Joe Edelman: Meaning-Aligned AI

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