Video of My Talk, "Language, Technology, & Care"

I had a wonderful time giving my Topos Institute Colloquium talk yesterday. Thanks again to David Spivak of Topos for the invitation!

Happily, the talk was posted straight to YouTube. Please give it a watch and let me know what you think! Even better if you leave a comment on the YouTube page itself—I think that helps boost its relevance in the recommendation algorithm. More people need to be brought into the missing conversation about care in AI.

I was delighted that Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd, my longtime collaborators and fellow defenders of the relevance of care to AI, joined in the audience.

Behind the Scenes of the Slide Show

It was fun generating the images for the slideshow. I used a standing prompt that said something like:

 A retro-futuristic, austere, surreal image like you would find on the cover of a 1970s sci-fi paperback", and then gave more specific direction for each image, e.g., "A paperclip monster trapped in an iron cage with the words 'Instrumental Rationality' emblazoned on top.

Apparently, the phrase "Instrumental Rationality" doesn’t appear much in the training data, because DALL·E simply could not spell these words! Here is one of its attempts:

Here is another attempt:

I think it’s weird and amusing that it seems to have taken inspiration from Hannibal Lecter’s cage in Silence of the Lambs for its idea of an “iron cage.”

I'll be back next week with some writing about Heidegger!

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