COVID-19 is changing our society, but how are we coping? Ben is joined by digital anthropologist Dr. Caitlin McDonald to discuss our collective re-examination of common assumptions about work, community, and life.
- Read Caitlin’s latest report: Coping with quarantine: pandemics & reconfiguring the collaborative workspace
- Follow Dr. Caitlin McDonald’s work at the Leading Edge Forum
- Social Network Analysis, by John Scott
- Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cathy O’Neil
Intro / Outro Music by DJ Quads
https://soundcloud.com/djquads
Transcript
everyone, and welcome to episode eight of The Hired Thought Podcast. I am very
pleased to be joined today by Dr. Caitlin McDonald. Dr. Caitlin McDonald is an
award winning scholar. She’s a digital anthropologist and professional thought
provoker. She works for the Leading Edge Forum. And Caitlin, you describe your
work as helping industry leaders make sense of our technological future.
I was wondering what does that work look like and what kind
of topics do you focus on right now?
absolutely. So digital anthropologist is such a, I love it because it’s, it’s
a, it’s a wonderful job, but it also could mean a lot of different things. and
the great thing about the word anthropology is it just means the study of
So that covers a lot of ground. and the digital part of
course can mean anything from, I, I will bet anything Ben that you have a
drawer of cables in your house that you’re saving because you think you might
need them someday and you refuse to get rid of them, but you haven’t used it in
my skill as an anthropologist. This is, this is the thing that I know. but it’s
things like that, the material culture aspect of digital lives. it can be
anything from looking at, remote working practices, which of course, right now
many people are being forced into with little preparation and practice, to
looking at digital ethics.
but in essence, I cover a range of issues that have to do
with how digital, whatever that means, shows up in people’s lives.
been doing a lot of exploration around this topic of remote work before
coronavirus really started becoming the driving constraint, I guess, for the
shift to remote work, and I imagine that there are a lot of people struggling
right now because they just don’t even know how to make this thing work.
But at the same time, this is kind of a liminal space where.
Because we’re forced into these circumstances, we’re going to learn a lot. So
from your perspective, what are the tools that people can put into play to, to
learn about how remote work is unfolding in the world right now?
great question. And I think the important thing to focus on is, that a lot of
information is available about the actual tools themselves so, of course,
there’s that. Whole situation to get used to dealing with new tools and new
technologies. but really the thing that I think has to change is people’s behavior
because, they, when you are used to working in an office where, for example,
you have many, many times that you can have micro interactions with your
colleagues and you move online and suddenly those informal places for
connecting are no longer physically there for you.
How are you going to build space as in mental space? How are
you going to build space for that collectively. So we’ve seen lots of different
ways that people are doing that. there’s one team who I really love has called
their kind of afternoon meeting for 15 minutes afternoon recess. So they all
kind of go out at lunchtime and they do something and then they come back and
they show off what they’ve done, or they have pictures or dogs or whatever it
But there’s plenty of ways of doing that. You can create
remote coffee hours. That’s one thing people have done. If you have a standing
meeting already, you can, for example, introduce like a warm up or a cool down
time to those kinds of meetings. but it’s really, really critical to introduce
those informal ways of connecting because otherwise all of your interactions
become really formal because you’ve set up a meeting and you’re going to stick
And that’s the meeting that we’re having and it’s very
bulleted. So developing that kind of sense of low level trust is really
important for when you really need the high level trust to come into play.
makes sense. I, I’ve heard Kevin Behr just in my, in the back of my head
saying, you know, your organization moves at the speed of trust and I think
trust depends greatly on communication.
And then I hear Jabe Bloom on the other side of my head just
going. Pointing out the difference between transactionality and reciprocity.
And so when we don’t have these in person conversations where we, we have
reciprocity, we have like, we can see facial expressions, we can know what it’s
like to be with you when you’re feeling this way.
but now it’s like, by default, highly transactional show up
in the meeting at this time. So, so what’s at stake and how can companies learn
to explore this in a safe way?
it’s, it’s a really wonderful question because, so many of the companies that
work effectively, really well remotely, so this is in the kind of pre
coronavirus pandemic situation.
