Stanford Professor Michele Elam and Kevin Scott on art, AI, the engineering mindset and more

Stanford Professor Michele Elam and Kevin Scott on art, AI, the engineering mindset and more

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[ MUSIC ] KEVIN SCOTT: Michele Elam is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Humanities in the English Department at Stanford University, and a Race and Technology Affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her work is informed by the understanding that racial perception and identification impact outcomes for health, wealth, and social justice. Her most recent book project, "Race Making in the Age of AI," considers how the humanities and arts function as crucibles through which to frame and address urgent social questions about equity and social justice in socially transformative technologies. She teaches what sounds like fascinating interdisciplinary courses at Stanford, ones I really wish I'd had the opportunity to take when I was an undergraduate student. And I get to work with her closely at the Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford.

Michele, I'm so glad to have you on the podcast today. MICHELE ELAM: I'm so happy to be here. I look forward to talking with you.

KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. So, look, we always start these conversations by going all the way back to folks' childhood and how you got interested in the things that ultimately led you to choose the career path that you are on, or maybe what you didn't choose and what just sort of organically happened. So, tell us a little bit about your childhood and how you got onto the path that you're on. MICHELE ELAM: Thank you.

I feel like we're already in a therapy session, because the path chose me. It's so odd, really, how I got interested in this. I think about this all the time when I'm teaching my students who, it always looks like, they have a straightforward path to a major and then a career.

But mine was really peripatetic. So, I was a humanities person. I wasn't a technologist.

I wasn't particularly interested in math. I wasn't bad at engineering. My father was an astronautics engineer and he worked on the Apollo 13 tracking system.

And the early -- and that influenced me a lot because I remember him. He was a straight up engineer, and he hated that the government was sending monkeys into space. He thought that was completely unnecessary. He hated the politics of the Cold War -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- the sort of politics informing. And at that time, you remember, very early AI, I think he was -- it was in the 60s and 70s, it was mostly government contracts.

He was working for control data and then very early artificial intelligence. And I was completely the opposite. I don't know whether it was just having a father for whom the world was a problem to solve. There was a whole engineering mindset that had full explanatory force for everything. And when you're growing up, that totalizing view of the world always frustrated me. We were always at loggerheads.

He unfortunately passed away during COVID, not of COVID, but right before I joined the Institute for Human Centered AI, and or thereabout. And he would have been flabbergasted that I was sitting around the table, as you know, that that institute, at least at the time I joined, we had eight [Associate Directors of HAI] it was very interdisciplinary intentionally. So, Fei-Fei Li and her -- John Etchemendy decided that they wanted, in addition to computer scientists and engineering, I was representing arts and diversity, humanistic perspectives. We had someone in the medical school, someone from law. She'd taken sort of C.P. Snow's, "Two Cultures" and blown it up and she really wanted people sitting at the table.

But before then, that table didn't exist. And the cultural status, at least for my father, of being an engineer, doing things, making things, always seemed unintentionally, I'm sure by him or culture, to set technology and technologists above the arts, which were always seen as sort of ornamental, nice. Maybe they add local color to a product or something. And so, I was always frustrated by the different cultural statuses with that. So, I'll just say it is bizarre that I'm sitting here talking to you, Kevin.

And I think we, if I'm not mistaken, we actually met at in Rome. KEVIN SCOTT: We did. MICHELE ELAM: The dialogues and that was really what started I would say quite late in life obviously, my interest in this, not just because Fei-Fei and John approached me about it, but there was a conversation there with spiritual leaders, right? The Pope, the Pope's people who were brilliant, Father Eric Salobir and other people, who were talking about spirituality and AI and not in an apocalyptic or hallelujah way, but what are the bigger implications? And there was a conversation about storytelling, if I recall. And the people in the room, I think were thinking storytelling like marketing.

How can we tell this story better? And I was like, "There are so many more narratives about technology than 50s science fiction by white cis-male authors. I mean, that's there, too. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: And I think we connected over that too, because you have such an expansive imagination. And then I think the other strange thing that happened, it was before facial recognition technology. It was literally like 25 years ago and a photographer had taken pictures of the faculty and unbeknownst to me, had sold my image to Getty Images.

The university didn't - I wasn't at Stanford at the time - didn't know either. And I started seeing hundreds of pictures of me out there. But I started being lightened and darkened. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes.

MICHELE ELAM: And my father-in-law saw me on the side of a Boston bus as the older than average non-English speaking student going back to school. I was on Harvard's Rainbow site. I was on the Hispanic Congressional Caucus website as a proud Latina moving in. So, I became very interested in one, the appropriation and commercialization of people's images. And I remember you telling me at the time, you're like, "That is nothing." It is like, having your sort of proprietary relations with your own image is just the sort of start of it now because of course now there's like generated AI -- generative AI where you can create faces in any--.

But both of those set me on a more cynical path, I think, to thinking about AI and both because I was cautious because of my father's true believer commitment that engineers would solve the problems of the world. And then also, the use of my image and that weird sense of losing control of your identity. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. Well, look, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to be cynical. I mean, it's sort of funny, like it's -- MICHELE ELAM: To be cautious. KEVIN SCOTT: -- yes.

Yes, cautious, right, or skeptical or--. The way that I describe engineers to most people is -- and the way that I think about myself is I'm a short-term pessimist, long-term optimist. And I think as an engineer you kind of have to be and it sounds like your dad was very much this way.

