Lowry Pressly | Privacy and the Power of Unknowing
In an era when information is treated as a form of power and self-knowledge an unqualified good, the value of what remains unknown is often overlooked.
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In an era when information is treated as a form of power and self-knowledge an unqualified good, the value of what remains unknown is often overlooked.
Clinical Mind AI is a Stanford-developed, international collaborative platform designed to strengthen clinical reasoning education through AI-simulated patient encounters across health professions.

Clinical Mind AI is a Stanford-developed, international collaborative platform designed to strengthen clinical reasoning education through AI-simulated patient encounters across health professions.
Our November session is Scaling Training Across GPUs and Nodes with speaker Zoe Ryan. This session focuses on efficient strategies for using multiple GPUs and nodes. We will discuss how to deploy strategies of data parallelism and model parallelism to scale to multiple GPUs through PyTorch, enabling faster training times and better model performance.
Location: CoDa W401 & Zoom
Refreshments and snacks provided
Please follow the link to register

Our November session is Scaling Training Across GPUs and Nodes with speaker Zoe Ryan. This session focuses on efficient strategies for using multiple GPUs and nodes. We will discuss how to deploy strategies of data parallelism and model parallelism to scale to multiple GPUs through PyTorch, enabling faster training times and better model performance.
Location: CoDa W401 & Zoom
Refreshments and snacks provided
Please follow the link to register
Sessions run Wednesdays from 4:30–5:30 PM in CoDa E160. Each session features a different Stanford speaker; talk titles are announced by the organizers.

Sessions run Wednesdays from 4:30–5:30 PM in CoDa E160. Each session features a different Stanford speaker; talk titles are announced by the organizers.
From fitness trackers to social media, contemporary technologies encourage individuals to quantify, reveal, and optimize their lives—yet this relentless pursuit of knowledge comes at a cost. In his talk, Lowry Pressly will explore the ethical and political stakes of an often-neglected dimension of human life: oblivion. Drawing from his book, The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, which was recently named one of the best books of 2024 by The New Yorker, Pressly argues that we misunderstand privacy if we assume that its value has to do with data protection or the control of personal information. Rather, privacy’s vital importance in our lives stems from its role in protecting—but also producing—oblivion’s unique form of unknowing that is essential to trust, depth, and human flourishing. By rethinking privacy beyond the framework of data protection, Pressly challenges us to reclaim the social, psychological, and political importance of limits to knowledge—and to better appreciate the power of the unknown to sustain the human world as a meaningful and livable space.