What they were telling us was we, we are a remote company,
but we would never say that we don’t get together physically. We always have
some cadence of time that we’re spending time all together. And that really
accelerates the pace at which we’re able to innovate together when we’re not
Because you, like you said, you’ve developed that sense of
reciprocity. I understand that that person’s making a joke, or I just have that
sense of, they’re a bit tense or
whatever it might be. So you develop that in person at a much accelerated rate
compared to what you can do offline, but then you can work really effectively,
asynchronously if you have that trust established already.
So in this era where. Really being forced not to have those
in person interactions. being able to develop those, those kind of micro
interactions is so critical. and I, I honestly think that, in some ways we are
there. and in some ways we’re not there. So we have lots of tools and
technologies that support us being able to have, for example, remote calls.
but one thing that I really think is missing, for example, is
being able to triangulate around something. So like, I could share my screen
with you on this call right now, but essentially it’s like we’re at a table,
sat across from each other, so we couldn’t then mutually say, Oh, why don’t you
come look at this with me?
And nobody could kind of wander by and say, Oh, that’s cool.
What are you working on? You know? So that kind of stuff, which happens very
easily in person, doesn’t happen so well online. there are many great things
that do happen while online. but I would suggest that scenario that I’d like to
see more innovation happening, for example.
things that has been on my mind a lot lately is how like literacy in the tools
is not enough, and it might be that in a lot of cases, the way we facilitate
these discussions and interactions is where we’re just missing so many common
What are some of those kinds of things that you’ve seen that
could enable people to more effectively attempt to experiment with things like
triangulation or emulating that in a virtual space?
one of the critical things is we have an assumption that everyone has equal
bandwidth and equal ability to get online and the reality of the situation is
so one of the things that’s really critical is having lots
of fallback mechanisms so that you can fail gracefully. So if for some reason
my screen fails and I can’t present to you anymore, or we can’t be on the video
call anymore, we can only do phones. having lots of kind of fallback mechanisms
and redundancies that allow us to continue the, the communication flow less
impeded than we otherwise would be is really, really critical.
but you then of course, have to agree all of those terms
essentially in advance so that you know what’s coming. and that’s true also of
our social interactions. So, having a kind of, we’ve started calling it the
Manual of We, so, you know, what’s the kind of expected, essentially service
level agreement for how long I can leave a message in, the team chat versus
email versus whatever it is. So there’s the, having a sense of expectation
about which of these channels is absolutely rapid response, which of these
channels is, can you get to this when you get to it? And which of these is
important or low urgency? So, really having an understanding of what do I need
to be paying attention to right now, a shared collective understanding is
and then there’s some questions about, I think that the
main question that I’ve been seeing over the last few days among, people who
are suddenly being forced to, to remote working is video on or video off. And
this is a really big debate. and my answer of course is as an anthropologist
that it depends on your situation.
So, one thing I would say is if you’re having a difficult
conversation, have the video on, because it’s really critical to be able to see
all of those extra signals beyond what I’m saying. But other things that I’m
communicating as well. the second thing I would suggest is, If you’re not in a
situation where you can have your own very nice kind of work setup with a
beautiful background and all of these nice things, which not everyone can,
especially now if you’re, if you’re working from home and you have caring
responsibilities, for example, or if you live in a city that’s overcrowded and
has very high price in housing and, you can’t have your own office. you know,
it’s a little bit unfair to expect people to have the video on in those
situations because, it’s, it’s a bit of an intrusion. so, so thinking about
those kinds of things, especially now, I’m thinking about all the, the parents
in the team that I work in who are, not only trying to carry on with their
regular lives, but also have family responsibilities, especially as some of
their schools have been shut or their children have been quarantined because of
You know, it’s, but their lives are going to be
interrupted, their working lives are going to be interrupted, and we need to be
more understanding of that than previously we have been. So I think that kind
of behavioral change where your, your expectation is different than it
previously was, is really critical because, you know, not thinking that people
are not paying attention or slacking off or whatever it is.
there are important things happening and urgent things
happening in their homes as well. And so we just need to be a little bit more
mindful of, being flexible about our schedules as well.
this moment in time, it seems reasonable to maybe lower our collective
expectations of, you know, we, we, we expect certain things in the workplace,
Constant attention. And maybe there are some negative
dynamics to that, that we get to revisit by experiencing this situation
together in the, in this sort of coronavirus pandemic. I am worried like.
