Episode 138
I spoke with Meredith Morris about:
The intersection of AI and HCI and why we need more cross-pollination between AI and adjacent fields
Disability studies and AI
Generative ghosts and technological determinism
Developing a useful definition of AGI
I didn’t get to record an intro for this episode since I’ve been sick.
Enjoy!
Meredith is Director for Human-AI Interaction Research for Google DeepMind and an Affiliate Professor in The Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and in The Information School at the University of Washington, where she participates in the dub research consortium. Her work spans the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI), human-centered AI, human-AI interaction, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), social computing, and accessibility. She has been recognized as an ACM Fellow and ACM SIGCHI Academy member for her contributions to HCI.
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Outline:
(00:00) Meredith’s influences and earlier work
(03:00) Distinctions between AI and HCI
(05:56) Maturity of fields and cross-disciplinary work
(09:03) Technology and ends
(10:37) Unique aspects of Meredith’s research direction
(12:55) Forms of knowledge production in interdisciplinary work
(14:08) Disability, Bias, and AI
(18:32) LaMPost and using LMs for writing
(20:12) Accessibility approaches for dyslexia
(22:15) Awareness of AI and perceptions of autonomy
(24:43) The software model of personhood
(28:07) Notions of intelligence, normative visions and disability studies
(32:41) Disability categories and learning systems
(37:24) Bringing more perspectives into CS research and re-defining what counts as CS research
(39:36) Training interdisciplinary researchers, blurring boundaries in academia and industry
(43:25) Generative Agents and public imagination
(45:13) The state of ML conferences, the need for more cross-pollination
(46:42) Prestige in conferences, the move towards more cross-disciplinary work
(48:52) Joon Park Appreciation
(49:51) Training interdisciplinary researchers
(53:20) Generative Ghosts and technological determinism
(57:06) Examples of generative ghosts and clones, relationships to agentic systems
(1:00:39) Reasons for wanting generative ghosts
(1:02:25) Questions of consent for generative clones and ghosts
(1:05:01) Labor involved in maintaining generative ghosts, psychological tolls
(1:06:25) Potential religious and spiritual significance of generative systems
(1:10:19) Anthropomorphization
(1:12:14) User experience and cognitive biases
(1:15:24) Levels of AGI
(1:16:13) Defining AGI
(1:23:20) World models and AGI
(1:26:16) Metacognitive abilities in AGI
(1:30:06) Towards Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment
(1:30:55) Pluralistic value alignment
(1:32:43) Meredith’s perspective on deploying AI systems
(1:36:09) Meredith’s advice for younger interdisciplinary researchers
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