YouSaid · the spoken record

Joi Ito

lines on the record: 80
first: 2019-06-26
most recent: 2019-06-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I don't think of it as a specific technology, but one of the things that we're working on, or we see, is the democratization of space. So we are seeing the cost of shooting up a satellite becoming the cost of a personal computer, thousands of dollars, which has good things and bad things, but there are a lot of parallels in space trash, billboards in space. But it's really similar to the early days of the internet, where we had this government system that became commercialized, and we had good things and bad things. And so what I want to see is I want to get Space right in the way we got the internet wrong. So whether it's institution.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happen Sounds fantastic. I can't wait. I'm hoping to be part of it. Last question What is the most interesting? You always had the most interesting technology idea. What do you think is the craziest thing that you would like to see?”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So those are the things that I think we really need to do. And I think there's a new version of the hippie movement that's going to happen where people are going to say, you know what, I don't want to play that game anymore. I'm playing a different game. And the game that I'm playing and the thing that I'm solving for is something really different than what you want me to solve for. And I think it's going to be a kind of values rebellion. I think it's already started.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Short of shocked by it. And that's, I think, the key. And the problem is, again, vocational education is great, but again, economists are part of that thing, which is the reason you're here isn't to work. The reason you're here is to live and ask questions and enjoy. And so I think universities shouldn't just be to get jobs, and that should be something that's important. But it's just like that's like just cranking out widgets for the factory.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what we've done is we have subordinated the humanities. So if you go to especially places like MIT, you've got the engineers have all the power, all the money, and everything looks like an engineering problem. And we've made liberal arts sort of this sideshow. I think that we need the historians, the social scientists, the anthropologists, the qualitative people involved in asking the questions. Why are we here? What are we doing?”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think we need to create a society that is self-regulating and isn't so centralized. And I think, again, I keep going back to culture. And this goes all the way back to the beginning of our conversation. I think it's a lot like how to build a strong, resilient communities. And it's less like trying to engineer a program.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before we put these jetpacks on. And we're, you know, it reminds me, I was just looking, I'm talking to my historian friends and 67 was 58 race riots across America. 50 years ago, we had Vietnam protests on MIT campus. There's a lot of similarities. And I think one of the concerns that I have is that we have a horrible relationship with ourselves right now and then adding more power to it isn't going to help. And so the complex, it really is a complex system. And regulating complex, so our bodies are complex systems. The earth is a complex system where we're somehow able to keep our body temperature. Relatively stable. And it's not because there's somebody in charge. It's because we have a resilient complex adaptive system. And I think that's like having a very good culture and very good norms. And I think that's what...”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we already have complex relationship with machines. Cards. Yeah, and Norbert Wiener was an MIT mathematician in 1950 wrote a book called Human Use of Human Beings. And he said that organizations are machines of flesh and blood. So we already have machines. They're called corporations, right? And our future is just supercharging what we already have. We can't even control companies. And so to me, it's like putting jetpacks and blindfolds on and just supercharging in whatever direction we're headed. And so what I think we need to do is we need to get our house in order.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you should poke, but the problem is that you overshoot. One of the worst laws that was ever created, the computer fraud and abuse act that was created the year after war games, it makes it a felony to breach of terms of service. When Julia Enguin shows that you can buy ads for Jew hater on Facebook, she's probably a felon for doing that. And that's stupid. And that's because lawmakers overreacted to some dumb movie that scared the pants off of them. So that's what I'm worried about.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I guess the one thing I will say, though, is that there are a bunch of people who are making a business out of fearmongering. And I do think that, for example, I recently wrote in Wired, there are great places online for kids to learn. And overreacting to the scary stories about kids having trouble online, I think could destroy these public spaces that help me learn when I was a kid. And so, I mean, we don't shut down churches and schools just because kids have problems and they probably have more problems in churches than they do online. I don't think we should be shutting these things down. I don't think that we should be shutting even Facebook down. I think what we need to do is go in and make them better, just like we try to get institutions to be better. So I do worry that there's kind of a whole generation of people who flipped out to the outside and now kind of go around sort of making money scaring people, which I think.