Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Michele Elam, William Robertson Coe Professor in the Humanities; Senior Fellow, Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence; Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Michele Elam, 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, joins Behind the Tech to discuss her journey and work. Michele shares her unique path from a humanities background to engaging with technology and AI, influenced by her father's career as an astronautics engineer.  In this episode, Michele and Kevin explore the intersection of humanities and technology, discussing the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the ethical considerations of AI. They delve into Michele's work at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford, where she represents arts and diversity perspectives. The conversation also touches on the cultural status of arts versus technology, the impact of storytelling in shaping cultural imagination, and the evolving education of engineering students to include social and ethical questions.   Kevin and Michele reflect on the balance between deep expertise and broad curiosity, the role of arts in technology, and the importance of integrating different perspectives to address complex societal issues. They also discuss the significance of tradition and innovation, drawing insights from Kevin's recent trip to Japan where he observed the coexistence of advanced technology and centuries-old crafts.  Michele Elam  Kevin Scott    Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott    Discover and listen to other Microsoft podcasts.    

Michelle Elam is the William Robertson Co-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 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 and socially transformative technologies.

She teaches what sound 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. Michelle, I'm so glad to have you on the podcast today. I'm so happy to be here. I look forward to talking with you. Yeah, 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 were on.

Or, you know, maybe what you didn't choose and like what just sort of organically happened. So tell us a little bit about, you know, your childhood and like how you got onto the path that you're on. Thank you. I feel like we're already in a therapy session. 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 straight forward 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, 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. You know, and then when you're growing up, that totalizing view of the world or, you know 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,

or thereabout. He would have been flabbergasted that I was sitting around the table. As you know, that institute, at least at the time I joined, had eight, it was very interdisciplinary intentionally. So Fei-Fei Li and her, John Etchemende, decided that they wanted a computer scientist, engineering. They wanted, I was representing arts and diversity, humanistic perspectives. We had someone in 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, you know, maybe they add local color to a product or something, but, and so I was always frustrated by the different cultural statuses with that. So all to say,

it is bizarre that I'm sitting here talking to you, Kevin. And I think we, I, if I'm not mistaken, we actually met at met in Rome. We did. 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, the Pope's people who were brilliant, Eric's father, Eric Salavier, and other people who were talking about spirituality and AI and not in an apocalyptic or hallelujah way, but like, 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, like how can we tell the story better? And I was like, there are so many more narratives about technology

than 50s science fiction by white male authors. I mean, that's there too. 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. Yeah. 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 a 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, you know, 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 and anything. 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 um and then also the use of my image and that weird sense of losing control of your identity um yeah well look and i i think i think it's uh it's perfectly reasonable to be cynical. I mean, it's sort of funny. Cautious.

Yeah, cautious, like right, or skeptical or pessimistic. The way that I describe engineers to most people is, and the way that I i think about myself is i am a uh i'm a short-term pessimist long-term optimist um 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 you know by by virtue of your acculturation or like you know the brain that you were born with you kind of look at the world in terms of everything that's broken uh and what you can do to go fix it right that's the impulse of engineering um and it's like a pretty jaundiced way to you know look at the world the way you described it though because that to me seems also like an ethical way to look at the world. 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's, it can be

limited if we don't pair it with other ways of looking at the world. There are different vocabularies and mindsets. Yeah. But the way you just described engineering actually sounds very much like my father at his best because he, he to um he always would say we shouldn't just make things because we can't we should make things because and 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 that's what i hear when you say that then too there are problems in 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. I want to go back to your father in and technology apart and above from, you know, the humanities or other things. And like, you know, and you and I both know in academia that there's like always everybody's got some stack ranking in their head, you know, like which thing is better than the other. I'm sure it's even in the humanities, right? That, you know, at some point you're like, and like all of it is kind of silly because, you know, the beautiful thing about being a human is like, we're all just playing, you know, our role. Like, hopefully we've chosen to do the thing that we're especially good at.

