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The Rise of Social Robotics

Social ref­er­enc­ing is so great robots should do it, too. But first there are some tech­ni­cal chal­lenges that we need to solve. For instance, low ener­gy con­sump­tion. Throughout these tech­ni­cal chal­lenges, what these robots real­ly need to do is under­stand the social envi­ron­ment that they are in. 

Applying Neuroscientific Findings to Enduring Social Problems

When low­er pri­mates form a hier­ar­chy, those at the bot­tom under­go a change in their dopamine sys­tem. This makes them more like­ly to con­sume drugs in an addic­tive fash­ion. Now, if this turns out to be true of our species, that would mean that human beings are par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble if they’re in some way dom­i­nat­ed or don’t have any power.

Engineering Thoughts and Memories

In brain decod­ing, we take our mod­el that we’ve devel­oped of the brain (and this can be a mod­el for any­thing, vision or lan­guage) and we reverse it. And instead of going from the stim­u­lus to the brain activ­i­ty, we go from the brain activ­i­ty back to the stimulus.

Verifying and Validating Machine Intelligence

We’ve been build­ing autonomous vehi­cles for about twenty-five years, and now that the tech­nol­o­gy has become adopt­ed much more broad­ly and is on the brink of being deployed, our earnest fac­ul­ty who’ve been look­ing at it are now real­ly inter­est­ed in ques­tions like, a car sud­den­ly real­izes an emer­gency, an ani­mal has just jumped out at it. There’s going to be a crash in one sec­ond from now. Human ner­vous sys­tem can’t deal with that fast enough. What should the car do?

Biased Data Panel Discussion

I think that we need a rad­i­cal design change. And I might ask if I were teach­ing an HCI class or design class with you, I would say, How are you going to design this so that not one life is lost?” What if that were the design imper­a­tive rather than what’s your IPO going to be?

Four Trends for the Digital World

This quote’s from Andy Warhol. He was look­ing at America and say­ing America’s dif­fer­ent. He’s say­ing, Well, Elizabeth Taylor’s drink­ing Coke and I’m drink­ing Coke and the bum on the street’s drink­ing Coke, and it’s all the same thing.” For the first time in his­to­ry, mass mar­ket cul­ture has allowed us all to enjoy the same thing. This is not cham­pagne. The bum on the street can’t afford champagne.

Sin in the Time of Technology

Social media com­pa­nies have an unpar­al­leled amount of influ­ence over our mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions. […] These com­pa­nies also play a huge role in shap­ing our glob­al out­look on moral­i­ty and what con­sti­tutes it. So the ways in which we per­ceive dif­fer­ent imagery, dif­fer­ent speech, is being increas­ing­ly defined by the reg­u­la­tions that these plat­forms put upon us [in] our dai­ly activ­i­ties on them. 

Everybody Knows When You’re Talking To Your Mother

You have to think with your users, with your cus­tomers, what is your actu­al rela­tion­ship? Are they your gods? Are they your guests? Are they a nui­sance to you? Because you know where the pow­er is. 

When Algorithms Fail in Our Personal Lives

I won­der with all these vary­ing lev­els of needs that we have as users, and as we live more and more of our lives dig­i­tal­ly and on social media, what would it look like to design a semi-private space in a pub­lic network?

Interview with Filip Leu, Tattoo Artist

The main dri­ve we all have is the desire to be tat­tooed. Design comes in sec­ondary, absolute­ly, because there are mul­ti­ple choic­es at every turn that would suit just fine.

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