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. It is interesting. Defensiveness is fascinating. The defensiveness is just one of my. I can't believe the richest and most powerful people in the world are victims. I just won't listen to them talked about themselves like that, but they tend to do that as a group. Not everybody. A lot of people, it's interesting. We're having a panel at Code this year called Inside Out, the People Who Have Left, all of a sudden are becoming quite critical in a way because now they're like, wait a minute. And it's not sort of born again kind of thing. It's more like, oh. I see the damage, I understand the damage. And it's a really interesting question whether it sticks or we do get these draconian rules from Congress or whoever or abroad, like GDPR or something happens somewhere where we get too much of a correction.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experience of being in Silicon Valley over the last few decades is everybody kept saying you couldn't do it and that they can do it. So there's really this interesting thing of there they go again, just telling us we can't do it, but we can't. Although being dragged in front of Congress and stuff like that, I mean, that wakes you up a little bit. But it's difficult. So I think the solution is not going to be to go into Silicon Valley and convince them through argument. I think it really is about coming up with a different narrative outside. I do think though that there is definitely a movement so you see like the tech won't build it movement, which the employees saying we don't want our companies doing this. You see consumers starting to say, you know, I like Lyft because of this. And so I think values will change even in Silicon Valley. And so, and it's interesting when you look at the companies, the senior people are more oblivious of this. 100%. The younger people or the people who are more in the system. And so I think it's going to change kind of bottom up.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and also this idea that things like fairness just can't be reduced to a formula and moved on and that it's messy. And the problem is that they've just been told over and over again that, oh, you'll never be able to do this. And then you can. So when you go to Mark Andreessen's office, software will eat the world. And because everybody kept saying, oh, you can't do that in software. Only humans can do that. And then they do it.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because reduction is important to get anything done. You have to reduce a recipe to a recipe to give it to somebody. So reduction is important, but it's resisting over reduction. It's the old, don't make it as simple as possible, but not simpler. But it's hard, though. I was just yesterday arguing with one of my friends in Silicon Valley about the role of advertising. In that community, since it's so powerful, since it's so reinforced by success, it's almost impossible to have that conversation with them.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know what I mean So, how do you think about that? So, first of all, it's really hard. You're saying resisting it. So resist”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're in violent agreement with each other. You know what I mean? And then they feel victimized if you start to go at them. And what's interesting to me is there's a lot of people like you, like me, Roger McNamee, who are in who are like, wait a minute. So they know the inside and are saying, you guys have to stop because you don't understand what you're doing. And to the outside are saying we look like attackers when we're not attackers. We actually, some of the other day was like, why do you hate Facebook so much? I said, I don't hate it. I love it. That's the problem. You know, I don't love Facebook particularly, but you know what I mean? The concept. And so what's really interesting is how do you educate these people who reduce into a new way? So how do you think about that?”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an interesting concept because this idea reduction is actually an excellent word when I think about it because they do they always have answers and I'm always like I'm always wary of people who always have answers to things and one of the things that has happened is because they reinforce each other in the society they're in”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being disgusted with us, being disgusted, so disgusted that they don't want to work for that company. They don't want to get on a private plane. They don't want more stuff. And I think the problem is we've just started measuring our success with how much stuff we have. How could he be smart? He's not rich. That kind of notion, and I think that the next generation's interesting.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And so I think GDPR is well intentioned. It's better than nothing, but it completely doesn't hit the target yet. So I think that the tech people have to get involved. So I do think this public interest technologist idea kind of like we have public interest lawyers getting tech people more involved in coming up with how we move forward. The problem is also tech people tend to want to just solve the problem. But the problem with the problem is that it's not like previous problems where you just solve it. You actually have to keep asking the question, is this even the right question? And this is why it's much more difficult. The next generation, so I think it's actually, to be honest, it's a value shift. I think it's about the younger generation, your kids.