For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code. Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript. We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)
216: Robot and Human Collaboration with Julie Shah
02:21 - Julie’s Superpower: Working Really Hard and Maintaining Focused Attention on Things for a Long Period of Time
04:25 - Robotics and Working in Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- What To Expect When You're Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration (Julie and Laura Major’s book)
11:10 - Structuring and Optimizing the World for Machines, AI, and Robots
- The Turing Test
- Labeled Data
- Teslas vs Airplanes
- Mode Confusion
- Ten challenges for making automation a "team player" in joint human-agent activity
26:10 - Understanding Output and Building Calibrated Trust
- Mental Models
33:39 - Robots and Humans in Public Spaces
- Predictability
- Directability
- Standardization
- Infrastructure
- Safety Imperatives
- Future of Work Implications
- Joint Activity
51:41 - What To Expect When You're Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration (Book Discussion)
54:40 - More on Human/Machine Collaboration:
- Girl Decoded: A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology
- Reinforcement learning with human teachers: Evidence of feedback and guidance with implications for learning performance
- Evaluating fluency in human–robot collaboration
Reflections:
Rein: There may be a sense in which AI or ML systems are categorically different from the sorts of systems we’ve tried to control in the past because you can’t characterize the variety of the system anymore just by observing its inputs and outputs.
Damien: Artificial intelligence is not human intelligence, nor should it be. The goals are making systems and human lives better; not making the computer better.
Julie: Aim for mediocrity!
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Special Guest: Julie Shah.
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