Rethinking Silicon Valley: Innovations, Ideals, and the Common Good ⎸ #Innominds S2EP4 (Part 1)

at the smallest level although this is itself a massive change is bringing a a whole new design Paradigm to the way that we're Designing Technology in which the focus is not on these very simple metrics that are not uh aligned with what people actually care about but to really it's almost it starts with a philosophical project to get really really clear about what is Meaningful what is valuable what what is the actual service that we're trying to provide what what is the way in which we want people's lives to get better individually and collectively and then some of those things we can create increasingly refined metrics for and be tracking those and then some of those things are just intrinsically unmeasurable they are by their nature qualitative Silicon Valley historically has no I has very little in the way of tools to understand quote qualitative experience and the subtleties and nuances of phenomenology of our subjectivity hi welcome to the show my pleasure to be here is your host just call me t-plus this show is called Inno mines a forum for leaders in Tech and politics to discuss how to solve today's problems with today's tools today our special guest is Justin Rosenstein founder of the non-profit initiative one project and co-founder of the collaboration tool Asana I'm also here with Audrey Tang taiwan's digital Minister today we talk about tech for business and Tech for society as well as how we balance between the two [Music] okay so before we get started I want to introduce our two guests today as I just mentioned Justin is the co-founder of the collaboration tool Asana and the founder of one project which is a non-profit initiative that aims to help Humanity transition to a thriving Equitable and ecological civilization he is also the co-inventor of Google Drive Gmail chat Facebook pages and Facebook's like button as well as a founding advisor of the center for Humane technology hi Justin welcome to the show it's great to be here Audrey Tang is taiwan's digital Minister she became taiwan's youngest Minister without portfolio in 2016 when she headed the public digital Innovation space she has been a hacktivist for over two decades she is also a promoter of Open Source Innovation hi Audrey hi good luck it's time everyone so Justin you've spent a lot of time thinking about how technology can Empower people and bring people together your company Asana and other recent Ventures highlight your belief that digital Tech has great potential to Aid Society I want to start with where this view comes from where did the idea for Asana come from yeah Asana is a collaboration platform that enables teams to be able to work together more easily so the initial impetus for this was I was working first at Google and then at Facebook and just over and over again experience this pain of we were working on these big ambitious projects with lots of people and the thing that seemed like it was slowing us down the most even more than the intellectual or technical complexity of the problems was the coordination was the work about work was just making sure that this part of the team knew what this part of the team was working on and keeping everyone in sync and it seemed like the tools that existed at the time were just really not built for that task and so originally at Google and then at Facebook built internal tools that would help to solve that problem and make it easier to collaborate and they really took off within those companies in a really exciting way that demonstrated like oh there's a real a real pain and a real solution here and so Dustin muskowitz who's Facebook's co-founder and I left with the idea of this is such a this is such a powerful idea that you could develop a single piece of technology that could enable any team working on any problem to be able to work together faster and easier because every single thing that matters all human progress that we might want to achieve at some level comes down to teams of people working together and so if a single platform could help accelerate all of those projects simultaneously that felt like a really leveraged way to be in service to the world Audrey how does Moda handle digital work and collaboration uh yeah we're currently a Google workspace shop but we do use a lot of what we call no code add-ons there's a Taiwanese startup called radic that allows anyone with some spreadsheet composing capabilities to redesign entire workflows and synchronize automatically with database visualizations Mission training and things like that so our main idea is this citizen developer thing in that anyone within Moda that doesn't like the way the workflow Works can just reconfigure the front-end or even entire workflows and also share these new workflows as social objects for other people to collaborate upon so we have like new ways of for the accountants for the secretaries and so on they don't have to learn a programming language they can just reconfigure their workflow like Lego blocks that's the main idea I've got exciting news for you Audrey Asana a couple years ago added just those kinds of no code workflow features oh excellent to talk about yeah yes it would be great to talk more about that but one question I want to ask first is what was the state of digital work and collaboration back in 2008 I think the most Innovative thing out there by far was Google Docs Google Drive um you couldn't even comment on Google Docs at the time things were in a uh a state where yeah people were relying on things like Microsoft Project or these very clunky enterprise software tools and while it seems very obvious now because there's a plethora of different internet based collaboration tools that are easy to use at the time there was this real perception of like consumer software where people build things that are easy and beautiful and and feel good to use and then there's enterprise software over here as though the kind of people who as though people at work are of a different species than the people at home using consumer software and so at the time uh we were surprised by how radical people thought it was we were