Talking personal journey, sustainable development and entrenched biases with the former US CTO and Google VP, now CEO and founder of people-forward innovation company Shift7.
Megan Smith is an award-winning entrepreneur, engineer, and tech evangelist. CEO and founder of shift7, a company working collaboratively on systemic social, environmental and economic problems -- finding opportunities to scout and scale promising solutions and solution makers and engage proven tech-forward, open, shareable practices to drive direct impact, together.
Smith served as the third U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President from 2014-2017 -- working on issues from AI, data science and open source, to inclusive economic growth, entrepreneurship, structural inequalities, government tech innovation capacity, STEM/STEAM engagement, workforce development, and criminal justice reform. Smith spent over eleven years as vice president at Google leading new business development including acquisitions of Google Earth, Maps, Picasa, she led Google.org, and later co-created WomenTechmakers, and SolveforX. Earlier she was PlanetOut CEO, at General Magic where she worked on early smart phones, and Apple Japan.
Board member of MIT, Vital Voices, LA Olympics 2028, Think of Us; Co-founder of the Malala Fund and UN Solutions Summit; Algorithmic Justice League advisor and member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Academy of Engineering.
Alex: [00:00:00] Megan Smith is an award-winning entrepreneur, engineer and tech evangelist. She's currently CEO and founder of shift7 a company working collaboratively on systemic social, environmental, and economic problems. Megan served as the third us chief technology officer and assistant to the president from 2014 to 2017, spent over 11 years as vice president at Google leading new business development, and earlier she was CEO at PlanetOut, worked at General Magic on early smartphones and worked at Apple Japan. She's a board member of MIT and co-founder of the Malala fund and UN solutions summit. She's a great friend and mentor, and I'm really happy to share our conversation.
Okay, so Megan, thank you again for doing this super cool of you.
Megan: [00:00:51] Incredibly happy to do this with you!
Alex: [00:00:52] So I wanted to start us off kind of broadly and talk about your personal experiences as they relate to a lot of your work. Are there any like really standout people or formative moments that got you into tech?
Megan: [00:01:05] Yeah, totally. Uh, I was lucky I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and I had a whole bunch of different experiences there that they were less about tech, more about all subjects and integrating those subjects.
And I think the key for me was to not leave science and technology out. Which I think is one of the challenges that the system we're in sort of pulls people like everybody should learn reading and writing, but not everybody does. It'd be good at math. You know? Like why do we think that?
Alex: [00:01:36] Right.
Megan: [00:01:36] And we think that because somehow we've set up the system, that's resulting in that when really anyone could learn anything well if we approach it in the right way, and one of-- actually a hero that hadn't occurred to me that I might sort of mention that, but is a perfect one for that example is Suzuki sensei, the original, the Suzuki violin innovator. Uh, I forget his name, like Shinichi something anyways. Suzuki, his idea, he happened to be from a family where I think his father manufactured violins or something. And so he. Brought his theory through the violin, but his theory was called the mother tongue theory. And it was that all of us learn our home mother tongue or native language, so intricately, and it isn't that people when we're children we're babies and throughout that sort of toddler early, childhood time are saying to us, okay, well, here's the word list for this week. And then they're just adapting to us and interacting with us in a way that, of course we learn in we're exposed to, and, and people in different times, just like, Louie and Alex, my boys , their first grade teacher was saying, you know, you get your teeth at different times, so you might learn to read at different times.
Alex: [00:02:49] Just being mindful about the box standardization puts things in, right?
Megan: [00:02:53] It's just a kinder way to think about learning. And, one time he taught , fourth grade, I think it was fourth grade math class. And he said , all of my children are going to get a hundred percent on all of their tests. And then he achieved that and he achieved it by adapting himself to the children.
