At New Paradigm, one of our perqs is getting to meet a lot of smart, creative people. Through our extended community and faculty, we get access to a lot of cool thoughts….or, “I’m not surfing Facebook, I’m researching.”

Here is a sample:

Alexandra Samuel who worked on a predecessor study of our Government 2.0 research wrote this great post comparing online communities to robot uprisings. My favourite part:

Robots reflect and amplify the worst traits and behaviors of their human creators. Robots can do all the stuff we do: perpetrate mass slaughter (Matrix, Terminator, the Day the Earth Stood Still), take away our ability to make independent decisions (2001), exploit human energy/labor (Matrix), destroy the natural environment (Matrix, Terminator), and appropriate other species’ cultural, biological and physical assets (the Borg). Likewise, the virtual being constituted by a social network can amplify the worst traits within the network: social networks have perpetrated mass frauds (hello, lonelygirl15!), turned peaceful coexisters into rotten neighbors, reduced people to whether they are hot or not, and — in an especially horrific case — even bullied at least one teen to her death.