going to take a consumer product mindset and build beautiful easy to use software for people at work but that feels fairly straightforward in hindsight so how did Austin is simplify workflow in companies yeah Asana has workflow features where you can make rules that normally would require a software engineer to you know in the past would require a software engineer to configure when someone assigns someone a task kick off this set of actions or send a uh update this other third-party system send this message there's all these complex workflows that historically either you needed to write your own custom software for or hire people to do manually and it's just this kind of soul-sucking work about work that everyone was doing multiple hours a day in in some cases or you were using very clunky expensive Enterprise software that itself requires a professional I.T person to to set up um and then every time you want to change it you have to call it so these days you can just create in Asana and as I said there's other tools that support this as well you can kind of drag and drop the toolkit as a toolkit of things you can drag and drop and assemble as an end user oh when this thing happens kick off the set of workflows and the set of actions and just uh yeah I mean we have customers who say this saves people in the company just hours and hours per day what about you Audrey how to simplify the workflow in organizations yeah uh so the main idea here it just as Justin said is that the people closest to the work should be able to invent new workflows so just two very quick examples for example when people on board Moda there's this host Lou of personnel work that needs to happen because we have multiple office sites we have two printed badges we have to give them a laptop we have to configure things and and all that now previously the HR is in charge of all this but because we're in new departments there's just this host Lou of entire departments being moved to Moda and so each person has a different way of expecting these onboarding process to happen depending on which Ministries they hail from right they originally were from so by opening up the whole process of onboarding to fit the particular expectations of where whether that person came from the national government Council the ministry of economic Affairs or the national Communication Commission and so on it enabled them to to like invoicing onboarding like all those chores in a way that feels most comfortable to their original interface and this is I think important especially in a plural culture because previously if we go with this vendor then this vendor would dictate the front-end interface the experience of going through such daily routines but now when each staff becomes an expert in just reconfiguring their routines then this actually frees up a lot of work hours because they no longer have to adapt to a strange way of working they can just keep working the way they used to work before but just with this magic power of sharing the real-time numbers and the outputs and the workflows with other teams that came from different cultures yeah it's very democratizing and changes the relationship that users have to the systems because historically as a user you're stuck with whatever the power structure whether that's you know the I.T department or your your boss's boss decided like this shall be the workflow um but enabling anyone to not only create but also like experiment and iterate makes that aspect of work much more creative and enables people to not just be not just be wrote doing the work themselves but uh yeah get I mean ultimately I think one of the most exciting things about Technologies it just takes things that are the humans are capable of but experience as drudgery and takes them away and automates them and then leaves the much more human work available as the the thing that we can focus on which yeah much more in life exactly and and the second uh use case is actually a personal one because I prefer to see uh into the future we have the future calendar where each team's focus is aggregated in a way with themes and topics and so on so that I can see in a very visualized way in the 3D like spatial way to feel like where we are at this point of potential and where is the Horizon of potentials and so on and so I like personally coded with a startup also a Taiwanese startup called hepta base the rules of importing those no code workflows so that people still continue about their work but it just Aggregates whatever people's current goals are their objectives and key results are and just detect the similarities between them find hashtags for them and just aggregate it into a calendar of the future that I can project on and I did that without writing much software mostly I just tell the language models of the results that I would like to see and it just go and look at the regect databases and pull together just enough information to make a good visualization of a future calendar so I think yeah I think this ideas of programming by stating what you'd expect to appear on the screen is becoming really a really good experience now with co-pilot Technologies and so on yeah and I think a llms are by far the most game changing to State the obvious uh the new AI models are the most game changing thing that has happened in technology in a very long time and it's uh yes it's the most excited I've been about uh doing product design in a long time because now there's this opportunity to rethink this really fundamental level like the the basic rules no longer apply when you have intelligence kind of for free in this different way and so yeah no code tools where you could drag and drop seem so sophisticated a few years ago and now seem Antiquated relative to like just talk to the computer in English or talk to a computer in your native language and it'll figure out what to do indeed a new field of possibilities is opening up but I want to take a step back and ask Justin you studied at Stanford in the early 2000s this was just after the.com bubble and when companies like Facebook and Google were gaining prominence what was the mood like at the time say it was boundless optimism uh there