And so , one of the things that's interesting about these times now, especially having the pandemic and seeing how quickly we could adapt our educational system to online. Is there really an opportunity to really, as we call it, build back better and really get into these kinds of things. And it's, it's interesting, cause it echoes with history. You know, you guys, at the University of Chicago, you know, with what Jane Adams , and her community with the settlement house in the early days, they, they worked and trained , John Dewey, amazing American educator and they brought that idea and one of the first things they did was preschool. This idea of everybody gaining mastery. So I guess I was lucky because. I went to, really cool public schools in Buffalo with great teachers. And none of them had a lot of money, like all the public schools, but, they had space for the teachers--
Alex: [00:04:02] But contextually, there was a lot more going on at that time.
Megan: [00:04:06] I was going to school in the seventies and a lot of the busing lawsuits, you know, Brown vs board of education brought the law forward, but people were still having terrible segregation practices. And the schools were really separated by neighborhoods and the neighborhoods were separated by race sadly.
And so I remember as a child, you know, crazy things, people lying down in front of buses in Boston. And we were lucky because the lawsuits in Buffalo created a magnet school system. And so we had these great schools and again, they didn't have money, but they had great teachers.
And so my teachers did amazing things with us. And one of my favorite things that really resulted in my confidence in science and technology was a mandatory science fair. And so every child. Had to practice , choosing a project of interest to themselves and, and something, they were passionate about learning more and try to discover something or invent something or not necessarily learn facts that others had had found out about or other inventions.
But based on the shoulders of those giants, what might you add to the canon? . And so, people could work in teams. They could work on their own, however they wanted to. And it was genius because all of a sudden turned out everybody was good at science and everybody got to learn that science was for purpose and for impact and for curiosity.
And at the time Jimmy Carter was putting solar panels on the white house, and there was a lot of innovation in the department of energy and solutions that were needed. And so I ended up doing solar and wind and, all kinds of different projects, phase change storage, and it was really fun.
And I gained a lot of confidence. And a lot of times when you're a kid you're doing these projects, it isn't because you're, you know, like for example, you guys are probably in college doing a business plan competitions and these things, it isn't because all of you are going to then go make all those companies.
Alex: [00:05:53] Well, there's a hope obviously, but probably not.
Megan: [00:05:56] You might, some people may, but it's really practice makes permanent. And so what we practice will become, you know, what we think we are able to do and what we're capable of. So the more we can expose kids-- and then I'd say the second thing. So I just call that all my amazing teachers. Mrs. Saltzman and Mr. Dealer were the ones who created science fair, but you know, Mr. Soffen and Mr. King had the draft for the math team. So you gotta be on the math team. Like it wasn't just kids who thought they were good at math. You know, it was like you had to do this thing. And so you learned. You know, in situation, which was great.
The other thing that happened in Buffalo was, there was just a lot of civil rights work. Women's rights work, environmental rights work. It was shortly after the moonshot and the picture of the earth from space. And my mom actually organized a bike race, or if it was actually a bike car walker and , bus rider from the edge of Buffalo downtown on the very first earth day and the bike won.
And then there was a bike parade and she started the bicycle club for Western New York of which people used to say, you know, what are you doing with that toy? But bikes and scooters and other things can be very handy for transportation. So our river had been on fire. We faced, grave challenges with , Love Canal, which is a super fun site near. Niagra Falls. There's an amazing painting called Niagara from Frank Warren. It shows the Niagara falls water, . But if you look closely at the painting, you can see chemical formulas s ruminating. And you're like, Ugh, do we want make our world so toxic? And why are we doing this? And how do we change , how we're approaching this?
So I think science and technology were never left off the table. And so that's why I think I included it with other things as well.
Alex: [00:07:37] Awesome. I think that's a good segway-- so I remember one of the first times that we spoke , as you were showing me this bike frame that had been grown from bamboo, you talked like at length about these 17 sustainable development goals put forward by the UN and what was it like 2015, right.
Megan: [00:07:54] Yes
Alex: [00:07:54] I think that little interaction really sums you up to me in a lot of ways, talking about these like huge goals, but putting forward these really grassroots solutions to empower people to get there. So with that said, are there any objectives in sustainable development that you see as being particularly important over the next decade?