So, like you, yes. By virtue of your acculturation or the brain that you were born with, you kind of look at the world in terms of everything that's broken and what you can do to go fix it, right? That's the impulse of engineering. And it's like a pretty jaundiced way to look at the world.

MICHELE ELAM: I like the way you described it, though, because that to me seems also like an ethical way to look at the world. Because I remember my -- it can be limited if we don't pair it with other ways of looking at the world. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes.

MICHELE ELAM: Through different vocabularies and mindsets, yes. But the way you just described engineering actually sounds very much like my father at his best because he wanted to -- he always would say, "We shouldn't just make things because we can. We should make things because and know what to do with them," which I realize is sort of antithetical to general intelligence, but he was very concerned with the social impacts of the things that we create and the social implications of them. And that's what I hear when you say that then, too. There are problems in the world that engineering can address. So, I definitely appreciate that.

KEVIN SCOTT: I want to go back to your father in just a second and talk about why it is that you think he may have held engineering and technology apart and above from the humanities or other things. And you and I both know in academia that there's always -- everybody's got some stack ranking in their head of which thing is better than the other. I'm sure it's even in the humanities, right, that -- MICHELE ELAM: For sure. KEVIN SCOTT: -- at some point you're like you -- you've--.

And all of it is kind of silly because the beautiful thing about being a human is like we're all just playing our role. Hopefully we've chosen to do the thing that we're especially good at. And hopefully we've all got enough wisdom to understand that we don't know everything and that we need all of these other perspectives to come in and help us, particularly as engineers. You can sort of look around and see that everything is broken, but maybe you don't understand why. Maybe you don't understand that not all fixes to all problems are equal in merit. Maybe you don't even understand what's worth fixing and what isn't.

And that's where you need a lot of help from other people with different perspectives. MICHELE ELAM: I agree. KEVIN SCOTT: But I mean how much do you think your father's perspective on things is just mindset that you're born with, because I do think that there's some really particular things about an engineer brain? And how much of it is it sounds like he's a Cold War, post-World War II trained. MICHELE ELAM: I think -- yes. KEVIN SCOTT: And so, a lot of it culturally is like, "Hey, we're in this existential battle, and science and technology is the way we win.

And here's the stuff that's important." And yes, it's easy to be in the middle of that and you think that you're more important than you actually are. MICHELE ELAM: He didn't quite have the hubris. I think it was -- it was hopefully -- I'm not sure about the engineer's brain. It's like biology and also training because he'd gone to Princeton and -- which did have a liberal arts background then at the time, actually. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes.

MICHELE ELAM: But for him, I don't know if I can give this example. Well, this is -- it was a sense of security and control. I was listening to -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- a couple of your other interviews with Mira, for instance, Murati, and the sense of -- especially when the world is in chaos, it seems like a way of making sense of things that bypasses politics and bypasses sort of social issues, all the things that at least I was growing was particularly interested.

I remember to his great credit, he always wanted, I was the eldest, me to not take sewing class, which is -- we had -- I can't remember what it was called. Like Home Arts or something. And then -- or you could figure out how to fix a car engine. And he was like, "No, you need to be able to fix a car." And he would teach me these things. But I remember him first instructing me at age 12 when I was pubescent.

I know you have like -- they're older now, but young kids. So, they're just coming into their own and their bodies and he was like, "Here's the hammer and here's the nail and the -- and here's a screw and a nut." I can't remember how he described. And he's like, "One is the male part, and one is the female part."

And I was just like, "This gendering of these tools is not -- is a problem dad." And I was feeling it like kind of horrified and -- that he was talking about male parts and female parts and female parts were passive and male parts were active. And even at 12, 13, I could see the gendered implication. For him, it's just like that's just how it is. And so, it didn't take him to thinking about the way his own field incorporated social values.

It was meant to be objective and neutral. And so -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- and there was a lot in the training. You know this, too.

And I have lots of engineering students, as you can imagine, at Stanford. That education has really started to change because it used to be you had to just learn all the technical aspects and then belatedly maybe after you went into industry, you got to ask questions about the ethics or application. Students want to know now. They want -- they're interested in social psychology.

I was just having a student talk to me about the Weizenbaum's Eliza Effect in relationship to the arts, and they want to integrate those questions about social psychology, whether or not they go and build a product, but early on. And I think of my dad's era. It was very much, "This is the domain of another field.

You can deal with the social issues. We'll deal with the technical one." And I think he associated the social with political that he didn't want to -- that he also found muddying pure math and muddying pure --. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: So, I don't think he was -- I have framed it like a battle.

I hope it didn't feel like I was too cynical, but because I really -- I think I have -- there's a lot of talk about interdisciplinarity and to your point, we need multiple perspectives. When you sit down at the table, which literal table, and I was luckily at HAI, we call it, as you know, the Institute for Human Centered AI. We were all equal partners.

However, the vocabularies, the way we talk about the world, the things we prioritize, the way we document our work in a universe where the quantitative is so important, I found, I know my colleagues did too, the way to legitimize humanities and arts was often by -- through quantitative methods. We would start to use the same language and metrics that the engineers were to measure success or impact and things like that. And humanists were not humanist people in literature or theater or visual or performance arts or writ large, I'm thinking of arts.

We sounded very squishy talking about it. Like it just -- the arts move us and they're -- we had very vague language or at least the way we talked about its potency, the arts potency, didn't compute literally with some of my colleagues. So, I have come to really appreciate how hard it really is. And there's outsized money in technology in ways not in the arts. What it means to come with goodwill together and try and hear each other when we have studied differently, learn differently and sort of speak differently -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- about the things that are important.