was a real sense that people and so many good stories of some pair of people working in a garage building a simple prototype and within a small amount of time the number of people getting value from what they have built expanding to millions of people and later billions of people and a real sense that civilization was on a trajectory of progress that yes there were still problems of course but that those problems were largely being solved more and more in fact faster and faster through the increase of technology and life expectancy and quality of life and income and all these key variables were up and to the right and the mood was oh we in Silicon Valley are some of the biggest drivers of those things being able to go up to the right the tech this balance optimism for the potential of technology to improve the world and implicit in that was a real boundless optimism about capitalism about the idea that that there was this alignment between what was profitable and what was good for the world and companies like Google showing like we in fact we can even provide this search engine for free and by running these little innocuous ads alongside it we will make a lot of money our users will be very happy our advertisers will be very happy win-win-win and the whole world gets better which if you can't tell by my tone is a narrative I now I'm very skeptical of but at the time uh it seemed incredibly compelling Audrey at that time you were based in Taiwan and working for Silicon Valley companies what are your thoughts uh more or less right uh so that that was my second startup uh aranet basically uh taking a page from decentralized Version Control mini that people around the world can Fork a project to work on particular features but somehow magically those new features can merge together into new versions of the product I was very excited about that possibility so I was working both with our National Academy to build something like GitHub so that everybody can use decentralized Version Control to build their pet projects but somehow aggregate them to make something much bigger as well as Consulting with Silicon Valley companies in bringing those tools into the Enterprise so I was working with a company called social text that is Enterprise social basically taking the micro blog blocking Wiki decentralized version control collaborative spreadsheets and so on and somehow transform large Enterprises internal culture so as to embrace this kind of decentralized innovation Audrey it appears that you have always been optimistic about the future of technology and continue to be I am curious what keeps you motivated and positive yeah I think the main variable uh that we see at a time is about concentration of power there are certain Tendencies as just just described in those innocuous advertisements that will promote a culture of normalizing surveillance because in order to deliver Precision targeted advertisements somehow the search engine will have to figure out what you really want and that entails a lot of surveillance and back then um people in Taiwan I think are uniquely aware of that because we're very close to a jurisdiction the PRC regime that starts building this kind of state surveillance apparatus so we had our Snowden moments much earlier when the Golden Shield when the Great firewall was being built in our vicinity and so we were always quite wary of anything that over concentrates the surveillance power and our main research back then was in privacy enhancing Technologies decentralized Technologies and the field did feel like we're in the niche like it was not what people cared about at the time but I think uh currently after a couple of decades people do care about privacy and the words like end-to-end encryption and so on are no longer jargons like people actually know what it means and so I'm quite optimistic that this is a direction that the entire Global Society is becoming aware of that this over concentration of asymmetric surveillance is actually bad for this civilization what about you Justin have you become more optimistic too well optimistic about what I I don't Audrey have you become more optimistic that if companies simply optimize for maximizing profit that that will automatically lead to more good for the world not at all of course but I'm optimistic that people are becoming aware that it's not the way to get it right exactly so I have some optimism owed to the fact that people are increasingly waking up to the problems of the profit-driven capitalist economic model to the problems of of unbridled uncritical techno optimism um I still think that Civilization is heading in a direction that is uh not conducive to the flourishing of humanity and of life and I'm quite concerned about that but the increasing levels of awareness about this are are encouraging and in general I just don't um I don't even think in terms of optimism or pessimism because that models reality is though it was uh deterministic or probabilistic when really we we as humans are agents that have free choice and well that's easier to see at the individual level than at the collective level as a society or making choices about what directions we want to go in like the the economic motives and profit incentives and business models are not laws of nature they're things that can change over time and that we can redesign um so yeah there's a lot of things that are that are exciting and a lot of things that are uh have become corrosive to society uh in general and in technology it's hard to make General predictions about the future of humanity but how has your perception of things changed Justin yeah and to be clear like you said it is a complicated matter and you know I'm extremely grateful for digital Technologies and many aspects of my life uh and I think there's many ways in which they've been huge boom to the world uh and and at the same time I think there are many places where we see it eroding our sovereignty our social and political cohesion um the minds of our children like there are yeah very very dark effects of technology and of business generally as well uh I think I started to question that over the course of working at Asana as I really start