Megan: [00:08:11] Yeah, I think, those UN sustainable development goals, the 17 that people came together, actually, one of my co-founders at Shift7, Susan Alzner worked on the public engagement and our colleague David also. And the thing that happened, the millennium development goals, millennial development goals, that sort of the ones from the turn of the century, they were made by a smaller group of people and they were important, but they weren't as comprehensive.
And so this time around the UN, made it possible for all kinds of people to be part of, voicing those priorities. And the complexities to them, because there's competing priorities and , and people who want to pull in an opposite way, et cetera. So. To come up with that agenda was amazing. The bicycle actually, Bernice, who has the Ghana bicycle company, uh, eco ride.
And, by the way that bike, they already made , I don't know how many, several thousand and every time they make 10, they give one to a child , to get to school. It's amazing. And you know, there's not a big steel industry, or other kind of metals industry, you know, like there are in some countries, in Ghana, of course it has some , so having something that sequesters carbon bamboo, you know, in growing bicycles, which is what they do, and then adding some metals of course , for the gears and, pedals and things, and the wheel base, but they just came up with that. So what that gets at is something we saw in 2015, I just asked the question could we, as the UN ratifies these goals, could we just ask in the world, who's already fixing them? Which is a method I call scout and scale. And it's really, what I saw in Silicon Valley , with the venture capitalists, they, they don't make , companies, you know, if you get an Amazon package or whatever, the venture capitalist didn't tell Jeff what to do, Jeff came to them. And so there's people in the world who want to invent and innovate stuff and they already are. And so how do you get more information about what they're doing and create a similar ecosystem? I sometimes call it venture catalyzing. Maybe they're a social entrepreneur. Maybe, they're a civil, civil tech entrepreneur, a political entrepreneur like Gandhi , maybe they're, ordered, or maybe they're an artistic ent-- it doesn't matter what kind. Clara, Barton, George Washington, Carver, a scientific solution maker. How do you make sure that everyone is getting the kind of ecosystem around them, not only when they're younger, like we did annual science fair, where we got the chance to do this project, but there was a supportive environment around us, encouraging us-- as Bernice is making this wonderful bike company that is urgent, you know, for Ghana and really everywhere. So we asked this question. And, Puneet a hero. Who's one of our other co-founders, met Susan who was doing the outreach and all the work with , public engagement. And we were able to put together an idea of a solution summit.
Alex: [00:10:54] What was that like when you put it in practice?
Megan: [00:10:56] So one hour after the ratification of the SDGs at the United nations, by all the countries, upstairs a group gathered of, you know, open invitation to, the various , officials there and also a cross section of different kinds of innovators, supporters of innovators policy makers and people who work with entrepreneurs and youth and everybody we could hear from, we had asked on the internet, who's already fixing these goals. Do you have something already working? It could be a prototype, but it has to exist. It can't be just an idea. Is there something working regionally or even more broadly that you would share? And we got 800 submissions from 131 countries the first year.
And I, including a couple of hundred people volunteered to review all of this together. And if you make it gender balanced location balanced, geo balanced, um, topic balanced, team of talent to review, then you get the same back. So we had people from every continent , a group of amazing innovators working on climate and gender equality. And--
Alex: [00:11:58] Were there any standout projects from that time?
Megan: [00:12:01] I remember, cold hubs, which is, I sort of think of it as like Airbnb for cold storage of food at the market. So let's say you have tomatoes, they don't have to sort of melt in the sun in three days. You can have them selling across the month or two because you're sharing refrigeration.