People who are going to be caring for their kids. Like usually we kind of hold
that against folks. Not, not explicitly, but implicitly in the way that we
I’m hoping maybe some of that gets to be revisited.
it’s, it’s really interesting to watch the kinds of conversations that are
happening now. In particular, one area that I’ve been seeing a lot happening is
in academics who are being forced to work from home, especially in couples. so
you get lots of people saying, Hey.
Newton developed the theory of gravity when he was doing
this. And you know, Shakespeare wrote Lear, so what are you doing? And all of
the, the female academics who are, who have children or have caring
responsibilities are saying, excuse me. what I’m going to be doing is all of
those things. And then my husband is now like, I can write 15 million papers.
So, you know, that kind of disparity and fairness and
access, which has to be honest, already been a very much existing dynamic, is
really showing up right now. whether we will be able to leverage that. Towards
more effective equality for everyone. I think is an open question.
Thinking about that question in particular.
One of the topics that has really been on my radar right now
is this, this thing called epistemic injustice. And, it was introduced to me by
Cat Swetel and epistemic injustice is something described in a book of the same
title by Dr. Miranda Fricker.
different kinds of injustice. One is about credibility and the other is about
what we can even come to know because we have the language for it or don’t. And
so one of the things I’m noticing even in this conversation now is that we’re
starting to be able to analyze.
These circumstances, like the fact that there will be a
discrepancy between what, women who are academics versus men who are academics
who might or might not be sharing caring responsibilities during a time when
people are being encouraged to perform social isolation and things along those
We are now able to more explicitly analyze those. what does
it look like from the anthropological lens. To observe a community coming into
knowing that a certain kind of thing is happening.
very, very difficult to talk about epistemology without delving into, areas
where you have no language for what you’re trying to describe, because that is
the nature of what you are trying to describe.
So I think that there are several fascinating aspects. One
is that. certain kinds of social dynamics, which were already very much in
existence, are now coming into the highlights of, of people’s consciousness
because there is this enforced shift in their behavior. and whether that will
exacerbate those existing social dynamics or provide a catalyst for change,
again, I think is up for grabs, but simply the fact that it is coming to
although of course, many people have already noticed those
dynamics for many hundreds of years. So it’s, it’s essentially, there’s a kind
of novelty and yet not, which I find really interesting. I think the second
thing as well is, I’ve been thinking a lot, speaking, from an anthropological
perspective, less about the justice side and more about like literally the
physical distancing part.
So, the reason that we have the phrase personal space comes
from an anthropologist in the 1960s named Edward T. Hall, who developed a
theory called proxemics. And this theory essentially outlines the kind of
physical distances at which you feel, naturally that you are either in kind of
an intimate space with someone, a personal space with someone, a public space
You can go all the way out to kind of, you know, addressing
a crowd. and the dynamics of those things are extremely different. So if I
suddenly lean into my camera really far, that has a very different personal
feel, in fact, I’ll do it just to kind of simulate that. Or have you ever been
on a, like a, a multi-group conference call with someone and there’s someone
Too close to the microphone and you’re, it feels really icky
because it feels like they’re too close to you, even though of course, they’re
like actually at a great distance from you. that’s the kind of thing where, you
know, or someone standing too close to you on the tube or in the supermarket or
you have a sense of when, they’ve invaded your personal
space or when they’ve really pushed into your intimate space. and of course,
that’s a little bit cultural. So actually Americans have a different kind of
concept of personal space than Italians, for example. et cetera, et cetera. So
there’s some really interesting cross cultural studies about this.
but the thing that interests me right now is, there is a
concept emerging concept of digital proxemics. So if you look at the way that
both you and I have set up our cameras, in your case, you can see mostly just
your head. In my case, you can see my head and my shoulders, which makes it
feel like I’m probably about four or five feet away from you, which is about
the distance between me and the camera.
but sometimes I get on conference calls with people and
they’re like lounging on the couch and they’re holding the phone right there
and things. And of course that has a really different feel. so, and. It feels
different, but because people haven’t really strongly considered what that does
they aren’t making proactive choices about how they want to
show up online, specifically in video calls. And I’m seeing one thing that I’m
seeing more of now is people wanting to get together virtually instead of going
to the pub, for example, which is something we could have always done. But now
my friends around my city and around the world, it seems less weird to say,
Hey, do you want to have dinner over Skype or whatever, than it previously did,
which is super fascinating.
but what I’m getting to with all of this kind of rambling
thought is, the, the anthropological piece of this really to me is, enabling people to
understand a pattern that previously existed and that subconsciously they were
behaving in accordance with. But they maybe never thought about before.