I always find it -- my father used to say and then we'll get off my father. The artists on the one hand and art was often seen as sort of ornamental. He loved -- he sculpted. And I do want to ask you because you work with clay. Oh my gosh, you understand so much as a practitioner yourself, as an artist.

But he felt that -- he felt that the artist on the one hand seen as sort of incidental, and he bemoaned that. He thought it should be more important. But then he also pointed out that the first thing that fascist or authoritarian governments do was get rid of the artists, because they're the ones that shape the cultural imagination. They're the ones that actually -- and that's very powerful.

At least he saw they're both seen as irrelevant, and yet a primary threat. And that always fascinated me. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. I mean, it's always, I mean, like maybe this is getting a little bit too philosophical and squishy. I kind of wish we had fewer of these categories that are about skills and professional identity because you're a writer. You are an artist.

You're creative. But you also have things that you do that you're an engineer. You're a problem solver. You have to use quantitative methods for things. And so, it's just kind of -- what context are you in and what skill do you need to be able to manifest to solve the problem that you're working on.

And like we get a little bit -- MICHELE ELAM: But do you feel like --? Well, I'm super -- you're total -- I mean, I think I know where you're going, but I would love that in that world, too. You authorized yourself to create. You do sculpture.

You do clay, right? You work with clay? KEVIN SCOTT: I do. MICHELE ELAM: I only recently found this out about you because your Instagram post is amazing. But there's a case where you took yourself seriously enough to do that. And I imagine if you had decided to go into that as a -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- profession, there is tension sometimes about that. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes.

And that's certainly -- when I was younger, I think this is one of the things that I struggle with this with my children. So, yes, there's one thing that -- there's this joy that I find. I just have curiosity about everything and it's thrilling to go wallow in that curiosity.

But there, especially I think when you're young, there's a risk to casting the net too wide because there's some things that you want to do that are complicated and you have to focus for a little while to get good enough at a thing so that you can bring something to it. It was hard to learn how to program well. It's hard to do a bunch of things and you just have to go put the time in and I think when I was younger, that's how I invested my time.

I sort of cast aside a whole bunch of things that were interesting to me because I was like, "No, I've got to get good at this. This is going to be my professional identity. I have to focus enough to get into the, I don't even want to call it the elite, but I just want to be able to at a high level, go participate with a bunch of other people who are working at a high level on this.

And I want to be able to understand what they're doing and contribute. And yes, I'm not even saying that that's the wrong thing to do. It's sort of the advice I give to my kiddo who my 16-year-old is a bio nerd, and she also is interested in a gazillion different things.

And I'm like, "Look, you have to -- at some point, if you care enough about this one thing, you have to invest enough of your time and energy in it to get good at it. MICHELE ELAM: When you're talking, I'm thinking, especially because the stakes are higher with our children. And I think -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- with so many students that I see, well, like hundreds, that tension between having deep expertise and taking the time, the duration to get good at something, whether it's in the arts, whether it's in literature, whether it's in engineering is challenging because for instance, I've always taught at liberal arts institutions. And that -- it means that you have a level of expertise, but you are simultaneously also learning these other things.

KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: I don't know if you recall, but a few years back, the engine -- the credentialing for engineering, our engineering majors, is external and if they could, they would grab these kids in utero and start training them. I mean there's no profession including my own that wouldn't say if you just laser focus on this and the other things can come later.

I do appreciate that the opportunity with liberal education -- arts education is that. And it's a balance. It's not easy to find, develop enough focus and expertise, real expertise to excel, not just get by, and yet also, bring in with enough and not just casually like an elective, an arts practice elective, and somehow students manage to do it.

We've been thinking -- some of that's a curricular thing. Can we make it so that we hold at bay whatever field of expertise it is that's saying, "No, I'm going to train you for this profession," which is problematic, not least of which because it will change. But also, you said something earlier that I thought was so important. So, you obviously had internalized this earlier, which was you wanted to create things that had it -- that changed the world. And I think at those places where arts and sciences connect as well then, too. Reid Hoffman, dear friend, talked about recently in a talk about -- that he thinks we're techno sapiens.

That we're makers from the beginning, but I actually think we're storytelling sapiens because we are -- KEVIN SCOTT: A hundred percent. MICHELE ELAM: -- but they're not so far apart, if you think about it. Not to flatten makers and we're all makers or creators, which is to -- in some ways do a disservice to the expertise you're talking about. Also, that is essential. But I feel like we don't -- to go back to your thing about we don't have to have categories.

That's an example where we don't have to simply prioritize. We don't have to typologize -- create typologies of what we can do. I think that -- talking with you is always fascinating. I like the squishy philosophical, actually, because it has real practical implications when you're in school, just as you said, because a lot of the ways we teach disciplines and fields, go back to the 50s or even before. And students, human beings, are naturally if they have -- if school doesn't kill the joy of curiosity, want to know things, want to learn things.

But you mentioned and I was thinking about this a lot when I found out that you do pottery. If you call it pottery or do you call it pottery, the work that you're doing -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- which is beautiful. There's pictures of the kilns and the thing about arts that I would love brought into technology more, and the woman I taught with before was a MacArthur award-winning artist, Camille Utterback, who reminded me of this too, is that the practice of art making is durational and iterative and recursive, and it takes time in that kiln.