And hopefully we've all got enough, you know 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 like, maybe you don't understand why, like, maybe you don't understand, you know, that not all fixes to all problems are, you know, equal in merit. You know, maybe you don't even understand, like, what's worth fixing and what isn't. And like, that's where you need a lot of help from other people with different perspectives. I agree. But I mean, so like, 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 are some like really particular things about like an engineer brain. How much of it is, it sounds like he's a Cold War, post-World War II trained. I think he is.

A lot of it, culturally, is like, hey, we're in this existential battle, and science and technology is the way we win. And like, you know, here's the stuff that's important. And yeah, it's easy to like be in the middle of that. And like, you know, think that you're more important than you actually are. I, you know, 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. Cause he'd gone to Princeton and which did have a liberal arts background then at the time, actually. But he for him. I don't know if I can give this example. Well, this is it. It was a sense of security and control. I was listening to a couple of your other interviews with Mira, for instance, and Roddy, and the sense of, you know, 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 was, we had, I can't remember what it's called, like home arts or something. And then, or you could figure out how to fix a car and, you know, and he was like, no, you need to be able to fix the 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, you know, 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 here's a screw and a nut. I can't remember.

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, you know, even at 12, 13, I could see the gender duplication 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 there was a lot in the training, you know, 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, like they want, you know, interest, they're interested in social psychology. You know, I was just having a student talking to me about the Weisenbaum's Eliza effect in relationship to the arts and, and they want to integrate those questions about social psychology, whether or not they go and build a product, but like 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. So I don't think he was, you know, I framed it like a battle. I hope it didn't feel like I was too cynical, but because I really, I think I have, you know, 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, and I was luckily at high, we call it, as you know, the Institute for Human Centered AI.

They were, we were all equal partners however the vocabulary is the way we talk about the world the things we prioritize the way we document our work um you know in a in a universe where the quantitative is so important i found i know my colleagues the two the way to legitimize humanities and arts was often by the 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 humanists, 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, you know, the arts move us and they're,

you know, we have 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, you know, learn differently and sort of speak differently about the things that are important. I always find it, my father used to say, and then we'll get off my father. You know, the artist 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 artists was 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 fascists or authoritarian governments did 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.

Yeah. I mean, it's always, I mean, like maybe, maybe this is getting a little bit too, uh, too philosophical and squishy. Like I, I, I kind of wish we had fewer of these, uh, categories, uh, that are like about skills and professional identity, because, you know, like you're, you're a, you're a writer, you are an artist, you're creative, but like, you also have things that you do that you're an engineer, you're a problem solver, like you have to use quantitative methods for things. And so it's just kind of, you know, like, what context are you in? And like, what skill do you need to be able to manifest to solve the problem that you're working on um and like we get a little bit

well i'm super you're total i mean i think i know where you're going but just it i would love that in that world too um you authorized yourself to create you do sculpture you do clay right work with clay. 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 profession, there is tension sometimes about that. Yeah. And like that's certainly when I was younger, I think this is one of the things that I, you know, struggle with this with my children. So, you know, there's there's one thing that there's this joy that I find, like I just have curiosity about everything and it's thrilling to go wallow in that curiosity. But 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 the A thing so that you can, you know, bring something to it. Like it was hard, you know, to learn how to program well. You know, it's hard to do a bunch of things and like, you just have to go put the time in and, you know, and I think when I was younger,

like, that's how I invested my time. I like, I sort of cast aside a whole bunch of things that were interesting to me because I was like, no, I got to get good at this. Like, this is, you know, got to be my professional identity. Like, like I have to focus enough to like, you know, get into, you know, the, I don't even want to call it the elite, but like, I just want to be able to like, at a high level, go participate with a bunch of other people who are working at a high level on this and like, I want to be able to understand what they're doing and contribute. And yeah, like, I'm not even saying that that's

the wrong thing to do is sort of the advice I give to my kiddo who, you know, my 16 year old is a bio nerd. And, you know, like she also like is interested in a gazillion different things. And I'm like, look, you know, you have to, at some point, like 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. I, you know, when you're talking, I'm thinking, especially because the stakes are higher with our children. And I think with so many students that I see, well, like hundreds, you know, 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, you know, I've always taught at liberal arts institutions, and that means that you have a level of expertise, but you are simultaneously also learning these other things. You know,

