Julia Shaw

I just think from my mind, there was just a, you can't go there.

I don't know how to empathize with that person.

I think the fact that there are people who study the darkness gives me hope, and that there are people who want to understand why we do bad things, myself included, but I mostly get to benefit from other people's research that I summarize into my books.

And I think that...

I think that the tech that we are now experiencing mostly also gives me hope in that there is this whole new frontier of capacity to implement scientific findings if we want to do so and choose to do so.

Like, also even in memory interviewing, we were talking about the potential role of AI in distorting our memories.

When I do talks, when I do corporate talks, I tell people the prompt that I use to use the cognitive interview, which is the best practices in memory interviewing.

Because you can also tell, you know, AI tools to do the appropriate kind of interviewing if you're talking about memory things.

And I created a company called Spot in 2017, which uses...

Well, we're now building it out to be AI, but it's basically a tool to record important emotional memories and to share them as information with others.

So I've always been interested in how tech can help us to record important emotional events, like with Spot, Talk to Spot, and how technology can actually make us feel more human.

So there's these capacities like memory that we're bad at, and tech can help us to overcome some of those shortcomings as long as we use it in a...

science-backed way rather than just sort of freestyling.

I think the worry I have sometimes is that, as I've said before, we're sort of ignoring the social scientists entirely sometimes when building these systems, and it ends up becoming this engineering math problem when that's not actually, in terms of the consequences for humanity, what it's going to be.

And so I'm always keen on connecting social sciences and big issues.

So Spot came out of my going around the world and giving everyone an existential crisis.

So I'd go around and like with you, I'd say, look, our memory is really faulty.

And here's all the ways it can lie to us.

And people would go, oh, no.

And then I'd go, bye.