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of That's what I read about in the Times this week. Exactly what I was saying. You're going to whiffle. It was interesting because everyone's like, oh, you're being protect. I'm like, no, I'm saying there's got to be informed or else we're screwed even worse than we are now with no laws, that kind of thing. And they have to be proactively forward versus looking backwards because it's hard to not understand where you need to go if you don't understand where you're going.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know you had to jump out the window. Several, right? Several face went down. So I feel, I actually feel kind of responsible for having been involved in some of this. And so I don't feel innocent. And I feel that having been part of all of this, I have to do something about it. And so I'm not like a third party observer in this. And so I think, though, that thinking about internet governance, I do think that the changes that we make have to be technically well informed because I think that uninformed laws, whether they're gun control laws. That's what I wrote about in the Times this week. That's exactly what I was saying. You're going to whiffle.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you have this little girl and you think she's going to become this wonderful kid and then she gets possessed and starts, you know, becoming this.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And was one of them. And I felt like if we connected everybody together, we would have world peace. It just turned out to be more complicated. And, you know, it's kind of an old movie now, but you know the exorcist, you know, that little girl in the exorcist, that's what the internet feels like to me. I had this little girl in there.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So take the side of the reductionists. What is good about that? Because it's been pushed at us a lot, that we'll figure that we'll get you cars that work, we'll get you this that works, we'll get you full communications. None of it has turned out the way.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. This is a very carer swisher way of saying what I was trying to say, which is life is messy, and that if you ignore that, it's going to get worse. And the reason that it's a collection of essays, which I was excited, I wrote this little manifesto-like thing. Called resisting reduction. And It triggered a whole bunch of responses from Silicon Valley all over the place. And so then we decided to collect these essays and put them together into a collection that have a group of indigenous people. I have somebody who does the philosophy of science. And so it's a really interesting sort of response to some of these things.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I would put economists and sort of neoclassic economics in this, which is just reducing everything to just measuring GDP.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is what I call reductionist. Because fairness is really complex, and it's always contextual. And so the risk is, and so reduction is important. Reduction is Newton's laws. Reduction is what allows the engineering that created the Industrial Revolution and brought us all this stuff. But my concern is the stuff that we have, which is efficiency, productivity. But that's the stuff that makes us obese. That's the stuff that creates climate change. That's the stuff that the efficiency that creates income inequality sometimes. And so a lot of the, and this is an old thing. I mean, I'm not the first to say this, but the problems that we have today are caused by the tools that we created. I think there's a lot of people who believe that more efficiency and more productivity will fix everything. And so this is sort of a religious, almost religious kind of difference. And I think right now there's a lot of power in the hands of the reductionists.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People think we live. This is a game. Yeah, a lot of people approach life like an engineering problem. So for them, I could imagine that they could see their whole life being In a computer. But there are a lot of people, and I think they sort of sort out if you go into the humanities or the East Coast, there are a lot of people who don't think like a computer and they live life through experience. And only things that happen actually matter. And so I think what's interesting is that a lot of decisions that we make about how we feel about civil rights or gay marriage or whatever it is, those aren't decisions that are optimizations. Those are these cultural transformations that occur in society. And I think what's missing right now in the conversation in AI is that, first of all, I think that that's kind of the point of life, and in my own personal opinion. But also, you take things like the notion of fairness. So there's a conference called FATML, fairness, accountability, and transparency. I guess it's kind of fat star now. But a lot of the papers that you see by the engineers say, we'll just define fairness as accuracy or something like this.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The kind of thinking where they look at their life as a game, where they say, okay, I'm optimizing for money and this and how many minutes do I have to do this. So for them, I tweeted out the other day, those people who think that we live in a computer simulation are the kinds of people who are most likely to be simulations. Explain the computer setup.