And so, what I have partly -- what I would love to see more of, let's put it that way, is that the idea of size, speed, scale, efficiency, optimization, which works really well, I think in start-ups and certain things, doesn't have to apply to everything. Doesn't have to -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- right? You're saying you're agreeing.

So, I'm lucky you're agreeing, but I think it seeps into the way we talk about things. KEVIN SCOTT: No, I violently agree, and I think what the world needs from us is largely contextual. So, I was in Japan a few weeks ago and no surprise, I spent -- a very interesting trip. So, I spent the first half of the trip opening up Microsoft Research Tokyo. So, a new research lab -- MICHELE ELAM: Congratulations.

KEVIN SCOTT: -- and entirely focused on AI. And then I spent the last half of the week talking to a bunch of Japanese craftspeople, so potters, people who do Edo Komon, which is a dyeing practice for making kimono fabric and folks who make traditional cedar barrels and folks who make canvas bags. And so, the vast majority of the people that I talked to on the last half of that trip have been working inside of the tradition that is their craft, their entire lives.

And like the tradition itself is centuries old. And it's super interesting. Like -- MICHELE ELAM: How do you reconcile those two things? KEVIN SCOTT: Well, I think Japan does, as a society, does a very good job reconciling the two because on the one hand they are more progressive than most places in the world, including in some cases the United States and adopting very, very advanced technologies. And they can -- while they're doing that, simultaneously revere tradition and hold onto these things that if the objective function for your society was economic efficiency, they make no sense whatsoever. MICHELE ELAM: Yes, I love that.

KEVIN SCOTT: But in fact, they make a lot of sense inside of Japanese society because if anything, they sort of look at the technology as purely a tool, an instrument that's in service of Japanese people. And the art is something that's in service of your soul or your spirit or --. MICHELE ELAM: Right.

Right. Yes. I love that. And I love that you said the word "revere." And the other thing in that description that makes me realize I need to go to Japan is that so much of AI is so future-oriented. It's always -- it's like unprecedented supposedly, and never been seen and it's always -- and history can get left behind or seen as an enlightenment, progressive upward arc of somehow we're getting more and more advanced and then we can have an attitude towards the past and history as if it was more remedial or something we have to sort of get over. The way you just talked about Japanese culture as probably even revering the arts in that sense, even more, and tradition is beautiful.

And you mentioned our AI is a tool, too. One of the things that has come up a lot is the idea that it's a tool, but it's not exactly neutral. I don't know how you think about that, but it does embed social values the way language does, too. So, I love it as a -- in its proper place as a tool in service of it.

I think sometimes we maybe say "AI for good" as if it's inexorably going to reconcile kind of for-profit motives with social imperatives. It's a dance, I realize, but --. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes, I think calling AI or any other tool neutral is almost like a little bit of sophistry. It's kind of dancing around the issue that you really are getting at because it doesn't matter whether the piece of technology is neutral or not.

Ultimately, a human being is going to go decide what to do with it and human beings are -- MICHELE ELAM: The user, sure - KEVIN SCOTT: -- absolutely not neutral. MICHELE ELAM: Yes. Well, I mean it's interesting because the implications of that do matter.

So, either it's in -- when I mean -- so, if you think that it's bad actors, that it's not the technology, it's the misuse of technologies, that's one approach to solving technologies you might not like to see in the world. And the other is what technologies, when I mean social values, get embedded, besides the example of my father and male and female parts is what gets funded? KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: Who's in place to think this is valuable or not? And so, those you know... KEVIN SCOTT: I 100% agree with that.

MICHELE ELAM: Yes. KEVIN SCOTT: And it's one of those things too that's context dependent. One of the first projects that I worked on when I left academia and joined industry a million years ago was I built very early machine learning systems that made judgments about which content was adult or not. MICHELE ELAM: Oh. KEVIN SCOTT: And -- MICHELE ELAM: That's fascinating.

Yes. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. And so, you will find very quickly that that is very context specific. So, what one country or society or culture finds offensive -- MICHELE ELAM: Totally. KEVIN SCOTT: -- another may find acceptable. And -- MICHELE ELAM: Yes.

KEVIN SCOTT: -- there are all of these -- and then there's some things where we all have just globally decided as human beings this is unequivocally -- MICHELE ELAM: Hopefully. KEVIN SCOTT: you know, in the category and we have to treat it as such. But it's sort of interesting and yes, it's eye-opening when you have to sort of confront these things like as an engineer because I was 30 years old at the time. I was a little bit like your dad.

It's like, "All right, well, there's a reductive way of looking at all of this stuff and the algorithm is going to be simple and it's going to -- yes. MICHELE ELAM: But I love that example. I think that's so moving because beyond just content moderation, but at HAI, they're doing work right now about if you recognize that certain technologies that were created amplify whatever bias, this is so not new to you but -- or social agitation or whatever, then -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- what are the ethics of moderating that and how does that change across different cultures? And they've been sort of looking at it in terms of political animus and also being having transparency who are the moderators of it. But you can see within a heartbeat, if you're trying to do good, it puts you right in the realm of social psychology and ethics and I think the best engineers and you are so one of them, are like, "Gee, maybe I need to know more?" I think that's important. I think -- I won't name the names, but there's been a few books that have come out and said, "Well, humanists, people or laypeople just need to know how the technology works more.

They really -- they're not credentialed to weigh in on policy or anything else." KEVIN SCOTT: Yes, no, nonsense. MICHELE ELAM: Well, given that it impacts every aspect of our public and private life. But I felt that way, too.

