Joe Edelman: Meaning-Aligned AI

Joe Edelman: Meaning-Aligned AI

Author: Daniel Bashir March 9, 2023 Duration: 1:06:23

In episode 63 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Joe Edelman.

Joe developed the meaning-based organizational metrics at Couchsurfing.com, then co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris, and coined the term “Time Well Spent” for a family of metrics adopted by teams at Facebook, Google, and Apple. Since then, he's worked on the philosophical underpinnings for new business metrics, design methods, and political movements. The central idea is to make people's sources of meaning explicit, so that how meaningful or meaningless things are can be rigorously accounted for. His previous career was in HCI and programming language design.

Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!

Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on Twitter

Outline:

* (00:00) Intro (yes Daniel is trying a new intro format)

* (01:30) Joe’s origin story

* (07:15) Revealed preferences and personal meaning, recommender systems

* (12:30) Is using revealed preferences necessary?

* (17:00) What are values and how do you detect them?

* (24:00) Figuring out what’s meaningful to us

* (28:45) The decline of spaces and togetherness

* (35:00) Individualism and economic/political theory, tensions between collectivism/individualism

* (41:00) What it looks like to build spaces, Habitat

* (47:15) Cognitive effects of social platforms

* (51:45) Atomized communication, re-imagining chat apps

* (55:50) Systems for social groups and medium independence

* (1:02:45) Spaces being built today

* (1:05:15) Joe is building research groups! Get in touch :)

* (1:05:40) Outro

Links:

* Joe's 80m lecture on techniques for rebuilding society on meaning (youtube, transcript)

* The discord for Rebuilding Meaning—join if you'd like to help build ML models or metrics using the methods discussed

* Writing/papers mentioned:

* Tech products (that don’t cause depression and war)

* Values, Preferences, Meaningful Choice

* Social Programming Considered as a Habitat for Groups

* Is Anything Worth Maximizing

* Joe’s homepage, Twitter, and YouTube page



Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe

Hosted by Daniel Bashir, The Gradient: Perspectives on AI moves beyond surface-level headlines to explore the intricate machinery and human ideas shaping artificial intelligence. Each episode is built on a foundation of deep research, leading to conversations that are both technically substantive and broadly accessible. You'll hear from researchers, engineers, and philosophers who are actively building and critiquing our technological future, discussing not just how AI systems work, but the larger implications of their integration into society. This isn't about speculative hype; it's a grounded examination of real progress, persistent challenges, and ethical considerations from those on the front lines. The discussions peel back layers on topics like model architecture, policy, and the fundamental science behind the algorithms becoming part of our daily lives. For anyone curious about the substance behind the buzz-whether you have a technical background or are simply keen to understand a defining technology of our age-this podcast offers a crucial and thoughtful resource. Tune in for a consistently detailed and nuanced take that treats artificial intelligence with the complexity it deserves.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI
Podcast Episodes
Linus Lee: At the Boundary of Machine and Mind [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 2:28:46
In episode 56 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Linus Lee. Linus is an independent researcher interested in the future of knowledge representation and creative work aided by machine understanding of langua…
Suresh Venkatasubramanian: An AI Bill of Rights [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:40:58
In episode 55 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian. Professor Venkatasubramanian is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at Brown University, where his research…
Melanie Mitchell: Abstraction and Analogy in AI [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:47
Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!In episode 53 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Melanie Mitchell. Professor Mitchell is the Davis Professor at the…
Marc Bellemare: Distributional Reinforcement Learning [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:12:22
Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!In episode 52 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Marc Bellemare. Professor Bellemare leads the reinforcement learni…
François Chollet: Keras and Measures of Intelligence [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:28:50
In episode 51 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to François Chollet.François is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google and creator of the Keras deep learning library, which has enabled many people (includ…
Yoshua Bengio: The Past, Present, and Future of Deep Learning [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:14:09
Happy episode 50! This week’s episode is being released on Monday to avoid Thanksgiving. Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!In episode 50 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bash…
Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht: Generally Intelligent [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:21
In episode 49 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht. Kanjun and Josh are CEO and CTO of Generally Intelligent, an AI startup aiming to develop general-purpose agents with human-lik…

«1...678910