Julia Shaw: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah, I probably have a bunch of categories of people. Stuff with kids is just like— … it’s tough. It’s tough. It’s tough. What gives you hope about this beautiful world of ours, about the future of human civilization, given all the darkness that you have studied? I think the fact that there are people who study the darkness gives me hope, and that there are people who want to understand why we do bad things, myself included, but I mostly get to benefit from other people’s research that I summarize into my books. I think that the tech that we are now experiencing mostly also gives me hope, in that there is this whole new frontier of capacity to implement scientific findings if we want to do so and choose to do so. Even in memory interviewing, we were talking about the potential role of AI in distorting our memories. When I do corporate talks, I tell people the prompt that I use to use the cognitive interview, which is the best practices in memory interviewing, because you can also tell AI tools to do the appropriate kind of interviewing if you’re talking about memory things. I created a company called Spot in 2017, which uses… Well, we’re now building it out to be AI, but it’s basically a tool to record important emotional memories and to share them as information with others. So I’ve always been interested in how tech can help us to record important emotional events, like with Spot, Talk to Spot, and how technology can actually make us feel more human. So there are these capacities like memory that we’re bad at, and tech can help us to overcome some of those shortcomings, as long as we use it in a science-backed way rather than just sort of freestyling. I think the worry I have sometimes is that, as I’ve said before, we’re ignoring the social scientists entirely sometimes when building these systems. It ends up becoming this engineering math problem, when that’s not actually, in terms of the consequences for humanity, what it’s going to be. So I’m always keen on connecting social sciences and big issues. Can you speak more to Spot? This sounds fascinating. So what’s entailed in recording important memories?…

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