I felt like at HAI before I -- I didn't want to just start critiquing something that I didn't technologically understand. But there was this tendency and there still is actually at Stanford, Introduction to AI, it's almost entirely technical. Maybe there's like a unit on ethics, but as you know, there's like huge debates and fascinating research out there, not critique meaning critical, but that can enlarge and encourage, I think, engineers or whoever happens to be creating, the arbiters of the worlds in which we live to think about the things the way you are, the way you always have, Kevin. You've always been like this, as far as I can tell.

KEVIN SCOTT: I wish one of the things that we taught our young engineers was for them to lean into the sort of discomfort that arises very quickly when you're trying to build technology for human beings. And they lean into all sorts of discomfort, right, because you walk into your first partial differential equations course and like -- MICHELE ELAM: You're uncomfortable. KEVIN SCOTT: -- that's uncomfortable because it's hard and like you don't know all of the answers right away.

But you -- I mean the weird thing, getting back to your dad, I think -- MICHELE ELAM: He's here in spirit right now. He would have loved you, Kevin. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes, no. God bless your dad, man.

I never met him, but I think I love him. Like he did sound like a super interesting human. MICHELE ELAM: He would have loved you. KEVIN SCOTT: But like we let our engineers get away with this notion that there are straightforward answers to most questions. MICHELE ELAM: I would love you to come into my class because this class that I taught, I'm going to invite you and now we're on record, to come in and talk to these students.

KEVIN SCOTT: I will come. MICHELE ELAM: Oh my God, they would utterly love it, especially the way you're talking. So, when I team taught, it was arts and AI with this artist, because I realized I needed to -- to bring her in. And then we actually brought in people who were working on AI, particularly. And the engineers were very uncomfortable initially with -- we're talking about feminist AI, queer AI, artists and AI artists of color dealing with like decolonial AI. You could just see their pupils dilating.

But the people who'd been working in either performance or theater or literature arts, who, if they weren't familiar with it, they were -- it wasn't -- they were either the social sciences or humanities. It didn't seem so odd to them. They were highly intimidated by what looked like the outsized intelligence and status of the engineers. And so, we created some assignments. I mean, they were both intimidated by each other.

That's the point. And -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes, yes, yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- but that's why I like undergrads and some graduate students who are, if they're not totally pre-professionalized, because they're so open and curious. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: And if they're -- and if you can create assignments where either they're case studies or different kinds of assignments. So, it's not just memorization and it's not just product design.

They produced amazing things. A couple of them went on to become Rhodes Scholars and it was a stance of humility, too. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: We weren't dogmatic coming in there and saying, "Get outside of your narrow mindset," -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- but you would be very inspiring to them because you can come in.

No, I mean think of the impact very early on when they're young and still open, because as we get older, I don't want to say "we," once you hit 30 and you are professionalized and you're surrounded with certain world and you're rewarded for certain kinds of things, there's just less of a tendency to have the kind of totally frank, open conversations that we're having right now, Kevin. I so appreciate your --. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes, and you -- there's just all of the natural forces like the gravitational pull is all towards, you're hanging around, you're working in teams with people who are like you. You are going to parties with people who are like you.

You are -- MICHELE ELAM: What parties, Kevin? Or your parents are suggesting because we get conservative listening to what you were just suggesting to your daughter, I think it was, who's amazing by the way. We want to look after them. So, we're like -- and they may have a passion that shows up later in life. That my one cautionary note to this, especially if you're first gen, and I know your background, too. My mother didn't go to college -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes.

MICHELE ELAM: -- is the sense of like, "You better get something that is going to make you solvent. And so, there's this pressure. But I cannot tell you how many times my husband, who you also know, and I have seen students who are going into a field that they think is going to pay out or at least make them stable. And then when they're 30 or 40, have a midlife crisis and they're like -- and then--.

So, it's a balance. I mean, I have no idea what the answer is. It's just that I -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes, I don't know either. I mean, look, I think the thing is you just at any point in time, there are pragmatic decisions that you have to make, but you also need to leave yourself open to possibility and have at least some feelers that are outside of whatever bubble that you might be living in. One, you have to recognize, you're going to be in a bubble at some point.

MICHELE ELAM: Yes. KEVIN SCOTT: It's just -- MICHELE ELAM: Bubble recognition is hard if you're the fish in the fish bowl for all of us. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: Yes.

Well, how did you -- can I ask you a question? KEVIN SCOTT: Sure. MICHELE ELAM: How did you get into pottery? I want to hear about your experience as a practitioner. It just seems a very different step than the kind of work you do. How did you valorize or validate yourself enough to -- because I've seen some of your work on Instagram. It's beautiful.

KEVIN SCOTT: Well, I've never been able to decide what I am. And this goes back to me as a kid. So, the first thing that I wanted to be when I was really young, is I wanted to be an artist. I was going to be an illustrator. The first college catalogs that I had sitting on my desk were for RISD and -- MICHELE ELAM: Wow, really? KEVIN SCOTT: Yes.

So, I -- and I'm not saying I ever would have been good enough to get into these places or to have a career, but I just wanted to be an illustrator. And then, I went to -- and I, right around the same time I discovered computers, and I got really fascinated by programming and whatever. I don't even understand it. But there was a feedback loop there where I enjoyed programming enough where I did a lot of it, which made me better at it, which made me want to do more of it. And so, I got pretty good at programming relatively early.

