5 of our favorite hot takes from the Lisbon Web Summit 2023

With more than 70,000 delegates and 2,608 startups from 93 countries in attendance this year pitching, the event was once again a landmark in the event calendar.

The Drum was there, and while we couldn’t tune into all 806 speakers, here are a few nuggets from some of the sessions we did attend.

Andrew Mcafee, principal research scientist at MIT on algorithmic intervention

Algorithms are having more and more of an influence in lots of domains. The reason I am not terrified by that is when I look at what we are doing today. We need to compare the innovation to the baseline. We are still letting human-alleged experts make these societally important decisions.

The more I learn, the more I want the algorithms involved more deeply. The research is overwhelming about how inconsistent we are, how biased we are, how resistant to training to eliminate our biases we are. When I think about decisions, for example, just in criminal justice, either with granting people parole or letting them out of jail early. Then I look at how those decisions and how the outcomes improve when we involve more algorithms and more data, I get really excited.

Now, I want to be clear, especially for important decisions that are societally important. I don’t just want algorithms to run wild and have no human intervention or no human oversight on them. I think that’s probably a bad idea in a lot of cases. However, again, we have more than a half-century of research on this, and letting the human and doing quote marks here, ‘experts,' continue to make these important decisions is giving us inferior outcomes in areas that we care deeply about.

Yes, a lot of our algorithms are biased. There’s a huge amount of work to try to identify and eliminate those biases at most of the different places. In general, the algorithms today are less biased than the people today.

Carlos Moedas, mayor of Lisbon, on the need for diversity

If I get together with someone like me, it’s fun, but I won’t invent or innovate because we think alike. But if I get together with someone that is totally different from me, then that’s the spark that makes innovation a reality that when you’re really different, sometimes it’s tough because you’re different from the other person, and you can’t find a little bit uncomfortable, but that’s why it's still a little bit uncomfortable that you need to find new things for the world.

Brian Collins, founder of Collins agency, on its work for Figma

When you look at the bottom of the painting, you see one signature. When you look at the spine of a book, you see one author. When you look at a Netflix movie, you see one inventor. What we decided is that if it had things really work. The myth of the lone genius is only a myth. Great ideas come from working together. Two heads are better than one. And so alone is great. But nothing great is made alone.

Dan Gardner, co-founder Code and Theory on futurism

Most people, not everybody, but most people are relatively new into AI. They haven’t been doing this for years. They don’t have the sophistication to go as deep in both thinking and execution the way that they think they are. Including myself. We’re all fake experts. We’re all pretending like we know what the future and the reality is we don’t and we're not as original as we think we are.

Liza Enebeis, creative director, Studio Dunbar on pitching

I think it’s so brilliant that there’s so many people pitching today because they know they have nothing to lose, and they're really going for it. My father always always said if you don’t play, you can’t win. And I think that goes for everybody here, and that's why we’re all here. We want to play, and we want to win.

Because if you don’t try an idea out or you don’t ask, you really, really don’t stand a chance because you’re already at zero.

You just need to ask! If they say no, you’re still at zero and you’re still OK.