And that to me, relates to the epistemology piece around, being
able to bring to light types of knowledge and describe types of knowledge that
didn’t exist. So, you know, you, you haven’t a learned sense of when
close is too close. And you will behave in accordance with that.
Even if you’re not consciously thinking, I must step one,
one half foot further away for this to feel comfortable. You’ll still do that.
Now, how we do this online in an era where we are all being forced into
relatively static, camera capabilities. You know, most people don’t, I would
suggest have excellent home setups or work setups, for conducting conference
calls. so even though the camera technology is available, where you position
it, how you set up the keyboard, to how you set up your camera. If you’re doing
it on your phone, how do you make sure it stays in place? All of that stuff. despite
the fact that we have the capabilities to do video calls, all the stuff about
how you position yourself relative to the camera and how the other person
positions themselves, that stuff is very much emergent.
So I’m really curious about how the next, let’s say six to
nine months emerge, both in terms of the technological innovation that will
happen. And also the etiquette that will emerge around how we conduct our calls
and whether that’s going to be explicit as in, you know, Ms Manners manuals or
whether that’s going to be much more implicit and it just becomes normal or
weird to, be close or far or whatever it might be or have the background on or
All that stuff I think is very much up for grabs. So we’re
going to start seeing new rituals and habits emerging in this time period.
looking forward to the listicles with “top 10 things you need to know
about proper etiquette on a zoom call” or something along those lines. And
what I really appreciated about the way that you explored that whole space was
the anthropological lens of the sort of social practices that are emerging from
these, these moments in time where our norms get kind of disrupted.
Something that a friend of mine talks a lot about. his
name’s Tasshin Fogleman. He talks a lot about disfluency. So sort of like all
that regular everyday stuff that we’re just sort of ignoring, cause it’s not
apparent to us. If we slow down long enough to notice those things, then we can
start making more explicit decisions about them.
I love the example that you just raised about cameras
because the decisions we make every day are often oriented around our own
individual perspectives. The considerations that were, you know, at the time
important. for example, the consideration behind me using a very close up view
of through my camera is based on my embarrassment about the background in my
And so I was like, can I put a whiteboard behind my head and
then cut off all the rest of the images? The side effect that I did not have a
language for until you just now raised it was that. I am probably a little bit
more intimate with all the folks that I get on a call with from that standpoint
of, you know, the proximal kind of view of that.
than maybe I was intending to be right, and now it’s not
that I’m going to sit here and say, now, Caitlin, give me the good or bad value
judgment on that. It’s more like, Oh my goodness, I’m aware of this now and I
can make active decisions for each call even depending on who it is that I’m
And so these emergent kind of things become more, it’s like
decision spaces that are now accessible to us. Now. I’m really into that idea.
to be honest, I think that that’s one of the core kind of anthropological
skills is learning to journal your own experiences and keep, keep field notes
about what’s happening that you observe, that you see, that you feel that you
experience, and then use that to, forward your decision making.
So it’s, it’s almost like the, the anti metrics, let’s say.
Right. You know, so you, you’re still, you’re still engaging in a practice that
allows you to engage in decision making, but the inputs that you’re using for
that are much more qualitative than they are quantitative, which is not to dumb
I think it is very important. I’m speaking as a former
quantitative analyst as well, but I have thoughts about under-utilizing
qualitative, inputs as well. So.
sense. Yeah. I’m thinking about what it looks like for you to do this kind of
work. you mentioned the interest in the qualitative side of things. I know
ethnography is in your background, and it’s something that I’m really
interested in, especially, ethnography around stories and what, what kind of
narratives people create for themselves as they go about their daily lives.
but I know you’ve also done the interesting things like
social network graph analysis and stuff like that. I was wondering if you could
share a little bit about what’s in your toolbox as a digital anthropologist.
sure. So anthropology covers a range of different, kind of tools to get the
data that you want to have.