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they feel, though, I mean, a lot of them feel that the world can just be reduced to a very simple formula. And so therefore, then if you could create an AI that was smart enough, it would figure out how to win at life. And we would either lose or this would save the world. And to me,”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what was happening is as I was starting to get involved in this conversation about the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence, I teach a course that's cross-lic between MIT and the Harvard Law School called the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence. And what I realized was that a lot of the engineers who work in AI felt that you could reduce the whole world to a Function and that life, human life was just optimizing and that the world could be simulated in a computer and that if we could just and that world life was just a game that you could win. Right. And there were a lot of.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it is legally hard. So there was a Reuters article about the Amazon using its historical data to create an HR engine that just went to hire white men. Well, the engineers will say, oh, well, we should just, okay, got it. That's bad. So let's just create a constant to give increased scores for women and minorities. Well, it turns out Title VII, which is anti-discrimination part of the Civil Rights Act, says that over the years now, because of all this lobbying, affirmative action is illegal. It's illegal to put your thumb on the scale. So today, we can still push for diversity by having the HR persons lean towards minorities. But the problem is if your data says we want to hire white people, it's illegal to put your thumb on the scale. And so what we're seeing now is the law doesn't protect us. The code isn't protecting us. And all of these issues are just suddenly becoming. And the problem is you need to understand both the law and technology. And technology.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's dirty data. And even if it's perfectly accurate, society is unfair, right? So society's dirty. And so what you're doing is you're reinforcing sort of backward-looking status quo. And so it doesn't allow us to be progressive.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so automated decision making, the problem is the judge gets this risk score. And some of the risk scores, like the difference between a five or a six, might be a few percentages points, but they say, oh, it's a six. We should sentence this person to a longer time in prison or not give them bail. And so what happens is it's taking, and again, the argument is that humans are biased and these things are less biased. But the problem is that the data is biased. It's called”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and so basically, what it does is it predicts how likely you are to recommit a crime. But for example, they use rearrests as a proxy for your likelihood to recommit a crime. And it turns out that rearrests have a lot more to do with policing practice than the sort of inherent criminality of the individual. And what it does is it tends to reinforce social biases. So if you look at data, for instance, there's a famous study by Christine Lum, and it shows that in Oakland, when you do a health study, everybody across Oakland does drugs. But when you look at the police data, only poor neighborhoods do drugs because all they're looking at are drug arrests, and they only arrest people where they go. But when you look at the police data and you put it into the algorithm, the algorithm thinks that only poor people do drugs. So what happens with these risk scores is it reinforces the bias. It also takes the agency. So it says, no, no, no, we're just trying to predict the criminality of the poor people, and we'll just make policing more efficient and make jails more efficient. Instead of saying, wait, is there something we can change?”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so for example, right now we have these risk scores that we use in criminal justice for setting bail, sentencing, and probation.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, since I got there, I got there as an administrator, but over time they made me a professor of practice and I started teaching, I'm taking students now. So my own area of research is based on what I've observed being there. And so it's really on understanding automated decision making and criminal justice or trying to understand the way that academic publishing tenure and funding Create silos and create the way that science and knowledge get created and to try to turn it on its head. And so what I'm trying to do is take what we've learned at the Media Lab and to try to push it out to fix some of the problems that I see. And also”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think my hypothesis is that it gets scary in a different way because I think people are more complicated and I don't think machines can solve the complexity of human beings as easily as the technology people might think. And that I think we're going to have intervention pretty soon. And again, books like that help the intervention happen. But I don't think that a lot of people who really believe in machines feel that the machines will get so smart that all of the messy complexity of human existence will no longer be a problem. I think that's impossible. So I think that the worst case scenario isn't as scary, but I also think the best case scenario isn't as optimistic.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think people are especially born by sci-fi that they see and everything that they've had over the course of their lives, it will be. You can iterate it out to the end and if it gets good, it gets really scary.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think, and again, I think it's a really important conversation to have, and this is sort of a longer conversation, but I also think, like Cambridge Analytica, their sales pitch was a lot sounded a lot scarier than when you actually look at the data. It's not nearly as effective. And so one of the other meta questions is, so how effective are these ads in making you buy corn flakes? And I think, again, it's probably more effective than the average person thinks, but I don't think it's nearly as effective as some people sell it.