LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

For details regarding specific events please contact the organizers or venues. If you are an organizer or venue and would like to reach out to us please feel free to contact us or submit an event using our submission form. We’d love to hear from you!

technology

  1. Events
  2. technology

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Zucked (Penguin Press) is the story of how noted tech venture capitalist Roger McNamee, an early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and investor, woke up to the serious damage Facebook was doing to our society and set out to try to stop it. Zucked is McNamee’s intimate reckoning with the catastrophic failure of the head of one of the most powerful companies to face up to the damage he is doing.

Free

Damon Krukowski

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Our voices carry farther than ever before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard? In his new book, writer-musician Damon Krukowski examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. In Ways of Hearing (MIT) – modeled on Ways of Seeing, John Berger's influential 1972 book on visual culture – Krukowski offers readers a set of tools for critical listening in the digital age. Krukowski lays out a choice: Do we want a world enriched by the messiness of noise, or one that strives toward the purity of signal only?

Free

Julie M. Albright

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

In Left to Their Own Devices (Prometheus), digital sociologist Julie M. Albright looks at the many ways younger people, facilitated by technology, are coming “untethered” from traditional aspirations and ideals, and asks: What are the effects of being disconnected from traditional, stabilizing social structures like churches, marriage, political parties, and long-term employment? What does it mean to be human when one’s ties to people, places, jobs, and institutions are weakened or broken, displaced by digital hyperconnectivity?

Free

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the hard-charging CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley. Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped (W. W. Norton) presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber. Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic 12-month periods in corporate history.

Free

THIS IS NOT A RUSSIAN PLOT: A “Readings for Now” Seminar

Mother Foucault's Bookshop 523 SE Morrison St, Portland, OR, United States

The Oregon Institute for Creative Research presents: THIS IS NOT A RUSSIAN PLOT: A “Readings for Now” Seminar This is not a Russian plot, despite articles to the contrary by Mr. William J. Broad, science journalist, senior writer, and DuPont fellow at the New York Times, which, a month prior, had established in its main newsroom a "5G Journalism Lab" in partnership with telecom giant Verizon so that readers of the country's newspaper of record can see "more detailed, lifelike versions" of David Bowie's new red shoes. A "Readings For Now" seminar & group discussion on fifth generation wireless technologies.

Free

Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. The achievements in the field thus far have occurred in closed systems with fixed sets of rules, and these approaches are too narrow to achieve genuine intelligence. The real world, in contrast, is wildly complex and open-ended. Gary Marcus’s Rebooting AI (Pantheon) (coauthored by Ernest Davis) provides a clear-eyed assessment of the current science and offers an inspiring vision of how a new generation of AI can make our lives better.

Free

Flynn Coleman

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

The Age of Intelligent Machines is upon us, and we are at a reflection point. The proliferation of fast-moving technologies, including forms of artificial intelligence, will cause us to confront profound questions about ourselves. The era of human intellectual superiority is ending, and, as a species, we need to plan for this monumental shift. International human rights attorney Flynn Coleman’s A Human Algorithm (Counterpoint) examines the immense impact intelligent technology will have on humanity.

Free

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Melanie Mitchell separates science fact from science fiction in a sweeping examination of the current state of AI and how it is remaking our world. Interweaving stories about the science and the people behind it, Mitchell’s Artificial Intelligence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) brims with clear-sighted, captivating, and approachable accounts of the most interesting and provocative modern work in AI.

Free

Cyrus Farivar at Northwest Academy

Northwest Academy 1130 SW Main Street, Portland, OR, United States

Until recently, most of our personal activities were easy to keep private, and unearthing the details required at least some effort on the part of those seeking our information. Today, however, with the advent of social media and surveillance technologies, along with the movement of many aspects of our lives into the digital realm, our data has become more widely available and more public. Between emails, web browsing, phone calls, CCTV cameras, social media posts, and online transactions, we can be tracked by private companies as well as our government. But, how much of this tracking is even legal? Cyrus Farivar has written a great book, called Habeas Data, that examines 10 pivotal legal cases that have shaped our current rights related to privacy and…

Continue readingCyrus Farivar at Northwest Academy
Free

Ramesh Srinivasan

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

In his new book, Beyond the Valley: How Innovators Around the World Are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow (MIT), Ramesh Srinivasan describes the Internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. To make a better Internet, Srinivasan says, we need a new ethic of diversity, openness, and inclusivity, empowering those now excluded from decisions about how technologies are designed, who profits from them, and who are surveilled and exploited by them.

Free
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.