Or Beno Juarez who's from the Amazon, grew up there, but had left and become really quite, an expert in advanced manufacturing, you know? And so as an indigenous leader, a young person from the Amazon, he had thought of how can I bring these kinds of tools? And so he was making floating fabrication labs or studios, like on a ship in the Amazon so the people there could be part of innovating new medicines. Sends and other kinds of solutions and have the same tools that somebody might have in an engineering school or, or a pharmaceutical company, to just even the balance out so, many incredible people at the time, A princess mechanical engineer from Burkina Faso, working on solar lighting solutions for women, having resources and salary as well as solving the lighting problems locally. So just around the world where people doing very high tech, in fact, even the most wild one at that time was a group called Darewin , which was doing signal processing like we do with, you know, Alexa, Siri and all the signal processing machine learning with whales! To try to understand if we could actually understand their language, you know, could we speak with whales ? There's another team flying drones to plant a billion trees a year. Great use . Of drones. it was an exciting year. And so we kept doing it every year-- by 2019 we had, I think 1400 submissions from 141 countries in three weeks yet again, and an ecosystem around accelerating. We would narrow that down. We'd have a youth committee , 30 and under, and then a general committee , open participatory selection process that , the teams, you know, have run in Susan and David knew how to do that.
And so we we've continued that, we've not been doing it with COVID, but we hope to do things like this. And can they continue to accelerate those over 60 innovators and all of the people like them all around. So, yeah, so the bicycle and Bernice had given me that one frame that I have from the UN meetings so that's what you saw.
Alex: [00:14:18] That's super cool. And, you know, you keep touching on this again and again, but maybe this is an oversimplification, right. But it seems like a lot of your work has shifted from things to people over the course of your career, which I guess ties back into Shift7 a little bit, like what was the context, if you wouldn't mind elaborating a little bit, to you and Susan, and Puneet starting this thing after your own time at the white house, what . Really drove that for you?
Megan: [00:14:40] Yeah. So I think the main thing that I learned-- I've been really lucky in my career. I've always worked with just incredible people and had a chance to really learn a lot. And beyond that apprentice journey mastery kind of path that, that we go on as young people, if we can get the chance , and my early work, I had really cool summer jobs in college that got me exposed to really great work. You know, working in a machine shop, you know, so I'm a mechanical engineer. So having that experience was really important. And I got to work on an amazing project because the stuff I was building was used , it was the space systems, lab at MIT. And so we were building things that the astronauts were using to test with underwater so that they eventually, when they were doing EVA in the early days when people would do experiments outside of the space shuttle to see how you could construct something in space. Cause you got pressure suit gloves, you can't be hammering-- but it was that early work. And so for me it was a chance to work on that. You know, working for a company which does wireline logging in oil fields. I worked at IBM in the summer on materials surface treatment and cleaning technologies groups. So, you know, particle scales, you know, like crazy different jobs and it was a great experience.
Alex: [00:15:54] Are there any bigger points of advice you'd have for someone looking to get that kind of exposure?
Megan: [00:15:59] So the one that I would recommend for everybody is to leave your country. If you haven't had the chance to grow up, or you have experiences in multiple countries and work in another country. And I got to work in Japan, I worked for Apple in Tokyo I was supposed to go for a year.
I stayed for two. And then that's how I met the folks from general magic and got to work on early smartphones. Um I I've always worked. Like when we were working on smartphones, the idea, there was something that you could take, that would help you with your daily life. And we see that now with our phones, we also see the downsides of some of it with the social media challenges are too much, you know, this, this business model that we have developed, which is unfortunate around attention and wants our attention. The network wants our attention in order to have more data from us. So we'll have to adapt those business models and, and figure out how to get out of that mess. And we also have created really biased algorithms that are good for some and not. Not equal, not really designed that the way they need to, even though the intention wasn't there.
So I always found that I worked on things that were either trying to-- my goal with others was to reduce our impact on the planet or to improve the quality of life for people in some way and make sure to work on things that I was interested in. So I'd be engaged. I think it's one of the things people really need to do is try to follow their passion. I got great advice to follow passion.
Alex: [00:17:21] Was there anything or anyone that really instilled that in you?
Megan: [00:17:24] I took acoustics from professor Bose who was amazing, one of the best teachers. And he always said, you can follow your passion which he did. He was supposed to leave for a Fulbright and they gave him a lab in the summer before he left to just play around with some speakers.