to question this this basic progress narrative this basic narrative that I had grown up with um I think is popular in certain especially certain parts of the western world that as I said things are up and to the right things everything's going well and to the extent that some things seem worse that's an illusion that's just because you know now you have more access to news and you can see the suffering of other people but if you really look at the data things things are actually much better than we think and since then at one project we've done a major research initiative to look into to what extent is that true and uh we think that like the data does not back that up in any way that yes in certain things are going up for the right but similarly if you jump out of a plane without a parachute your velocity will increase for quite some time until you hit the ground uh and similarly the the so much of the progress we've experiencing has been at the cost of the destruction of uh basic natural resources the destruction of the the atmosphere of basic ecosystems upon which life depends as well as to many forms of social cohesion Community Mental Health and these are at least as important metrics as the things that do seem to be improving and in many cases the things that are improving I think are a bubble that are only increasing temporarily and and will that we will hit points especially in terms of ecological systems um and other sort of global catastrophic risks that could really that have a very strong potential to make those seem like a civilizational bubble when you live in a society in which the incentives for Enterprises are aligned with the good of the planet and its people then that those incentives will will result in people creating technology that is aligned with the good and it is this incredible opportunity to just continually uh it's an incredible opportunity for us to harness the power of of techne of skill to make lives better and better there's still significant concerns even if the incentives are aligned around unintended consequences and I think that that's a huge problem as well is that we often have the hubris to where even and I've experienced this firsthand building technologies that like like a Facebook like button that at the time all I could see was the positive upside but in hindsight there were all these potentially deleterious effects um so there's yeah in a world in which incentives were properly aligned and we had really strong processes for and feedback loops for ensuring that for both both anticipating unintended consequences ahead of time and then course correcting when consequences arise that we did not did not anticipate I think technology is an amazing potential for Humanity uh we don't live in that world right now what about you Audrey how do you see the world of Technologies evolving I think that the main message really from me is that coordination democracy and so on these are also Technologies these are social technologies that gets better as people put their minds on increasing the bandwidth of coordination and democracy in general and I think this was not considered you know the the call the progress narrative there's a lot of narrative in the Silicon Valley when I was there about a heroics essentially right one one person one genius looking at a product Market fit invents a entire category disrupts existing institutions and so on but instead of disrupting democracy maybe reaffirming democracy reaffirming coordination although it did sound less heroic is actually the more impactful among things and I think Taiwan is quite unique in that we Face a lot of this emerging societal scale risks all the time so we had to overcome them with societal level technologies that allow for this kind of coordination so to me I'm more seeing this as a lab of possibilities that anything with prototype in Taiwan may be a value to the world because the world is also facing societal skill threats obeyed maybe a couple years before like people did wasn't aware of it I think we're all aware of it now yeah my intention is to present a balanced message um if anything I've spent far more of my time communicating the potential benefits of technology and working most of my career as a technologist and I'm still in projects that I'm working on now trying to build technology that is in service to life I think it's I just have a balanced approach to it of um technology is not by its necessity technology is not automatically good technology is not automatically of service to the world it is uh it is an open-ended tool and depending on how you design it it can lean it can be used for good or can be used for ill and the specifics of how we design platforms really have a direct impact on what are the consequences that you're going to get so I'd say my main message is the necessity for us to be incredibly Mindful and thoughtful and conscious and intentional in how we're choosing to build these services and design them I really strongly agree with Audrey on the the positive potential and I'll go even further to say increasingly we live in a world in which coordination is not only ever more valuable but ever more necessary because as civilization has become globalized the problems that we Face are are of course Global in nature and we're increasingly interdependent we increasingly have a situation where we we're we're all going to go down with the ship together or or potentially we could all Thrive and it in that in a moment like that digital technology has the I don't know of anything other than digital technology that has such a radical potential and internet technology has such a radical potential to enable us to coordinate at the large scales that are required for the um Collective action that we need I want to move on to talk about how to make technology better part of that is understanding the unintended consequences related to design decisions can you tell us more about your views on the invention of the Facebook like button an invention always felt like a strong word for a single button but the the origin was my teammate Leah Perlman and I were talking about she had this idea for props like we could make it easier to give