I don't know if you recall, but a few years back, you know, the credentialing for engineering or 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 like to find, you know, develop enough focus and expert, real expertise to excel, not just get by and yet also bring in with enough and not like just casually like an elective you know an arts practice elective and and somehow students manage to do it we've been thinking some of that's a curricular thing

like 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 um but also you know 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 changed the world. And I think those places where arts and sciences connect as well then too you know um reed hoffman dear friend i talked about recently in a talk about um that he thinks we're techno sapiens you know that we're makers from the beginning but i actually think we're storytelling sapiens because we are 100 but they're not so far apart if you think about it we 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 typology, create typologies of, you know, of what we can do. I think that, you know, you know, 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 school doesn't kill the joy of curiosity, want to know things, want to learn things. But, you know, 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, which is beautiful. You know, 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 the 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 startups and certain things, doesn't have to apply to everything. It doesn't have to,

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. No, I violently agree. And like, I think, you know, what, what the world needs from us is largely contextual. So I was in Japan a few weeks ago. And, you know, no surprise, like I spent a very interesting trip. So I spent the first half of the trip opening up Microsoft Research, Tokyo. So like a new research lab and like entirely focused on ai um and then i spent the last half of the week talking to a bunch of japanese craftspeople so potters people who do edo komon uh which is a dying practice for like making kimono fabric and folks who make traditional cedar barrels and folks who make canvas bags. 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. I think those two things. Well, I think, you know, Japan does, you know, 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. simultaneously revere tradition and hold on to like these things that if the objective function for your society was economic efficiency, like they make no sense whatsoever. Yeah, I love that.

But in fact, they make a lot of sense inside of Japanese society. Because, you know, if anything, they sort of look at the technology as purely a tool, like an instrument that's in service of, you know, Japanese people. And like the art is like something that's in service of, you know, your soul or your spirit. Right, yeah. 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. You know, it's always it's like unprecedented, supposedly, and never been seen. And it's always and history can get left behind or it seem as you know in an enlightenment progressive upward arc of you know

somehow we're getting more and more advanced and then we can have an attitude towards the past in history as if it was more remedial or something we have to sort of get over um the way you just talked about uh japanese culture as as probably even reveringing the arts in that sense even more and tradition is beautiful. And you mentioned AI as a tool too. You know, 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 an extra really going to reconcile kind of for profit motives with social imperatives.

You know, it's a dance, I realize. Yeah, 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 like, it doesn't matter, like whether the piece of technology is neutral or not, like ultimately a human being is going to go decide what to do with it. And human beings are absolutely not neutral. Yes. Well, I mean, it's interesting because the implications of that do matter.

So either it's, when I mean, so if you think that it's, it's, um, bad actors, you know, it's not the technology, it's the misuse of technologies. That's one approach to solving, um, technologies you might not like to see in the world, you know? 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 um you know what gets funded who's who's in place to think this is valuable or not and so those you know a hundred percent i agree with that yeah and like it it's one of those things too that's context dependent like Like one of the first projects that I worked on when I left academia and joined industry like a million years ago is I built very early machine

learning systems that made judgments about which content was adult or not. That's fascinating. Yeah. And like there are all of these, you know, and then there's some things where, you know, like we all have just, you know, globally decided as human beings like this is unequivocally like, you know, in the category and, you know, like we have to treat it as such. But, you know, it's sort of interesting and it's eye opening when you have to sort of confront these things like as an engineer, because, you know, like I was 30 years old at the time. I was, you know, like a little bit like your dad. It's like, all right, well, you know, like there's a reductive way of looking at all of this stuff. And like the algorithm is going to be simple

and like, it's going to. But I love that example. I think that's so moving because, you know, beyond just content moderation, but, you know, at high 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 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 like within a heartbeat, if you're trying to do good, it puts you right in the realm of social psychology and ethics. And, 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 lay people just need to know how the technology works more. They really, they're not credentialed to weigh in on policy or anything else. Nonsense. Well, given that it impacts every aspect of our public and private life.