Cause he had been finishing his thesis and had some ideas. And he just stayed and did it because he loved it, you know? And, and he was such a good testament to that. So what happened for me was, you know, I had this incredible chance to work, at PlanetOut, early internet with so many people and then work on a couple of projects, then went to Google, there were like 1200 people when I was at Google. In the beginning, it was amazing. Like build a plane and fly the plane. You know, we grew to 55,000, by the time I left.
Alex: [00:18:06] And then it was onto the white house.
Megan: [00:18:08] And then I got asked. I got a call or an email. Actually. I was in Africa, from Todd park who was CTO at the time, US CTO.
And he said, Hey, I want to talk to you. And I said, you know, I'll be back next week. And I spoke with him and it never occurred to me to go work in the government and he's just like, I want you to come. I have to go back to California. I want you to interview for this job. We want to talk to you about US CTO.
And there was a group of us that went through that process and I think what I learned working for president Obama and working with so many amazing colleagues in government who come from so many different backgrounds and president Obama's team was the most diverse team I've ever worked on. And I learned that we could have diversity in our senior leadership teams, like right now, We don't have to wait, we just have to prioritize it and design for it, and then we can have it. The people are there, the networks are disconnected badly and it's really hurting us. And in fact, just from a data perspective. You make better products, have more creativity, better productivity, you know, more impact. If you have a diverse team, all the, all the data is there.
And so he was able to put that together. And one of the things he was adding in to the senior team was a tech person. In addition to the science advisor. And I think he felt like the digital networks now are so important that he wanted someone who is fluent from that disruptive tech world to be a colleague with all the other skills. And, you know, sometimes we'd call it TQ at the table. Not sort of as the help for later, like, can you make me a website, but just be in the room. So. We can help just like a surgeon general, we know--
Alex: [00:19:45] But the idea wasn't to be a know it all or anything like that, it was more about collaboration, right?
Megan: [00:19:50] And Todd said this when I came in, he was like, you don't need to know what everyone else does. You need to just bring what you know. And then we blend it together to try to get the best solutions for the American people. So this idea of the U S CTO was, how do you use the power of data , innovation and technology, on behalf of the American people and the world, and really bring those capabilities.
And what that really looks like is bring those people to make sure they are serving their country in the senior roles all the way through just like we might have experts in law experts in medicine and experts in operations or science or communications or policy. And that we would blend together because you know that the cha you know, Amazon, we know where all the packages are at any given time, but hard problems like immigration of the children on the border.
We need to know where the children are. We need to like those, we need school. Lunch is a big data problem, you know, just as much as the self-driving car, but people didn't naturally think that way they thought, okay, I can get a government contractor, make this. Which is fine.
Alex: [00:20:54] So how do you get all the tech people to switch perspective?
Megan: [00:20:57] We don't want all the doctors in government. We want a few. Right? So similarly they want some tech people. And that doesn't mean that we haven't always had technical people in government. Of course we have. In fact, right now we have NASA. You know JPL just landed on Mars. We have you know, the department of defense and department of energy and NIST and IT teams across the NSA and others just brilliant technical people serving the country, but they're in sections and they need to be also in the room as much as you might have a legal person or communicator and expertise just really everywhere.
And so lifting up the senior folks in there as well as those, and then we actually will procure better. Like we could spend less money for what we get or, or really improve the services. So we came up with really three really major areas to work on. One was policy itself, you know, tech policy, like open data, open source, encryption these things, but also when we're doing any policies that were tech component or digital networks, Or component or data science component that could be there. And if you default, for example, open data, not private data like IRS data, but open data for the names of streets, you know, open data for weather, then an industry can be built on top of the national oceanographic and atmospheric agency and NOAA, or on top of US geological survey, an entire mapping ecosystem like Google maps and Bing maps.
And, you know, they can be built. You know, billion dollar industries. And so what if we had that for the data from HUD, for housing affordability, housing mobility, we did that with census. And so the opportunity project, let us create APIs for data sets. There were sort of sitting quietly, even though they were open, so that let's take HUD, Airbnb, Redfin, Zillow, come on over, you know, let's go, you don't bring it.
