About this episode

Dr. Vivienne Ming discusses the importance of building better people to improve AI effectiveness.

Neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author Dr. Vivienne Ming joins Autumn and Noah to make the case that if we want better AI, we need to build better people first. We get into why AI tutors that hand students answers make learning worse, not better; what her research on "hybrid intelligence" reveals about the human traits — not the AI model — that predict elite human-AI collaboration; a wild experiment running Dungeons & Dragons with Claude and Gemini as dungeon masters to expose the gap between knowing and understanding; her case for "fiduciary AI," legal duty-of-care standards for tutors, hiring tools, and diagnostic models; and the real story of a hiring algorithm that learned to discriminate against women after every explicit gender marker was stripped out. Chapters 02:20 Why build this book now? The importance of human qualities 04:16 AI in education and the concept of robot-proofing 06:37 The median student and AI personalization 09:31 The limitations of AI understanding and theory of mind 11:30 Building better people with AI and human interaction 14:23 Hybrid intelligence and the role of human-AI collaboration 23:56 Case study: AI in Dungeons & Dragons 30:42 AI's…

People in this episode

Hosts: Autumn Phaneuf, Noah Giansiracusa

Guest: Vivienne Ming

Topics covered

• AI education
• human-AI collaboration
• hybrid intelligence
• robot-proofing
• discrimination in hiring algorithms

Keywords

• AI
• education
• hybrid intelligence
• Dungeons & Dragons
• discrimination
• human qualities
• robot-proofing

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Dungeons & Dragons

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