But I felt that way, too. I felt like at high before 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 like that can enlarge, you know, and encourage, I think, engineers or whoever happens to be creating, you know, 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. You know, I wish one of the things that we taught our young engineers was for them to lean into the sort of discomfort that arise very quickly when you're trying to build technology for human beings. Like they lean into all sorts of discomfort, right? Because, you know, you walk into, you walk into your first partial differential equations course and like, you know, like that's, that's uncomfortable because it's hard and like, you don't know all of the answers right away. But, you know, you I mean, the weird thing, you know, again, you know, back to your dad, you know, I think he's here right now.

He would have. Yeah, no. Like, God bless your dad, man. I never met him, but I think I love him. It sounds like a super interesting human. But like we let our engineers get away with this notion that there are straightforward answers to most questions. I would love you to come in to my class because this class that I taught, I'm going to invite you. And now we're on record. Come in and talk to these students. I will come. 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 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 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 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, you know, and if they're all, 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 they produced amazing things a couple of them went on to become road scholars and um and it was a stance of humility too we weren't dogmatic coming in there and saying, get outside of your narrow mindset, but it was, you would be very inspiring to them because, you know, you can come in. No, I mean, think of the impact, you know, very early on when they're young and still open, because as we get older, I don't want to say we, you know, 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 natural forces like the gravitational pull uh like 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 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. You know, we want to look after them. So we're like, you know, and they may have a passion that shows up later in life. My one cautionary note to this, especially if you're first gen, and know, you know, your background to my mother didn't go to college 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, you also know, and I have seen students who are going into a field that they think is going to, you know, pay out or at least make them stable.

And then when they're 30 or 40, have a midlife crisis, and they're like, so it's, it's a, it's a balance. I mean, I have no idea what the answer is. It's just that. Yeah, I don't know either. I mean, look, I think, I think the thing is, you just at any point in time, like you, there are pragmatic decisions that you have to make but like you also need to leave yourself open to possibility and like have you know at least you know some feelers that are outside of you know whatever bubble that you might be living like one you have to recognize you're going to be in a bubble at some point. Um, like it's just, it's hard if you're the fish in the fishbowl for all of us. Yeah. Yeah. Well, how did you, can I ask you a question? Sure. How did you get into pottery? Like, I want to hear about your experience as, as a, 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 beautiful. Well, I've never been able to decide what I am. And like, this goes back to me as a kid. So the first thing that I wanted to be when I was really young is, uh, like I wanted to be an artist. Like I, I was, I was going to be, I was going to be an illustrator. Like the first college catalogs that I had sitting on my desk were for, you know, RISD and, uh, yeah. So I, you know, and like, I'm not saying I ever would have been good enough to get into these places or to have a career, but like, I, I was, I just wanted to be an illustrator. And then, you know, I went to, and I right around the same time, I discovered computers and I got really fascinated by programming and, you know, like whatever,

like, I don't even understand it, but like 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, you know, the good thing about that is like 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 like I had an English literature advisor and a CS advisor at some point, like had a lot. And so like, I'm just always like interested in like stuff like in like that.