How about foster care? What are we got? And so the nonprofits. The startups, the commercial companies, governments, everybody could start being in the same apps ecosystem for solution making on behalf of all Americans on the hardest problems by changing that architecture. So that's the policy side.
And then the second part was really capacity building the government itself to do that, which meant bringing colleagues. Both who might be hiding out in government, but too varied, too low in the team to get their voice heard for architectural work and also coming from rotating a tour of service and that's happening now with the presidential innovation fellows, the U S digital service that 18 F team, the tech transformation teams at GSA.
All the agencies. Have folks like this and there's a college one called coding it forward. And a thousand young people applied last year. There were 80 kids here and again, people in an internship, they weren't physically here because of COVID sadly, but but they, they, each year they have been here. So they're in census and the veterans administration.
And then in, the department of labor and just. Solving problems. Some of our hardest problems with senior folks who really really know those topics more than you can ever imagine and putting it together with faster digital solutions and data science that's delivery. And then the third one is really.
How do we use these digital network tools to better organize across all the solution makers like the United nations solution summit? Could we find people already in States or local tribal who have solved criminal justice things or inclusive , economic, like future of work things and we did.
Alex: [00:24:25] Basically asking why you build something when you can find people doing it already.
Megan: [00:24:30] And then you would use the convening part in the white house to pull together sort of communities of practice. That would do that. So the main thing that I did coming out of the white house is I learned that all this was possible. And so I wanted to make Shift7 and Puneen and I originally founded it and then Susan joined us later.
My idea there and talking to them was could we continue kind of work that we were doing , and just have the structure for it. And so Shift7 means "and" if you look at your keyboard and it's really not about the company, it's more about all the collaborations. So we worked, for example, with MIT on a thing called the indigenous communities fellowship with MIT which is like the solution summit for the UN. And we ask who is already fixing things in energy or housing or other things on reservations or other places, which are some of the poorest communities, counties in the country, but, and full of genius talent. Who's doing this already. And we, first year we had six innovators from the Lakota community, or should it should come in the South and North Dakota's and then added Navajo and Hopi the next year.
And then now it's national with so six innovators, seven innovators, and then eight last this current year. And we have we're open call right now. So accelerating a group of innovators. Who've already been doing amazing work, but just supporting them to be even more networked. My colleagues in Silicon Valley said, um, Silicon Valley gets in a week in venture capital what Texas gets in a year. And so if you're in the pine Ridge reservation in the Dakotas...
Alex: [00:26:06] Yeah, even less going on there.
Megan: [00:26:08] And so I'm so excited for what you guys do at what you've been doing specifically at the university of Chicago with students to get everybody engaged in practice makes permanent, the practice of being part of innovating, whether you're inside an organization or outside the organization and the ecosystem or whatever it is.
Totally. On the topic of that people-centric approach to technology now on side of it of maybe some of the problems associated with that, like you've talked about social media earlier. A lot of the time, it seems like, I guess Moore's law, if we want to call it that has these implications outside just technological advancement. So the question, I guess is, are there any things you think would be necessary to mitigate rising inequality under increasingly rapid technological growth?
Yeah, I think inclusive design work is urgent. So , the idea of one room making everything for everybody else is really disastrous and it isn't, that people have super bad intentions. It's just that they don't have a lived experience. So they need a much broader lived experience to be part of designing things, designed with-- Joybool Anwinne is a colleague , who's a MITP student who was , doing a project when she was doing her masters that had to do with face recognition and she was playing around with some stuff and she camera to recognize her , and she was trying to like reload the software, you know, what's going on with this. And then a friend of hers sat down and was immediately recognized. And so her experience was to find out that the software just couldn't see her cause she had darker skin. And so the software hadn't been designed for humanity, it had been designed for a subset of humanity including police surveillance and other things, so very dangerous. And it turns out this is this kind of challenge. Isn't just new to, to tack it. Me and I think about, um, Think about the inauguration and the amazing poem by Amanda Gorman and someone had to go get a box for her to stand on and even then the mic was, you know, if you look at a podium it's designed for a pretty large guy. and then everybody else has to kind of figure out how to stand there, right? So my friends who are astronauts say that actually the audio, um, you know, the radios are designed for male voices. So we have a challenge.
There was something called the Shirley card that Kodak had, which they were optimizing the chemistry and actually it was making it so that if you had darker skin, you just were not your, your photos weren't showing, as much, depth about the details of your face. And so people were, you know, almost in shadow.
The good news is Kodak fixed it. The sad news is they fixed it because chocolate companies and furniture companies complained that their advertising photos weren't having enough distinction. We just have to realize that we share the planet with each other and, and that everybody deserves equality in these technologies.
Alex: [00:29:11] I mean that has some pretty serious implications when it comes to more complex data, right?
Megan: [00:29:15] And it's going to get really dangerous. The sexism and racism and all kinds of isms that unfairness by algorithm there'll be encoded because of two things. One, the algorithms being written by teams that didn't have the lived experience. You know, the Apple team, when they first launched health, the health apps, they forgot about reproductivity.
So there was no, no features for monitoring anything about women's reproductivity and I guess I just noticed that no one on the team would have been born without women's reproductivity so like, hello. Yeah. So it just helps, like, let's think more clearly about what we need to do. So that's the hard part and the, you know, so the algorithms and, and the lived experience, you know, when the Rohingya n, genocide was happening, I don't really understand why Facebook didn't find technical Rohingyan leaders and ask them to be senior vice presidents at Facebook and start working on attack or approach a challenge in advertising models. If they had the bug in the advertising they of course, I . Would imagine, worked on these problems, but not in the same priority level and not with the people with the lived experience. And that's solvable in that way.
And then the datasets themselves are biased. Like right now, if we run all the medical data ever. Then it'll be primarily North Atlantic, and a small amount, from probably Latin America, Africa, maybe middle East and others. So the data sets are imbalanced by gender too.
Alex: [00:30:49] That's a good point . Though. Because it goes beyond prejudice, right? Like the danger is really when it becomes encoded and the things we're using on a day-to-day basis. Right?
Megan: [00:30:56] Right. And so we crawl the data to learn and machine learning and we crawl really biased, racist, whatever data. Then the machine learns, you know, like a toddler. Right . What are you, who are you learning from?
So if we say, Oh, all medical information for humanity is this. And most medicine hasn't been tested on children. And a lot less on women and then a lot less from people from other places, then we will have medicine be good at certain things so it's algorithmic justice and data balance, you know, and, and just being mindful as, as you know, young people, you know, the whole knowing this, uh, USC actually a colleague there, we were talking about the idea of Hippocratic oath type idea for engineers. You know, how do you become a trustworthy engineer? How do you put your best self into that? And you can't always know it wasn't people's bad intention. Usually of course there are people with bad intention, but in these cases, it's not that it's, blindness that we have to overcome , pretty urgently.
Alex: [00:32:00] Got it. So you've told me this story once about the time you were working for Apple in Tokyo and you were visiting, I think San Diego, somewhere in California, where you realized as you were getting off the plane, You haven't spoken to some of the people that you were working with on the phone and having this light bulb moment that this email thing, which was like new in the world was really going to have a huge impact. And I'm curious if you've had any notable light bulb moments with any new technology since then?
Megan: [00:32:31] Yeah, my friends, Mary Lynn and Kevin and I were going to do this like road trip and I realized, you know, we had only used email to talk and, you know, and for people, they would think that there just was a time before email.
There was a time before all these things talked on the phone and before the phone, they, you know, there was the pony express you know the Telegraph. So, you know, it just, it's amazing these moments when you suddenly you're like, wow, that's amazing. I remember talking to somebody who said he had a choice between he and his wife had a choice to fly to the U S or to take a boat.
And he knew it was the moment when after that you would never take a boat. And so they actually chose to go by boat. But, uh, you know, like no one would do that anymore. I would, I would love to, but thankfully Greta as is teaching us about climate change and just doing things like that to just raise consciousness about use of power, but it's a it's.
I think by the way about Gretta Malala and you and everybody, all the young people out there, Gloria Steinem, who is just an extraordinary leader. For women's rights and just a writer. And I just encourage you to look up. She was talking to some colleagues in an interview recently, and I heard her say something about like how, even though there's so many teammates in the world and so many colleagues, you just sometimes have to wait for them to be born.
So I just think it's, it's exciting to have the gen Z community with us now, and the way everybody's thinking and teaming up and it's a daunting time, you know, I think a little bit, you know, I got to work with Malala. My son Louie graduated class of 2020, you know, Malala from college, Louie in high school.
That those classes, you know, you're in college now, what it's like to be a young person during COVID it's hard, but I think you guys will. Will come together more and you need each other, you realize how much you need each other. And I think that hopefully it'll have an impact on us because we can see the unfairness in the systems so much.
Alex: [00:34:34] It's definitely exposed a lot of that, which is maybe one of the few positives to take from the situation,
Megan: [00:34:39] It's so obvious now. We had seen it before people saw it and people work for all time. You know, university of Chicago, Jane Adams won the Nobel peace prize for inventing social work with her colleagues and Ida B Wells and the Chicago area, working on justice and data science, you know, way before computers that people like them who maybe history didn't bring through as loud as they brought the industrial age captains, you know, they were all doing this thing just like now.
And so the first industrial age where Darwin discovered our origins and Ada Lovelace invented algorithms. She said, I wish to bequeath to the generations a calculus of the nervous system, you know, and Mary Shelley warned us of Frankenstein. Should we raise the monster or not-- AI? You know, it's all the same.
Charles Dickens wrote about Oliver. Right. Oliver twist is a story of it's it's a play written about a boy and a workhouse. Right and we get to see his point of view. So do we understand more about the ghost workers of the internet, who today are cleaning up terrible porn or whatever they're doing, or people who are like fixing messages or people who are ripping apart electronics and terrible situations or sorting plastic? Or--
Alex: [00:35:54] Basically modern day hidden figures.
Megan: [00:35:57] Or how can we change Oliver twist's world and, and include him and her as equals. And I think your generation is seeing this idea. So maybe it doesn't have to be the fourth industrial revolution, but it can be the fourth or maybe ongoing industrial social, environmental inclusive sort of community. And we can have not just these ideas of smart cities that are these sort of scary surveillance places, but instead of wise community you know, like Jane Adams and Ida B Wells were working towards, and I think one of the secrets there for me came from somebody saying that the challenge that Jane faced in the beginning is the University of Chicago cannon, they included her, but by the 1920s, they were like, Oh, you're the field people and we're the academics. And so if we can stop being like, we're the academics, we're the field, we're the companies, we're the this, and instead say, we're the ecosystem, you know, in this place. Or in this country or in this world, or in this town, in this home and really bring the collective genius of each other and see that genius in others and help accelerate that entrepreneurial or innovation or solution making capabilities, whether they're social, economic environmental community political, or some combination, hopefully, cause when you go across. You play the whole orchestra and the hardest problems, that would be certainly my hope. And I think that it's possible, especially if we study all of history, including the hidden figures, we'll see that we'll have the confidence. That we're on the right track. And I'm excited for gen Z and the teamwork that gen Z and those younger than you all, and those older folks, then you all will be able to collaborate on together.
Alex: [00:37:50] No, it's important to have that perspective. And , it's definitely an exciting thing to be a part of. So. Absolutely. Yeah.
Megan: [00:37:57] Cool.
Cool!
Alex: [00:37:59] Well, Megan, Thank you so much for making the time. This was so awesome.
Megan: [00:38:03] Thanks Alex
Alex: [00:38:04] Good talking to you!