The Internet Connects Us, the Internet Divides Us
Conceived and built as the apotheosis of the free human spirit, the internet is turning into a veritable factory of inequality—by many different measures and in completely unexpected directions. Some rifts are quietly becoming chasms capable of causing enormous problems for all of humanity. Is it too late to “turn” the machine around?
02Iva Gumnishka: Using AI to Give People Hope
Iva Gumnishka came back to Bulgaria from an Ivy League university with a dream: to make the most high-tech industry of all help the people who need it most, and to make that model sustainable. Her company, Humans in the loop, has spent six years giving work to refugees, people in deep poverty and people living in war zones, from Afghanistan to Venezuela, as they annotate the data that teaches artificial intelligence to see. What does it feel like to give a livelihood to 1,000 people scattered around the world?
03Divide and Rule, Online
Could any of the most meaningful events in our history, whose undisputed benchmark is the Unification, have happened in the age of social media? In a time when the online world shapes our consciousness even more than our offline being does, is it really worth repeating the famous line “Unity makes strength”?
04Did the Mouse Eat the Book? Or Just the Newspaper…
“Will the mouse eat the book?” we asked at the beginning of the 21st century. Two decades later, we check whether that really happened. Did books lose the battle with the internet? Was there ever such a battle at all? And what happened to the print media in the meantime? We look for answers in the numbers from the database of Bulgaria’s National Statistical Institute.
