The Gradient: Perspectives on AI

Joe Edelman: Meaning-Aligned AI

Mar 9, 2023

01:06:23

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Highlights

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Episode notes

Are There Any Examples of Entrepreneurial Projects?

02:14

Are Constitutive Attentional Policies a Good Idea?

05:46

Is There a Difference Between Unleashed Preferences and What Is Really Meaningful?

05:24

Introduction

2min

What Are Your Primary Interests Right Now?

5min

Is There a Difference Between Unleashed Preferences and What Is Really Meaningful?

5min

What Is the Inevitability of Simplifying Software Architecture?

3min

What Are the Sources of Meaning?

4min

What Are the Sources of Meaning?

4min

Are Constitutive Attentional Policies a Good Idea?

6min

The Rebuilding Society on Meaning

5min

I Think There's a Lot of Work on This Front

2min

10.

Is There a Difference Between Collectivism and Individualism?

5min

11.

Social Programming - A Habitat for Groups

4min

12.

Is There a Game in Conversational Language?

3min

13.

The Dearth of Formats on Twitter

5min

14.

How to Build a System Doesn't Have to Be Slack

5min

15.

Is There a Way to Connect Sensors and Cameras in the Ceiling?

2min

16.

Is There a Future for Machine Learning?

5min

17.

Are There Any Examples of Entrepreneurial Projects?

2min

18.

The Gradient on SubStack Podcast - Episode 5 - What's Next?

2min

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.

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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

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