And the good thing about that is by the time I showed up at college, and I went to a liberal arts school, I was good enough at programming that I didn't have to burn 100% of my cycles trying to get better at programming in college. And so, I was a CS major, but like an English literature minor. So, I had an English literature advisor and a CS advisor who at some point had a -- MICHELE ELAM: That explains a lot about you. KEVIN SCOTT: And so, I'm just always interested in stuff that --.

So, I'm interested in my day job, for sure. I love computer science. I love programming.

I love building complicated software systems, and I love the problems that trying to do those things throw at you. It really does scratch a really powerful itch that I have. But I also have all this other stuff that I want to do that it's kind of dissimilar.

And so, I do woodworking, and I make bags, and I make machines, and I sketch and for the past year or so, I've been down the rabbit hole of ceramics and making pottery. And part of it is just I think of it almost like meditation. It's like the thing that I go do that engages a different part of my brain where when I'm doing it and I'm doing it -- I'm just fully engrossed in it, I can't think about all of the other stuff that may be giving me anxiety or I'm not making progress on it in the other part of my brain.

But I can go accomplish something with the other part of my brain, which is very fulfilling and necessary. So, I do think they complement one another. MICHELE ELAM: Yes, they may actually even be integrative. I mean, I think it's interesting. One of the -- listening to you talk about creativity and in AI and one of the ways AI has been talked about is amplifying or blitz-scaling creativity by expediting it or scaling it.

But actually, the way you talked about it as meditative, not as escapist, but as also -- I always as sort of just stating, I suspect what's going on in your brain is not the two halves. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: And even the idea of the neural map is a metaphor, but that -- I'm sure all of us have gone to bed thinking about something and then we wake up and whatever that durational process is. And so, I suspect that your ceramic making is making you a better engineer, too. And probably vice versa, I--. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes.

And look, I do ceramics like an engineer. I've invented tools. Some pieces of it, I'm much more precise than a normal ceramicist. I'm off buying rotary viscometers to make sure that my -- MICHELE ELAM: You're so wacky, Kevin.

KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. But I also -- so, it does two other things for me. One of them is just purely -- it is a little bit escapist because I will tell you, the more senior that I've gotten in my career, the less individual contribution I can feel on any of the things that I'm doing, because there are thousands of people and they're usually years long projects. And so, it just really -- you can't really see what you're contributing to a thing.

Whereas like you go into the studio and you make a pot, you know exactly what you've done and the timeline's kind of short and it's your own two hands and you get to the end of it and you're like, "Here's the thing that I made." And the young computer scientist, you have that and then you just sort of lose it over time. And so, it's really good for that. But the best thing that it does for you is it gives me a way to go talk to people who aren't computer scientists, because it's hard to go to an artist and to strike up a rousing conversation about how great stochastic gradient descent is. MICHELE ELAM: I just want to pause here and point out how moving it is the way you're talking about art because not once have you said -- so, social connection, also a mode of personal expression with a sort of not, I don't want to say outcome, but a connection to that which you're creating.

Not once did you talk about aesthetics, good art, bad art. Because if there's one thing that's been helpful about all the debates about AI and art honestly is that it did upend the professional art world. And the tastemakers and all of that, because the aesthetics about what makes for good or bad art, according to all those traits, are so culturally specific and historical. But I love -- so, I really wanted to just -- the teacher in me is like, "That's a note worth pulling into relief," because the way you talked about what is fulfilling about art resonates with the way people understand, not just personal expression or even social commentary, which for some is, or even art for art's sake, which is almost impossible to do anyway.

But art is not even just a reflection of the world, but also constitutive of it. You are creating your own worlds and different ways of thinking. I'm sure that shapes the work and life that you have, and that's usually how people do -- I mean to me, that's a more meaningful way to value art.

KEVIN SCOTT: Yes, it's sort of funny. You talk to artists and artists I think have a hard time defining exactly what art is. So, forget about good art and bad art, but what is it? And to me, and this isn't me even saying this is what it must be. It's just how I think about it.

Art feels to me like this thing that you have in you that you need to express, that you don't have any other way to express, but it has to get out. You've got to --. MICHELE ELAM: I hear that. It's like a calling.

KEVIN SCOTT: And there's other parties in this transaction. So, like you sort of put this thing out there and then you have a whole bunch of other people that are going to connect to you through this thing that you've tried to express. And whether or not they get what it is that you were expressing to the extent you even know what it was that you were expressing. The important thing is there's a connection.

There's a conversation that you can now have about this very squishy thing. And the catalyst for the conversation is some artifact that you've made. MICHELE ELAM: Think about how you just talked about this right now, which was, you said squishy and at Stanford it's fuzzy. But actually, you were very articulate about what it is.

It just doesn't fall into the same calculations or certain kind of vocabularies that engineering does. But Toni Morrison has this great line where she says where she writes the novels and then she sends them out into the world like children. So, there'll be people who value it or evaluate it, or there's valuations of the work you do, or is there aesthetics, But you're right, the artists themselves, sometimes they can name what they're doing. There's fabulous people who can. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes.

MICHELE ELAM: But it's not required, necessarily. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: And I think you're absolutely right.

But that's part of also sometimes how people dismiss artists. They're like, "Oh, they're just out there in a little Parisian atelier just doing their little thing." So, we need better ways to talk about it and to revalue it. The way you talked about Japan appreciating a tradition, if it's built into institutions where we, it seems to me, allow space, funding, culturally even parks like creating or you know, it costs money to create art -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- a lot of times.