So, you know, as you pointed out, ethnography as one of
those. And typically what ethnography entails is going to live in a community
or work in a community depending on the kind of thing that you’re doing, and
actually experience the things that they’re experiencing. So, that would entail
a method called participant observation, which is.
What it sounds like you do, the things that you’re seeing
and you see and you watch the things that other people are doing. So you’re
actually trying to become, become one of the community that you are studying.
And the reason for this is that, anthropologists, contemporary anthropologists
believe that the people that you are
studying are the experts in their own experience.
So if you want to be able to describe that experience to
anyone else, you must be part of that experience as well. so that creates some
kind of interesting dynamics in terms of who you study and how you study. in a
digital world, what that will often mean is, participating in online
For example. when I recently did a project. That we call
digital ethnography. It was much more of a kind of diary study. Really when you
got right down to it. What we were doing is asking people to send in
information on their phones, asking them to send us photos, giving them little
prompts to send in, survey questions or, just send a little thoughts about what
was happening in their day.
so. It was much more immersive than a traditional diary
study where I wouldn’t see the information until the end, for example. Or they
could only send in, text. And in this case, they could also send video, for
example, but to, to call it an ethnography in the traditional sense. I mean,
it’s very different than what you typically would do.
But still, it’s really interesting to experience all those
immersive methods, especially in a time that we are becoming increasingly
digital. So it was important for me to, in a way, doing that study was in
itself a digital ethnography because you’re experiencing and experimenting with
different, you know, new ethnographic methods.
so another tool that we often use, one of my favorite
methods, in the social sciences is something called semiotics, which is the
study of signs and symbols. so if you’re thinking about, for example, if you
Google AI, you might find that all of the images about it are blue. Why is this?
and you know, I conjecture that it’s often because LEDs,
especially in the early days were blue. So you get that kind of blue screen
glow. So it’s probably something about that. But then that means that that kind
of shade of blue is become very synonymous with AI. So then it becomes a
self-referring system where if you want something to seem like AI, then it has
so it becomes really interesting. So that’s really fun. You
can do a lot with that. and then the other method that you mentioned is social
network analysis. And I will hold up a reference book.
that are home, the book that Caitlin held up was social network analysis by
So, network analysis is a fascinating discipline and what it
really is designed to do is to help you understand the relationships between
people. So typically when you do social network analysis, but you can also do
network analysis on other things like telephones and you know, objects,
physical objects in a, in a computer network, for example. but the, the
advantage of doing it in a social sense is you then get a sense of the, the
And how they are formed. so I’ve done quite a lot of that in
the past. typically, I worked with a large education community, online
education community. I’ve also done it in a slightly less online way, so it’s,
it’s much harder to get the data if you’re not doing it digitally. but you can,
you can do things like run surveys to say, who did you work with or who did you
And then get a sense of who that was and then how they. When
they did it, how they did it, and you can then build your network in that way.
So, it’s really fun. It’s especially fun if you can do it when you have all the
data collected. The data collection is the hard bit of social network analysis.
So that’s the part that I would, if you can do that digitally, I would
but then, An example of that in practice at the moment is
that a, a, a social network analysis tool, a graph database called Neo4j, has
made their graph database technology available to people who are studying, the
spread of the coronavirus.
And at the moment, people in China can essentially upload
themselves as a node, as an object in the network, and they can then see who
else they’re connected to and whether those people have tested positive for the
coronavirus. So you can look at the spread of the virus very quickly. so it’s,
it’s an advantage in that sense.
If you want to see how something like a virus or information
passes through a network that’s network analysis that means to do that.
was doing a lot of management consulting one of the things that we really
needed as sort of a core competency was the ability to know what the social
graph was in the organization we were working, especially when it was in a
larger scale, like, not even for insight, just for understanding how to orient
to the system that we were a part of.