each other kind of like a virtual high five and we were talking through yeah when we had the we were Facebook was much smaller at the time but we had this growing network of people who were all connected and both being young and very optimistic we had this question we were exploring which was how could you make it the path of least resistance how could you encourage the promotion of positivity and love on this new platform and kind of reasoned our way to like well they eat the way to make it as easy as possible is to make it one click that that's the app mathematically the easiest way to be able to spread positivity and so can we just put a button on every single thing that's just a little bit of a little ping of positivity and how lovely that would be in Brighton people's day and just make things a little more lovely and pleasant in the world a little more lovely and pleasant in the world uh I think that and in some ways I think there are moments in my own life when I've posted something important to me or vulnerable and gotten positive feedback from friends and looked through the list and felt a little more connected and that it did succeed in those ways but over time I've started to see the ways in which that design did not anticipate the ways that when applied at scale and given actual human nature things would play out and the experience I had that actually made me start to realize those unintended consequences was I was when iPhone came out and smartphones were becoming popular started to see more and more people staring at their phones in moments that they would otherwise have been socializing it were now enough years out from that that it's hard to remember that that there was a moment when that seemed strange because now everyone stares at their phone and occasionally I would look over people's shoulders and see what was distracting them so much and a good portion of the time it was that they their phone had buzzed because they had gotten a like and and it was taking them out of the moment and that felt like a real shame and costs because presence is yeah it's the deepest most valuable thing we have and and to be distracted from that presence and then of course over time to see the way that social media and and the The Addictive quality of likes the ways that I mean it's obviously not just likes but the ways that especially teenagers there's a whole culture around self-worth becoming tied to the amount of positive feedback that you get on social media and crafting the self-image in order to optimize for that positive feedback and then like is such a simple emotion and it doesn't reflect what we actually value it's just this very very simple piece of information as opposed to you know was this valuable was this consistent with my values did this make me think did this change my mind things that actually matter and so you might like something that reinforces your values you might like something or give a quick little Emoji reaction to something that angered you or upset you or or give you a more basic bottom of the brain stem Instinct and that can lead to things that are more Sensational and more polarizing and uh more that give you a quick hit of of dopamine becoming the things that are most popular and most shared and that leads to this uh you know the spread of misinformation that leads to polarization that leads to the ability for corporations and states to engage in in Mass psychological manipulation there's all these things that result from the the basic dynamics of social media but by the time I started to see these negative effects I had already left Facebook and initially I was sort of presuming oh well these are clearly unintended consequences they aren't good for users these aren't good for our mission this isn't making people more more connected this is this kind of fake facsimile of positive emotion it's uh it's like junk food it makes you feel full but empty um and at first I I sort of assumed oh well the company will iterate on this and and and improve it and try and because there are design changes that you could easily make that would make it more conducive to to serving people's values and ultimately I think the reason those changes haven't occurred is because those changes are things that will hurt the metrics that the company is Tracking not necessarily directly profit but engagement or or user growth or the various things that are the the things that the companies not just Facebook things that companies in general are measuring as these proxies for Success that are that at first can seem aligned with Mission you might be like oh well the number of minutes someone spends on this website surely that correlates with how much value that someone is getting but that assumes this model of humanity in which we're perfectly rational and we're operating and every choice we make is in service of our of our own good which is completely ridiculous we know that things are addictive we we all have this visceral experience especially with social media of or I I don't think I've ever met anyone who doesn't have this visceral experience of uh being pulled into things almost against your your conscious will um and so it the misalignment between the success metrics that companies use and indeed the metrics that are typically aligned with their profit incentives and actual human flourishing it's in that Delta that um that the that the Badness Creeps in yeah um when I was working with a social text around 2009 or so um we discovered that anything that causes a context switch meaning that you're working on one thing you're present at the moment and then a push notification came and you had to work on something else that actually decrease uh workspace productivity so push notification um if uh taken in isolation may be a good thing touch screen in isolation may be a good thing and the like button also a good thing but the three things mixing together is like a mixed string a cocktail that makes them much more addictive than before and that led to a a very sharp decrease of productivity if we mix the three together so we all have to make some choices and my choice was that I renounced touch screens and only interact with my phone with the stylus and I also disabled push notifications for all external apps so that I can continue to use the like button but I don't mix the other two things that will add to the addiction however that does require a lot of uh like experience design expertise and the passive lease resistance is of course is just to stay with the default but the default was that all of these are on at the same time and I think that creates a very different mental landscape for the entire new generation thank you both for your insights Justin in 2020 you were featured on the social dilemma a documentary which highlights the negative impact of technology on our attention well-being and Society has anything changed since then not as much as changes as I would like I'll say that I think the main thing that has changed positively is that people are more aware people there is more cultural understanding of what what is going on and I think you see parents more rightly concerned about uh and taking steps to limit the exposure that people have that to limit the exposure that their children have to these Technologies but the the main point that I was trying to make or but the main thing that I was referring to in the documentary has has not changed which is the fundamental Dynamics and the fundamental incentive structure that leads to these problems the the core point I articulated was that we've seen for decades now the way in which the financial incentives of Corporations have seen the ways in which the incentive structure and the constant urge to maximize profits and look at the intent the wavelings we see the incentive to maximize profit leads to the destruction of nature the way because we live in an economic system in which trees are worth more dead than alive which whales are worth more dead than alive and for so long as you live in an economic structure like that of course you're going to have the natural outcome of we're going to be destroying trees and killing whales for so long as you live in an economic system in which water is worth more when it's bottled up and sold as a product than flowing in a river you're going to have the poisoning of waters and and companies profiting off of bottling it for so long as you have a system which some human beings are are more profitable to the system when they're behind bars than when they're outliving their lives you're going to have a prison Industrial complex you have a military-industrial complex and for so long as we have an economic system which children are worth more money when they're staring at their screens than experiencing their childhoods you're going to have rampant childhood addiction to staring at your screens like if you explained to an alien how the economic incentives of of planet Earth work they would be able to predict for you all of the different catastrophes that we're experiencing on planet Earth as well as the places that things are going well but the the the design of the of the economic system of the incentive structure is the thing that creates the outcomes that you see in the world in a really really fundamental way that has not changed and because the social media companies are still subject to that exact system because they're still working within the profit maximization context because they're still ultimately beholden to a board of directors that's beholden to shareholders and indeed have a legally binding fiduciary duty to maximize profit uh you're continuing to see the the rampant increase of polarization and misinformation and filter Bubbles and psychological manipulation and addiction and mistrust and eating disorders and and all these problems that Again Naturally arise from from the the fact that that the incentive is to keep people staring at their funds I think there are people inside these companies you know including at the top leadership who see these problems and are Staffing up teams to try to address these things but I think the fact that we see in the data the ways in which the problems are still occurring is because at some not just the incentive structure but it's some fundamental way in which the systems are designed they're not designed in a way that is conducive to well-being and and like they need to be fundamentally rethought at this very basic axiomatic level yeah indeed um in issues like pollution and so on uh usually uh what we eventually agreed on is a very clear liability structure where we trace the sources such pollutions and attributes and to particular actors or configurations of actors and then just just find them right and if people are become aware of the imminent stanja such as the ozone a couple decades ago being depleted by particular combinations of chemicals used in refrigeration than the entire industry banded together to invent a new replacement that does not deplete the ozone so I think the the main response here should be one of not just awareness but clear attribution and liability so for example in Taiwan uh Facebook and other platforms if they feature a investment advertisement and uh but featuring somebody who is actually not a um somebody who a purpose to be right A D fake a synthetic Avatar of say Audrey Tong recommending you to buy some stocks and so on then we treat this note just as an infringement on copyrights or things like that that are more or abstract but rather this is something that the social media were profiting from right the advertisement budget goes to the social media platforms and they were indirectly profiting also by people getting scammed into such uh pyramid schemes or things like that so uh and because of that we passed a law that says uh you know if they do not verify the identity of people posting the investment advertisements that could lead to a scam then well they can still post those advertisement but they become directly liable to whatever scams damage so when the people who see the scammers for damage those social media company that enabled it without verifying the credentials the persons are posting that advertisement should also be liable for the same damage so this is just one anecdote to one particular issue of like misinline incentives on social media platforms but we think that there are much more than just scams and investment advices but if this formula works then we should look for more like incentive alignment using this liability structure sounds like an Innovative approach to a recurring problem on social media platforms Justin what types of incentives do you think need to be put in place to remedy the issues you've identified at the smallest level although this is itself a massive change is bringing a a whole new design Paradigm to the way that we're Designing Technology in which the focus is not on these very simple metrics that are not aligned with what people actually care about but to really and it's almost it starts with a philosophical project to get really really clear about what is Meaningful what is valuable what what is the actual service that we're trying to provide what what is the way in which we want people's lives to get better individually and collectively and then some of those things we can create increasingly refined metrics for and be tracking those and then some of those things are just intrinsically unmeasurable they are by their nature qualitative Silicon Valley historically has no I has very little in the way of tools to understand qualitative experience and the subtleties and Nuance of phenomenology of our subjectivity but if you're Building Systems that are having direct impact on people's subjectivity that it's critical that we get to the point where we can understand that and incorporate that and Design Systems that are respecting that nuance and building for how can we how can we help people to not just to not be simply behaviorists and be like what's going to get someone to click what's going to get someone to to stare or longer at a particular video but instead to inquire into what is the underlying subjective experience that someone is having and is that is their presence is there is there quality of uh of of being being uh being served and then you need feedback loops you need to not just design with those with those qualities in mind but to observe and measure and be and talk to users and see what are the consequences of the systems that we're building and very mindfully consciously course correct and not just hide behind like oh well increased amount of time that they're spending on the site then it must be a good thing but understand the the actual deep impacts and then continually modify our services and to to move more and more in the direction of the impacts that we're trying to achieve at the larger scale as you mentioned that it is ultimately the incentives I think in general you get what you incentivize and so well there's no magic wand to be able to flip over the entire economic system overnight what I would love to see happen is to see more companies move from a structure in which they are governed by a board of directors that has a fiduciary duty to shareholders to a model which they are governed by the people and I don't mean that in the sense of the kind of existing Democratic processes that we have necessarily but there are models of participatory democracy and Audrey has been a Pioneer in in exactly these kinds of systems where you can get many many people who are affected by a system to participate in deciding which of the future of that be I think it's it's just an equitable when the people who are in control of something are the people who are affected by it and today that's not at all the case corporations the people who are affected by those systems is a completely is a very different set of people than the people who are who are making the decisions who are the effectively the the shareholders and the executives who are beholden to those shareholders so in in if you move more toward companies essentially being in the Commons seeing them as common resources that are governed by by the people in service of society and that is doing that is of course completely contrary to the existing system the existing profit incentives and motivations um we could talk about what are the Stepping Stones you could take to move more and more that in that direction I think keeping our eye on like the the systems that govern Our Lives should be governed by us the people it is indeed essential to democratize the way new technologies govern Our Lives thank you to Justin and Audrey for joining us today in the next part we'll talk more about Democratic design principles and about bringing people into the process if you like today's episode be sure to subscribe share and let us know what you think see you next time on Innovative Minds I think policy plays a critical role and and in a way a very necessary role in order to contain the collective action problem so Collective action problems or they're sometimes called multi-polar traps are situations in which if you don't have coordination between actors and each actor acts in its own self-interest you get these effects that are bad for everyone so nuclear proliferation is example I think every country would prefer that there were not any nuclear weapons but because they there's no airtight way to ensure that no country has nuclear weapons it's in each country's not just in interests but they're almost required for National Security to build to build that up or you know at least in America there's so much sugar in food and I think that's the result of like any food company that doesn't invest in that their their food is not competitive in the market and I think you see the same thing in technology where and I see this excuse over and over again or this this reason where you'll have leaders at social media companies or AI companies that say yeah we wish that we could make this less addictive we we agree it would be safer if we were deploying AI at a slower rate but if we don't do it someone else will and so in a lot of cases those companies the people behind the scenes actually are asking for for regulation because they that will enable them to do the right thing without worrying that a unscrupulous competitor won't then just take advantage of them being an ethical actor I'm Justin Rosenstein see you on Taiwan Plus digital Minister CEO on Taiwan Plus

2023-08-08 03:42

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