Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Vox Media Podcast Network

Technology, Business

4.3 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2019

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joichi "Joi" Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about engineers who over-simplify the world's problems, the Media Lab's role in "surveillance capitalism," and why the values of the tech world will shift from within. In this episode: Ito's background and what the Media Lab does; techno-utopianism and the early days of the internet; how Ito got to MIT; computers implanted in the human body; Shoshana Zuboff and "surveillance capitalism"; the gap between technology and the law; why we're not living in a simulation; what’s missing from the AI discourse; the problem with how tech solves problems; the dangers of bad policy; and the subordination of liberal arts at schools like MIT. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sabotage hired goons and a landfill in Utah.
0:05.0	How Steve Jobs' revolutionary catastrophe of a computer, the Apple Lisa, earned a brief
0:10.7	second life and then was buried for good.
0:14.8	Watch the Verges documentary, Lisa's final act, now on YouTube.
0:19.8	Hi, I'm Cara Swisher, Editor-at-large Recode.
0:25.2	You may know me as the author of an existential play narrated by the 20th letter of the alphabet.
0:30.2	It's called M-I-T, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode
0:34.8	from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:37.1	Today on the red chair is one of my favorite people I've known for a long time, Joey Ito.
0:41.2	He's the director of the MIT Media Lab, which is separate from the MIT itself, which is
0:45.6	a university.
0:46.6	He's also an activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the editor of an upcoming essay
0:50.8	collection called Resisting Reduction, Designing Our Complex Future With Machines.
0:55.9	Ito says he's optimistic in the face of the tech lash that young tech workers and consumers
1:00.9	will shift Silicon Valley's values from the inside.
1:03.9	So I think the solution is not going to be to go into Silicon Valley and convince them
1:08.7	through argument.
1:09.7	I think it really is about coming up with a different narrative outside.
1:13.5	I do think though that there is definitely a movement, so you see the tech won't build
1:18.0	it movement, which the employees saying we don't want our companies doing this.
1:20.9	You see consumers starting to say, I like lift because of this, and so I think values
1:26.1	will change.
	...

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