The Joy of Emotional Intelligence, with Pamela Pavliscak
Pamela Pavliscak specializes in emotionally intelligent design and emotion-sensing artificial intelligence. Her research has been featured on CBC's Spark, Salon, and Quartz. Her book, Emotionally Intelligent Design, focuses on how to design a future that has as much EQ as it does IQ. Pamela is a TEDx speaker and has spoken at SxSW , Web Summit, Google Creative Labs. She teaches at the Pratt Institute School of Information in NYC and serves on an international committee to develop IEEE standard 7000 for ethically-aligned AI.
Join us as Pamela discusses the ways that our relationships with technology are shaped by our perception of its role, power, and purpose, the ways healthy people engage their tech, and how we can help guide the ongoing evolution of technology that becomes increasingly enmeshed in our lives.
Favorite Quotes:
“We’ve evolved to take signals that are threats and feel that intensely and react.. But when we’re constantly in a state of that, it feels like we’re not ourselves, and our reality is not the same- it’s distorted.”
“Because so much of our technology is shaped by how we interact with it, that if we did that work of self-reflection and tried to match up what we do more with how we want to live, we could probably train the algorithms a little bit to respond to that.”
“There are always going to be some tradeoffs involved in the process of thinking about what can I do that’s positive, and do the positives outweigh the negatives?”
“We’re all really kind of in this giant experiment together, of technology, and it’s come on really quickly, and it’s challenged us on a personal level, in our workplace, as parents, on all these levels, and I think it’s quite extraordinary to live in this time.”
Key Take-Aways:
A critical component of our problem with modern technology is negative distortion- the lack of friction (by design) causes us to feel that time slips away or is stolen from us, and the motive to creative viral content places us in an unnaturally-constant state of arousal and outrage.
Rather than disengage or “quit” technology, it may be more realistic- and more positive- to develop the skills of regularly reflecting on our emotional responses to it and defining our relationship with greater intentionality.
There are emotionally healthy- and unhealthy- ways in which people engage with the exact same technologies, suggesting the harm does not lie fundamentally in the technology itself.
Learn More
The JOMO(cast) exists to inspire and motivate listeners to take action to thrive in a digital age.
Guests include leading mindful tech leaders like Basecamp's David Heinemeier Hansson, WeTransfer CCO Damian Bradfield, Pivot for Humanity's Jumana Abu-Ghazeleh, Harvard’s Dr. Ellen Langer and Glitch CEO Anil Dash.
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