So I'm interested in, in my day job for sure. Like 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. Like it, 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 is 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, like I'm just fully engrossed in it. I can't think about all of the other stuff that, you know, may be giving me, you know, anxiety or like I'm not making progress on it, like in the other part of my brain. But like I can go, you know, accomplish something with the other part of my brain, which is like very fulfilling and necessary. So like I do think they complement one another. Yeah, they may actually they complement one another. you know, creativity by expediting it or scaling it, but actually the way you talked about it

as meditative, not as escapist, but as also, you know, I always, as sort of just stating, I suspect what's going on in your brain is not the two halves. And, you know, even the idea of the neural map is, you know, a metaphor, but that I'm sure all of us have gone to bed thinking about something. And then we wake up and, you know, whatever that durational process is. And so I suspect that your ceramic making is making you a better engineer to invite and probably vice versa. Yeah. And look, I do ceramics like an engineer, like I've invented tools. You know, I'm like some pieces of it. I'm much more precise than a normal ceramicist. You know, like I'm off buying, you know, rotary viscometers to make sure that my, you know, like my.

I'm so lucky, Kevin. Yeah. But like I also, I also. So, you know, it does two other things for me. Like one of them is like, you know, 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 like they're usually years long projects and so it just really you know you can't you can't really see you know what you're contributing to a thing whereas like you go into the studio and you make a pot like you know exactly what you've done and like the timeline's kind of short and like 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 uh and like you you know

as a young computer scientist like you have that and then you just sort of lose it over time and so like it's really good for that but like 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. I just wanna 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 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 um all the debates about ai and art honestly is that um it did upend the professional art world and the tastemakers and and all of that because the aesthetics about what makes for good or or bad art you know according to all those categories are so culturally specific and historically but i love so i i really wanted to i 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, or even social commentary, which for some is, or even art for art's sake, which is almost impossible to do anyway but art um is not even just a reflection of the world but also a constitutive of it you are creating your own worlds and different ways of thinking um i'm sure that shapes um the work and life that you have and that's usually how people do i mean to, that's a more meaningful way to value art. Yeah, it's sort of funny, like you talk to artists and like artists, I think have a hard time defining exactly what art is. So like, forget about good art and bad art, but like, what is it? And to me, and I like, 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 like it has to get out. Like you gotta. I hear that. It's like a calling. And, you know, 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. 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 extent you even know what it was that you were expressing like the important thing is like there's a connection like there's a conversation that you can now have about um like this very squishy thing uh and you know the catalyst for the conversation is like you know some artifact that you've made. Think about how you just talked about this right now.

Well, what, 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 kinds of vocabularies that engineering does. But Toni Morrison has this great line where she says, where she writes her, you know, the novels and then she sends them out into the world like children. So there'll be people who value it or evaluate or there's valuations of the work you do.

But you're right. The artists themselves, sometimes they can name what they're doing. There's fabulous people who can. But it's not required necessarily. 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, you know, 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, you know, culturally, even parks, like creating or, you know, it costs money to create art, you know, 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, all of that, it's in the background of all of this, I think. Yeah. And I think it's an important, it's a super important conversation. And like, if 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. Like what's the business model for it? Like, how does it get funded? Like, 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, like, I am not interested in having this upended on me without any input from me. Because, you know, like 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 is, you know, 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, you know, it is at the very least like a new tool in the repertoire of artists. And, you know, I think there's a question people have around, you know, whether the existence of this new tool, does that demean what it, what they do like artistically, not economically, but, you know, like, does it, does it take away the value of this thing that I do?

And I think they're like, the answer is, like, absolutely not. 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 and artistic creation than to what you mentioned, the kind of do art, and that takes us right into the, you know, these debates about what is art, what is great art.

To me, I'm pretty sanguine about that that's that the the other question actually that has obsessed me lately is not um because i is not can it do art or is it like a simulacrum of you know artistic expression or is it um cannibalizing other' livelihood and future of work? Of course, all super important. But also to me, what is art isn't an abstract question because historically, you know, I always think about like who and why is asking, you know, what, what, why is that question posed? And I, a friend of mine was pointing out, you know, Thomas Jefferson very infamously said, you know, he'd never heard, I'm paraphrasing, a Black person utter a line of poetry or a love of narrative, you know. 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. So, and he used, and the art,