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I guess my point is that the word surveillance is usually by law enforcement, and it's used to catch bad people in the eyes of the surveiller. Whereas I think the surveillance capitalists today, I would say, are Not using the data to catch these people and put them in jail. They're using it to sell you cornflakes, do stuff to you that may”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I think she's basically saying that the capitalist system that converged with the Silicon Valley Big tech companies that realized that taking user information and behavior and turning that into money was the currency of the day. And all of the technology for collecting information, understanding the information, tracking that information are the tools of the trade. And a lot of that was developed at the Media Lab. I think it's an interesting book. I do think there are some things that I, for instance, when I was fighting the copyright battles, the constant thing was, so there's rival risk good, non-rival risk good. Somebody steals your car, you don't have anymore, but somebody takes your picture from Flickr, you still have it. And so one of the, I think the problems with her book is that she treats data as if it were sort of a rival good, like oil, and it's different. Some of the key points she points out, I think, are okay, but some of the...”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that for me, the privacy and so the surveillance capitalism conversation, the Me Lab plays a big role in her book, and she calls out a lot of the work at the Media Lab as the tools of the trade of surveillance capitalism. And I think that thinking about our role in the world that she describes and thinking about how”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in typical Nicholas form, he said, that's not other, that's another. He's like, no. And so I think what really is a key thing about the MediaLab, which I love, is that we really do embrace the other. We're always trying to bring in things that make us uncomfortable, things that we don't understand sometimes. And I think that's what's very different from a traditional academic department where you're sort of extending, but mostly going into areas that are either adjacent to or connected somehow to the thing that you're doing.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's really the faculty search process. I remember there was the faculty search process that the founder Nicholas was running, and we called it the professor of other. And the candidate had to be proficient in at least true orthogonal fields and be antidisciplinary. But we were looking for this faculty member and we had a faculty meeting and we had this candidate everybody loved.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Company. We're giving money to mechatronics. We have Ed Boyden, who is doing synthetic neurobiology. So he's trying to understand all the different ways to understand the brain and perturb the brain to tackle some, because the brain's really complicated and is connected to a bunch of things. And I think that we have a very simplistic view of how the brain works. And medicine is really about kind of trial and error and not there isn't as much understanding of underlying mechanisms as you think. I mean, a lot of the pills that you take when it says mechanism of actions is unknown. And so a lot of what Ed is trying to do is understand the brain because most of the diseases that we have these days is now we live longer and longer are diseases that involve the brain. So that's a whole group. And in that group, it's not just neuroscience. We have AI. We've got robotics. We've got nanotech. And it's a very integrated group. And we have 25 groups. And each one's very, very different.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and there is kind of science and engineering about understanding things like systems dynamics and things like that, but the framing of why you're doing this and for who, I mean, so questioning is usually the artists and the scientists and the designers and the engineers are the ones that usually try to just kind of make it, you know, create the utility. And at the Media Lab, what we're trying to do is bring all of those together, art, science, engineering, and design on a good day.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes people throw away. That's exactly Which is what you get when you have an engineering point of view, let's just solve it. Not any of the repercussions or what you did to get there or anything. Yeah.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is, it is, it is. Words are really important. Sometimes people throw away words and then we revive them. And it's really about robotic prosthesis. How do you communicate with these prostheses? And it's interesting because there are cases where if you have a bad ankle and you're constantly having surgery actually amputating it and replacing it with a robotic prosthesis will increase your quality of life. And it's just these and somewhat taboo. And so some of these things are about poking at things that are taboo that might actually make you better. But to answer your question, I think generally.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think if you go to the history of the media lab, it's always been somewhere around the interface between humans and machines. And then it was a lot of the early social media and internet stuff came from the media labs. It was sort of networks and society. And more recently, it's data and AI in society. But there's always something about human beings and technology. And in the life sciences, it's often around the interface between inside of your body and machines or Hugh Hare's group. biomechatronics is”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT