Guest request: Neri Oxman!,(reply>), @Alexander Caines Thanks for the response, he also interviewed Alex Garland who's a writer and director, so naturally expanding beyond his own field is great. What I have to say is entirely subjectively, too long, and likely dead wrong, but it's a point of view nonetheless. <br><br><br>My background is not in engineering or computer science, but architecture. Having gone to a heavily futurist school (Google image: student work Bartlett School of Architecture or Architectural Association), generating shapes with Rhino3D using scripts, 3D printing, 3D scanning, photogrammetry are all techniques that are constantly promoted in these environments, I once went through a whole panel at the annual exhibition that features TensorFlow heavily, and by feature I meant the use of the term, the work had absolutely nothing to do with it. I was guilty of this myself in order to assimilate, stretch some Latex across two 3D printed site model procedurally distorted by Rhino3D? Oh it "propagates generative ecotomes", which is then scanned in and exported to Unity to be experienced through VR, in order to "amplify the generative paradigms and the transient nature of entropy". I graduated and the school decided I did well, and certified me accordingly, then I stepped into the real world of architecture where I realised it was a big circle jerk. <br><br><br>Neri Oxman, and many like her, represent this culture, artists who are too proud to call themselves "artists", so they skim the top of upcoming technologies, get a basic understanding of them, then apply them to the art work, coating them with seductive languages to disguise them as technology advancement / development, for people looking in from the outside the design space, her language fills in the gap by being purposely vague, for people looking in from within the design space, her use of new and exciting technology shrouds her from conventional criticism as it's not suppose to be art. There are many real issue that has to be solved with new technologies, in fashion, in medicine, in architecture, she is often celebrated to be just that, but consistently she misses the mark, and nobody has benefited from it. She pretends to do the work of Autodesk (developing 3D printers that prints at building scale), 3M (material science that keeps us safe in all sorts of environment), and more, these are often unglamarous and under reported work by these companies, yet they do make everyone's lives better. FWIW this is my impression of her work and her talks, not MIT Media Labs or the faculty. <br><br>Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against art, in fact I appreciate it a lot, I love science and engineering too, I just dislike a celebrated individual who in my opinion pretends to be all of the above with little to no tangible useful results to show, perhaps by design. An interview with Lex might change my mind with insights that her talks and other interviews don't provide. Anyway, rant over.,(reply>), @aaron4820<br><br><br><br>[Sorry in advance for the long response. But I think it's necessary in order to best get my point across.]<br><br><br><br> Lex attempts (and always succeeds) to interview people who have made significant contributions to fields adjacent to or within the study of artificial intelligence. Though, Neri Oxman is not an artificial intelligence researcher by profession, her work  (like her silk pavilion) relies heavily on machine learning. To consider her even unread on the topic I think would be a sever understatement.<br><br><br>Artificial Intelligence aside, Oxman would be able to provide insight into many philosophical and transcendental questions spanning from the enhancement of the human form (in the same manner as Elon Musk's NeuralLink) to insights on ideas of extended consciousness (given her involvement with the Council on Extended Intelligence: a correspondence between her lab and the IEEE Standards association)<br><br><br>It is very difficult to describe the work of Oxman due to the contrast we often assume between the futuristic and that which is practical. Oxman's lab is a moonshot factory for the near future. Without trivializing her work, Oxman creates services for the future (such as synthesizing melanin, creating "living" materials that produce consumable waste among other biological actrivities, and exploring the constraints and liberties of biomimicry). Despite the fact that an interviewee like Neri Oxman would be a pretty big shift in profile given Lex's previous guests, I don't think she would be the only "outlier" (take Grant Sanderson or Eric Weinstein). Instead, I think she would bring some profound conversation to the table comprable to those found in some of my favorite interviews: the ones with Jim Gates, Juergen Schmidhuber, Francois Chollet, and Donald Knuth.,(reply>), Yes, Neri is amazing.,(reply>), Don't take this the wrong way, but... why?