if art is an index of the level of humanity, which it has been for a very long time, it was seen as the apex of like sophisticated cultures and so on. Then that question, which should seem sort of moot, actually, I always think about like, how, where's that being used or mobilized? Like what, not to get, you know, wonky or anything, but like, why is it really mattering to people? Are they anxious that AI, you know, is going to, or algorithms are going to steal future work? Are they anxious because it looks like it's the last turning test of humanity is artistic expression? Or is it sometimes, I mean, for me, at least I feel like the, 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, that, 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, that I just want to hold those together in the same space somehow. Yeah. You said something a few minutes ago, which I think is really, really important. Like we are maybe more than homo techni, like we are whatever technosafian system. Yeah. We're storytellers. And, you know, one of the interesting things about art

is, you know, 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 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, you know, sort of artistic and social reasons that like things got made the way that they were made. And,

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 like sip some liquid out of. It's like the story around it. Yes. It's about Buddhism and nature and, you know, like state of mind and harmony. I love how you just figured 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. Yeah. Which I think is just so, you know, we co-create the meaning of the objects we create. I love your description of that, Kevin. Yeah. And sort of, you know, back to AI. So, you know, 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, you know, 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 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. You know, it's like we impute the meaning on this. Completely. And sometimes the meaning is shaped by marketing. Like, we're going to 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 yep um

you know um i love that and so that that's why like i i am obviously in a whole bunch of different ways worried about the bad or the unintended stuff that our tools can let us like intentionally or unintentionally get up to. And but like I also on the other hand like I'm not too worried about like having our human dignity stripped away from us because like we're we you know like our dignity is a thing that we have and like it is you know our interactions with one another and you know like the 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's interesting. You know, when 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'm not worried maybe some people are more worried than me that it's um going to be sentient in a way that we are concerned it's going to you know up and us or i'm not i'm not in that um apocalyptic camp for instance well in the very least like we should

refuse to let it like for well but you know there's plenty of people out there and you know them all they're like well let it be what it is is we've brought this into the world and it's gonna do its own thing um to go back to my dad finally who would absolutely have loved you is um we can't always anticipate you know obviously um second use or third use we can't always human in the loop isn't sufficient because who knows when that you know when we human in the loop isn't sufficient because who knows when that, you know, 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. And you work in some of that, I think, for some things around climate change or about food scarcity. Oh, my gosh. Amazing. Right. So I wouldn't want to forget that. Or enhancing and augmenting creativity, not taking over it, obviously. But that's, I've seen it, I've seen AI, particularly in terms of literature, as a useful interlocutor. I do think it needs to be, you know, 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 to write a paper. We haven't even gone there. We'll have to talk about AI and education sometimes in the future with your students, your kids who are growing up right in the thicket of all of those ethical issues that I'm sure all the colleges in high school probably right even now are having to deal with. Yeah. Yeah, 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 know, you, you have such a interesting job and like a broad range of interests. I'm just curious what you do outside of work for fun. 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 they actually, besides the fact that a hard copy book is, 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 I have, 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. Yeah, it's funny you say that. So my wife, by training, is a historian and And 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 she had 2, 000 pages of material to read every week as a history phd student and like the only thing she would allow herself to read were

like the important things that were part of her professional development so she stopped reading no i'm i'm delighted to hear that like you read for fun 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 yeah, I'll make sure my students can as well. It's so lovely talking with you always. Yeah, I could have spent easy another like two hours. So thank you so much for taking the time. And it was a lovely conversation. Good to catch up.

Thank you. Wonderful talking with you as well. What a great conversation with Michelle Elam. I really could have gone another couple of hours with her. This is, by the way, how all of my conversations go with Michelle. 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. You know, I think Michelle has got a really fantastic take on some of the thorniest issues with AI. And like part of that is ensuring that, you know, 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. You know, 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 Michelle 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, you know, hear how they're thinking about things. So that's all of our time today. Thanks so much to Michelle Elon for joining us. If you have anything you'd like to share with us,

please email anytime at behindthetech at 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.