So, not that we have to think about the economics of it, but we haven't talked about this at all, but I'm hoping at some point, and I know we're almost out of time, but talking about the value of art and then the conditions for art are so important, because all the debates, as you know about the SAG-AFTRA debates or the strikes, and the copyright compensation -- KEVIN SCOTT: Well, I -- MICHELE ELAM: -- all of that, it's in the background of all of this, I think. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. And I think it's a super important conversation.

And I'm sure there are many, many, many parts, but at least two of the parts are like there's sort of the -- there's the economics of art and creativity. What's the business model for it? How does it get funded? How can you choose to be an artist and have a career? And I think it is perfectly rational for everyone who has discovered a business model that empowers their creativity for them to say, "I am not interested in having this upended on me without any input from me because I'm just a human being trying to have a life and to earn a living from this thing that I've invested so much of my time and energy getting good at." That's perfectly natural and real. And then there's this other question, which is, "Okay, well, we have AI and AI --."

I don't even want to use the word "can do" art because I don't think it actually can. But it can -- it is at the very least a new tool in the repertoire of artists. And I think there's a question people have around whether the existence of this new tool, does that demean what they do like artistically, not economically.

But does it take away the value of this thing that I do? MICHELE ELAM: Right. KEVIN SCOTT: And I think there the answer is like absolutely not. MICHELE ELAM: Right.

I actually would agree with you. I think it is much more similar to a paintbrush and there's a very long history of technology in artistic creation then, too. But you mentioned can it do art and that takes us right into these debates about "What is art? What is great art?" To me, I'm pretty sanguine about that.

The other question actually that has obsessed me with lately is not because -- is not, "Can it do art?" or is it like a simulacrum of artistic expression or is it cannibalizing other artists' livelihood and future of work? Of course, all super important, but also to me, "What is art?" isn't an abstract question because historically, I always think about, "Who and why is asking? Why is that question posed?" And a friend of mine was pointing out, Thomas Jefferson very infamously said, he'd never heard, I'm paraphrasing, a Black person utter a line of poetry or a love of narrative. And not just because he was opining about the biological status and abilities of Black people, but also, there was an anti-slavery bill that he was supportive of, but it actually included the notion that Black people were not culturally or physiologically advanced enough to become part of the polity. And if art is an index of the level of humanity, which it has been for a very long time, was seen as the apex of sophisticated cultures and so on, then that question, which should seem sort of moot, actually, I always think about how -- where's that being used or mobilized? Not to get wonky or anything, but why is it really mattering to people? Are they anxious that AI is going to -- or algorithms are going to steal future work? Are they anxious because it looks like it's the last Turing test of humanity is artistic expression? Or is it sometimes, I mean, for me at least, I feel like the pace of technology, not just the pace of technology, but the way we're all supposed to speed up and have this seamless user experience and not pop, that feels a rub against artistic creation, the way you've talked about it too.

The value of taking time, of pausing, of reading a book, which takes a really long time. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: That I just want to hold those together in the same space somehow.

KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. You said something a few minutes ago, which I think is really, really important. We are maybe more than homo techne. We are whatever -- you know, the Latin. MICHELE ELAM: Techno sapiens was his term.

KEVIN SCOTT: Yes, yes. We're -- MICHELE ELAM: Storytellers. KEVIN SCOTT: -- storytellers. And one of the interesting things about art is you can have a Japanese tea bowl, for instance, and it can be a vitrified hunk of mud if you look at it one way, or it can be like this thing that has a rich tradition that's centuries old and just a fascinating history around all of the different ways and all of the sort of artistic and social reasons that things got made the way that they were made. And you have people even today who just invest an enormous amount of their soul into making these objects, not because they're interested in making a vitrified clump of mud that you can put some green powder in and sip some liquid out of. It's the story around it.

MICHELE ELAM: Yes. KEVIN SCOTT: It's about Buddhism and nature and state of mind and harmony. MICHELE ELAM: I love that you just pointed out the multiplicity of narratives with even an object, because when we say storytelling, it's not just one cultural narrative. And it's not even just everything subjective.

It's that it's almost like a palimpsest of all these different kinds of storytellings I complete. And storytelling that is a function of both the thing itself and also the viewer -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- which I think is just so -- we co-create the meaning of the objects we create. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: I love your description of that, Kevin. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes.

And sort of, back to AI. So, the object itself is relatively uninteresting, absent the humans. And the two interesting things to me about the humans relative to the object is you have a craftsperson who went to extraordinary lengths to make this thing. And it's less about the thing than the extraordinary lengths that the person went to make it. And then there's the story that surrounds the whole thing. That's what makes it compelling, because if you didn't have those two things, then it's kind of borderline indistinguishable from some random rock that rain hollowed a pit out in and it's -- MICHELE ELAM: Yes.

KEVIN SCOTT: -- we impute the meaning on these things. MICHELE ELAM: Completely. And sometimes, the meaning is shaped by marketing. Like, "We're going tell you what this thing is important to you." And then humans, just as you said, we co-create the meaning of it, too. I do think of the Eliza Effect of the way we will insist on meaning in the things that we create, even when we know the meaning doesn't necessarily just reside in it, which I find fascinating, potentially problematic because we can be profoundly manipulated by those things, obviously, but also something very poignant to me, that we're meaning-making creatures.

KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: I love that. KEVIN SCOTT: And so, that that's why I am obviously in a whole bunch of different ways worried about the bad or the unintended stuff that our tools can let us intentionally or unintentionally get up to.

But I also on the other hand, I'm not too worried about having our human dignity stripped away from us because we -- our dignity is a thing that we have, and it is our interactions with one another and the stories that we tell each other that create all of this meaning. And so, AI absent that is to me completely uninteresting. MICHELE ELAM: Yes, it's interesting. I was thinking of ghost workers and the way in which certain practices, of course in AI development or whatever, does have this invisible underclass and it can actually strip the dignity away of some people. So, paying attention to that.

But I agree with you. I'm not worried. Maybe some people are more worried than me, that it's going to be sentient in a way that we are concerned it's going to upend us or -- I'm not in that apocalyptic camp, for instance. KEVIN SCOTT: Well, and the very least, we should refuse to let it, like for -- MICHELE ELAM: Well, but there's plenty of people out there and you know them all, who are like, "Well, let it be what it is, as we've brought this into the world and it's going to do its own thing."

To go back to my dad finally, who would absolutely have loved you, is we can't always anticipate obviously, second use or third use. We can't always -- human in the loop isn't sufficient because who knows when that -- when we're in the loop or how belatedly -- humans have been in the loop for a lot of technologies that have done a lot of damage. So, it's much more complicated than that. But at least being alert to those things, I think is very important because it has such great potential, obviously. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: And you work in some of that I think for some things around climate change or about food scarcity.

Oh my gosh, like amazing, right? So, I wouldn't want to forget that or enhancing and augmenting creativity. Not taking over it obviously, but I've seen AI particularly in terms of literature as a useful interlocutor. I do think it needs to be in the same way we're having a conversation. If I quote you, which I probably will, I will say -- I will credit you. So, I think that's also important, too. I'm thinking of students now of recognizing when you've drawn on AI -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes.

MICHELE ELAM: -- to write a paper. We haven't even gone there. We'll have to talk about AI in education sometimes in the future with your students who are grow -- your kids who are growing up right in the thick -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- of all of those ethical issues that I'm sure all the colleges and high school probably right, even now, are having to deal with.

KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. Yes, we could talk for hours about that, I'm sure. So, we are well and truly out of time.

I have one last question for you before we go, which I ask everyone. So, you have such a interesting job and a broad range of interests. I'm just curious, what you do outside of work for fun.

MICHELE ELAM: I read. I read because it's so rare to spend time with a book. I was talking with one of your producers before. I hope I'm not outing her, said her favorite thing to do is to take a book into the bathtub.

And I actually -- besides the fact that a hard copy book can be tricky and get wet, if you notice, there's like a lot of books behind - I'm almost entombed by all these books. It's a luxury it feels like, to take the time, to authorize myself to take the time to sit down with a book in a quiet space. It is meditative. So, that is what I've been doing. You'd think as a literature professor, I would be doing that all along, but I forgot the pleasures of unrushed, unhurried reading. KEVIN SCOTT: Yes.

It's funny you say that. So, my wife by training is a historian and like she and I both dropped out of our PhD programs at about the same time, and one of the things for her that was a benefit of not being in academia was she enjoyed reading again, because like she had like 2,000 pages of material to read every week as a history PhD student and the only thing she would allow herself to read were like the important things that were a part of her professional development. MICHELE ELAM: Yes, speed reading. That doesn't count.

KEVIN SCOTT: So, she stopped reading for fun. MICHELE ELAM: No. KEVIN SCOTT: So, I'm delighted to hear that you read for fun. MICHELE ELAM: But I want my students to do -- I've assigned less.

Not shorter pieces, but it takes longer to read a novel. I want them to enjoy it again. It's terrible that in academe we kill the joy of something that brought us into it to begin with. So -- KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: -- I want to make sure my students can as well. It's so lovely talking with you always.

KEVIN SCOTT: Yes. MICHELE ELAM: My head is buzzing with thoughts. KEVIN SCOTT: I could have spent easy another two hours.

So, thank you so much for taking the time and it was a lovely conversation. Good to catch up. MICHELE ELAM: Thank you. Wonderful talking with you as well.

[ MUSIC ] KEVIN SCOTT: What a great conversation with Michele Elam. I really could have gone another couple of hours with her. And this is, by the way, how all of my conversations go with Michele. So many interesting things to chat about. One of the things that really stood out to me about our conversation is this notion of how important narrative and storytelling is, and how we understand technology and how we understand technology's relationship to us.

I think Michele has got a really fantastic take on some of the thorniest issues with AI. And part of that is ensuring that us as storytelling beings, how we really understand the technology of AI as a tool, and really sort of inspect how it is that that tool is helping to shape the stories that we're telling, so that we can have more agency in evolving those stories and not having things get away from us. There were a whole bunch of other things that we chatted about in that conversation that were really great. And I absolutely am going to take Michele up on her offer to spend more time with her students who I think are asking all of the important questions right now about how this technology is unfolding and what its role ought to be in the world.

And so, I'm just sort of excited to chat with more young people, with artists, with writers, with creatives of all sorts to hear how they're thinking about things. So, that's all of our time today. Thanks so much to Michele Elam for joining us.

If you have anything you'd like to share with us, please email anytime at behindthetech@microsoft.com. You can follow Behind the Tech on your favorite podcast platform or check out our full video episodes on YouTube. See you next time. [ MUSIC ]

2025-01-24 09:05

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