to shape our technological future and reinvigorate democracy along the way.”
— Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix
Join Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, Stanford professors and co-authors of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot It, in a conversation moderated by Virginia Heffernan, host of This Is Critical, at Betaworks Studios on March 22nd.
In System Error, Sahami, Weinstein and Reich reveal the discrimination, privacy issues, and misinformation produced in big techs eternal pursuit of optimization. Come ready to discuss tech’s blindspots and how we can reform big tech’s role in our everyday lives.

Moderator Bio:
Virginia Heffernan is the host of “This Is Critical,” a talk show of cultural criticism, on Stitcher. She is also a columnist at WIRED, and the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art.

Author Bios:
Rob Reich is a philosopher, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Ethics in Society, co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and associate director of its new Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. He is the author of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better. A former sixth grade teacher, he has won multiple teaching awards at Stanford. He helped to create the global movement #GivingTuesday and serves as chair of its board. He is a co-author of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.

Mehran Sahami was recruited to Google in its start-up days by Sergey Brin and is one of the inventors of email spam-filtering technology. With a background in machine learning and artificial intelligence, he returned to Stanford as a computer science professor in 2007 and now holds the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professorship in Engineering. As the Associate Chair for Education in the computer science department, he helped redesign the program’s undergraduate curriculum. He is one of the instructors of Stanford’s massive introductory computer programming course taken by nearly 1,500 students per year. Mehran is also a limited partner in several VC funds and serves as an adviser to high-tech start-ups. He is a co-author of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.

Jeremy M. Weinstein, a political scientist, went to Washington with President Obama in 2009. A key staffer in the White House, he foresaw how new technologies might remake the relationship between governments and citizens and launched Obama’s Open Government Partnership. When Samantha Power was appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations, she brought Jeremy to New York, first as her chief of staff and then as her deputy. He returned to Stanford in 2015 as a professor of political science, where he now leads Stanford Impact Labs, a major university initiative that partners research teams with leaders in the public, private, and social sectors to tackle important social problems. He is a prizewinning author and a decorated teacher whose expertise spans domestic politics and U.S. foreign policy. He is a co-author of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.