#329 – Kate Darling: Social Robots, Ethics, Privacy and the Future of MIT
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What is the background of Kate Darling?
The following is a conversation with Kate Darling, her second time on the podcast. She's a research scientist at MIT Media Lab interested in human-robot interaction and robot ethics, which she writes about in her recent book called The New Breed, what our history with animals reveals about our future with robots. Kate is one of my favorite people at MIT. She was a courageous voice of reason and compassion through the time of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal at MIT three years ago. We reflect on this time in this very conversation, including the lessons it revealed about human nature and our optimistic vision for the future of MIT, a university we both love and believe in. And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor.
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got True Classic Tees for high-quality t-shirts, Shopify for e-commerce, Linode for Linux, Insight Tracker for biomonitoring, and ExpressVPN for privacy. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I hate those. And since I do this podcast, I'm able to control whether we do them or not. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by... I believe in you, sponsor. I've been wearing their t-shirts for a while now, so I don't remember. But I do remember that I've been loving it for a while now.
Anyway, the sponsor is True Classic Tees. They're high quality, soft...
How did the Jeffrey Epstein scandal impact MIT?
slim-fitted t-shirts for men. They also make all the other menswear staples like polos and workout shirts, and they're all built with the same flattering fit as their t-shirts. It's kind of fascinating how something like a t-shirt can feel good and look good, and the way to achieve those two goals are very subtle design decisions. So it's fascinating because I'm a t-shirt person. I usually just wear a black t-shirt, a bunch of black t-shirts. True Classic Tees is an example of a company that delivers. Now that I've tried it, that's all I've been wearing. I feel amazing. Get comfortable and upgrade your wardrobe with True Classic. Get 25% off at trueclassic.com with code LEX. Free shipping included. Unpurchase is over.
$100. 100% risk-free guarantee with 30-day return policy. This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere. With a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life and gives you tools to manage day-to-day operations. I've been using Shopify for a while to sell stuff, but my use cases are pretty simple. And I think that's probably true for many people, for many merchants. You just want to sell a couple of things that you care about, and to a small set of people that are interested in that kind of thing. But I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs that really use Shopify to run a business, small business, medium-sized business, all that kind of stuff.
I think it's 1.7 million entrepreneurs that use it. Yeah, it's my favorite.
What are the sponsorships mentioned in the episode?
As far as I'm concerned, if you look on Reddit and all those other kinds of places, Shopify is the recommended place to sell stuff online. Super easy to use, super easy to set up, all that. Get a free trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features when you sign up at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Shopify.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Linode, Linux virtual machines. It's an awesome computer infrastructure that I just love everything about it. It lets you develop, deploy and scale what applications you build faster and easier. I use it for small personal projects. I hope to one day have huge projects that I can run on it. I think the big competitor is AWS.
There's probably a bunch of others, but AWS, it's lower cost than AWS, better customer service, the simplicity of everything. I just love it. Obviously, computer infrastructure, the compute has to be really good, right? The actual systems have to be really good. The distributed compute has to be good, but...
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the background of Kate Darling?
0:00–1:41
2
How did the Jeffrey Epstein scandal impact MIT?
1:41–3:23
3
What are the sponsorships mentioned in the episode?
3:23–42:55
4
How does humor play a role in robotics discussions?
42:55–1:34:52
5
What ethical concerns arise from marketing to children through social robots?
1:34:52–1:35:17
6
How do kids perceive social robots and their advertising?
1:35:17–1:35:52
7
What challenges do companies face in addressing algorithmic bias?
1:35:52–1:36:14
8
How does the discussion of love and relationships relate to robots?
1:36:14–3:09:33
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Lex Fridman Podcast
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