And it’s these, it’s these tools that we can build to
understand the world around us that help us make more sense of it, help us act
more meaningfully within it. And it’s kind of really interesting to see the
kinds of tools that you’ve leveraged to understand how people work, how
cultures work. And especially now that we’re focusing more on, you know, we
tend to privilege the technology over the social part of our interactions, but
how those two things really kind of create each other in a way. It’s really
Yeah. So. Given the context that we’re in right now. So the
date that we’re recording this is March 17th, 2020,
Patrick’s day, very important.
day, yeah! so Caitlin is based in the UK. I’m based in the United States.
I’m in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I think we’re both kind
of in this somewhat reflective place where we’re sort of getting to watch how
the government response is playing out in specifically with coronavirus. And
the place it puts me is sort of in this contemplative mode of, what is the
responsibility of an organization to its people? One of the things I often say
is that the entire point of organizations is to gather human potential and
focus to a particular end. and a lot of times. Our, frankly, our institutions fail`
So now in this moment, corporate responsibility to sort of
take some on a different meaning, and I was kind of curious, Caitlin, what
your, your thoughts were about corporate responsibility in a coronavirus
context? from an anthropological perspective. Hmm.
this is both with my anthropology hat on and just with Caitlin’s hat on.
So it’s, it’s been fascinating to me to watch the difference in responses from companies and governments and seeing some act with such responsibility and care towards not only there clients and their service users in their paying customers, but also towards their staff and others who are behaving in a very, very different way.
so for example, if you look at Microsoft, which committed to
closing down their campuses, but also paying all the people that normally would
be dependent on the jobs that are physically located in those campuses and
can’t be moved, such as canteen workers and drivers and things like that. You
know, that speaks to a kind of deep ethos of care in terms of we recognize that
by shutting this, we might be very negatively impacting these people’s lives.
So we’ve decided that we’re going to take responsibility for
paying their wages, despite the disruption. How long that is sustainable for
them. I don’t know. But they’ve, in the meantime at least allowed themselves a
breather window to figure it out. you contrast that with something like the UK
government yesterday announced that it was going to not mandate that pubs and
bars and theaters and, sporting events close, but they were highly recommending
that people no longer go to those things.
Which means that because they’ve decided not to officially
close any of those things, none of those people who work in those industries
can now claim any insurance. So, whether restaurants, bars, and, and theaters
can continue to operate after they’ve not been able to do that for a certain
it’s very much, again, an open question because those people
have been left with no security and also no warning of that happening. So I
have quite strong feelings about that. I think it’s extremely irresponsible
towards those people. and I think it’s also very shortsighted because humans are
social animals and we simply will not be able to sustain a culture where we
stay inside all the time and that we, we never have any contact with each
other. So, we need pubs and we need theaters and we need sporting events. and
of course, at the moment. We, we can’t responsibly have those collective
gatherings that we normally would have. but we simply are not going to be able
to live in a world where we longterm never have any of those things.
We can’t do it. Aye. It’s not possible. So what does it
mean if we then put all of those people out of business and we have no way of
rapidly bringing them back into the into the fold. and I’ve been
thinking about this not only with reference to social and cultural events, but
also with reference to business resiliency.
So I was speaking to one of my, one of my bosses actually
the other day, and he was describing a situation previously, where, you know,
you as a responsible business would never have used more than 25% of your
highest days network capacity when you were planning for, network outages or
surges or whatever it might be.
And we now live in a world where we optimize for efficiency
over those kinds of, capacity and resilience considerations. if you think about
things like, just in time delivery services and, and all that kind of stuff
where you’re really prioritizing efficiency, what you’re not doing is allowing
for sudden change or allowing for, the ability to respond to, unexpected
And to some degree, they’re unexpected, you can’t possibly
know what you will need, but to have some flex in your capacity, which we’ve
now decided is not a good thing because we have all these wonderful
instrumentation capabilities and we can measure everything to the nth degree. So
therefore we can put in only what we need to put in.
But that of course means that your system is very, very low
resilience. So, you know, even if you’re not thinking about all of the poor
actors who are out of work, which I am thinking about because I love going to
the theater and I’m really gonna miss it if we don’t get it back. You
know, just thinking about grocery deliveries and power plants and, you know,
certainly on everyone’s mind, healthcare services and systems without those
kinds of, thoughts about how you deal with shocks and the system.
We, we’re deeply under-preparing ourselves for, for the
future where, you know, the future may be very, very different than what we’d
had in the past. I think that there probably will be a real overarching change,
especially for people who work in what were office jobs. but that doesn’t mean
that you can remote everything.
So when we come back out of hibernation and come back out of
the cave, what’s going to be out there for us and how are we going to prepare
a moment of kind of destabilization where you know, a lot of the things that we
hold dear, a lot of the expectations that we have are as good as gone right
And when we emerge from however this plays out, when we
emerge, we will have to kind of put the pieces back together and maybe some of
the old things will come back and maybe some of them won’t. And maybe there
will be some new things. But the difficulty I think is who, who will actually,
from an existential perspective, make it, right?
And I mean that both physically and literally, but also from
the standpoint of these organizations who are operating on thin margins don’t
have a cash reserve. in a way, it’s a,
`it’s a demonstration of how fragile a lot of capitalism is at this point where
you have businesses with very low cash, suddenly put into a situation of
perhaps extreme duress and unable to cope. I’ve been talking with a lot of
conference organizers in particular lately because I’ve been interested in
learning about the decision making processes that they’re going through right
now. and first of all, most who I’m talking to are under extreme mental, mental
And for many of them who operate year to year and, and frankly
don’t carry reserves from one year to the next, whether or not they cancel is a
matter of whether or not they come back next year. And so that existential
question leads me to this other thought that’s been sort of bouncing around my
And I’m kind of curious how you, perceive it and whether you
agree or disagree. We need to be making the right thing to do the easy thing to
do. beyond that, I think we need to be making the right thing to do the selfish
thing to do. So how, how can our institutions, how can our organizations.
Look at the world in this way and maybe is that the right
frame to think about this?
you make the right thing to do the selfish thing to do? I think that’s a really
interesting way of putting it that will, enable people who are not
automatically drawn into the ethics narrative. feel like they have a stake in
the game as it were. and. Most of the time people do have a stake in the narrative
So, when I’ve been doing a lot, I do a lot of work on
digital ethics in general and AI ethics in particular. And for the most part,
people are very receptive often because they realize how much these
technologies are playing into their own daily lives and they think about things
They’re like, Oh, I wouldn’t want my bank to be doing that.
I wouldn’t want my airline to be doing that. Whatever it might be. And that
makes them then reconsider. Oh, that means that I have to change the way that I
behave because this also has an impact on other people’s lives. But there’s
definitely an aspect where if you’re trying to highlight, the selfish value of
ethics to organizational leaders.
it’s not just that narrative about do unto others as you
would have done unto you. There is also, you know, real hard cash money needs
to be made by making ethical decisions, including, for example, looking for
underserved communities or looking for markets that are not yet really fully
and in particular talent. And this is the one that I think
is the most interesting because, all the research that we did, and there’s also
some other research on this by external other think tank groups, suggests that
the people who are most working with the most advanced technologies right now,
AI and machine learning, do want to work at places where they feel that their
values align with the company.
They want to work in responsible technology organizations.
And this is really important because those talented people are so rare and so valuable,
that, being so rare and so valuable have the capacity to walk away and to make
a difference in a way that perhaps people who are in more vulnerable situations
So that means that those people have an added ability to
push for senior management to behave more responsibly. and thank goodness that
they are looking to work at responsible places because how awful would it be if
they weren’t and still have all of that power.
me to all these places that I, I really want to explore and I almost feel like
we have to have another followup conversation at some point specifically on the
Is there anything that you’ve come across lately that would
be a recommended reading or viewing for the folks who are listening at home.
it’s not too much, to, push my own research. we recently published a little
blog post on how to deal with remote working if it’s being suddenly
foisted upon your team, so we can share that with you. I would suggest as well,
if you’re broadly interested in issues around digital ethics, which I think
does play into that space very nicely, I would strongly suggest Weapons of
Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil, which is a great book. Really explains
a lot of the kind of challenges of the ethical space with digital products, in
simple and easy to understand language and the kind of core concepts of what
are the potential pitfalls are well articulated there.
good way for people to find out more about your work and follow you as you
Caitlin: LeadingEdgeForum.com.
Thank you so much for being with me, Caitlin.
My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Ben.
