Socos Labs' Vivienne Ming: “I want to build better people”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2020

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Vivienne Ming, founder of Socos Labs, to talk about ethics in artificial intelligence (2:25), passing on a job at Amazon (7:55), why its hiring algorithm failed (11:0), the death of professional human judgment (13:30), how work will have to change (23:15), the bifurcation of society (26:00), what Socos Labs is (31:30), why universal basic income is not the answer (39:00), the importance of learning to learn (45:25), creating a tech wise council (50:30), AI as an expert witness (59:45), how transitioning genders has coloured her views (1:03:40).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:02.9	What is it all about?
0:04.5	I have this unique opportunity to do something I truly believe in.
0:12.6	And I think that's the only reason I'm still alive.
0:20.0	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from deep inside the Silicon Valley Future Machine.
0:28.8	I hope you had a fabulous and a restful Christmas and New Year.
0:32.3	I did and didn't.
0:34.4	We had 19 people in our house for Christmas, which was wild. Our house is very average
0:41.4	size, so everyone was on top of each other, but a good time was had by all, and then everyone
0:48.5	left, which meant the house was eerily quiet. And that allowed us to recover, catch up on our laundry, and get ready for
0:56.4	2020. And here we are, your first episode of the new year of the new decade. And it's a good one.
1:05.6	We have Vivian Ming on the show. And Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist. She is an expert in AI. She started a few
1:15.5	companies, including Sokos Labs, which is a Berkeley think tank slash AI development lab, which
1:23.6	is what she runs now. And she has opinions, lots of them.
1:29.3	And we cover a lot of ground here.
1:31.5	So we talk about the good, bad, and ugly of AI.
1:34.8	More things are going right and terribly wrong.
1:37.5	We talk about why she turned down a job at Amazon.
1:41.1	Talk about the future of the human race because why not?
1:44.9	And we also get into Ming's personal story, which is really quite harrowing.
1:49.8	She is transgender, formerly homeless, and got very close to suicide.
1:56.0	But now these days, she flies around the world advising companies and politicians on AI policy and builds new AI tools that she gives away for free.
	...

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