[Music] welcome to Better Business outcomes the podcast where we discuss how good communication can transform and grow organizations with a series of global leaders who have set the standard for what great looks like I'm Stephen Waddington from wads Inc and in this podcast you'll hear from leaders and Senior communicators about their leadership journey and how they create social impact you'll also understand the areas you should be focusing on to build personal and organizational resilience find
out how public relations can unlock value for your business and enjoy a great lesson along the way today I'm joined by Dr Stephanie Hare a researcher in the sphere of technology and geopolitical risk her book technology is not neutral was shortlisted by the financial times as one of the best books of 2022. welcome to the show Stephanie thank you so much for having me Stephen so Stephanie when we spoke recently we talked about tech and why it's seemingly at the moment dominates the media agenda
so much blocking out oxygen from so many other important topics why has he got such an abstract share of voice at the moment hmm well and it's also even like what kind of tech is dominating the media discourse and what kind of tech is also being shut out so it's not even just that all Tech is shutting out so many other topics is that even within technology there's certain stories that we seem to be hearing dare I say almost too much of for some of us and some that we're just not hearing very muc
h of at all and so there's the fact of the matter that you've had your your big American Technology Giants Fang so your Facebook Amazon Apple Netflix Google for a really long time they have dominated quarterly Financial results because of their seller performance at any time their performance slacks we hear about that we hear about their leaders Lots everybody knows their you know their names and what they're up to we're not necessarily hearing about other types of companies that aren't like an
Amazon which is kind of doing everything or a social media company so at the moment Elon Musk the world's richest man is taking up a lot of oxygen in the tech news cycle because of his recent acquisition of Twitter and the terms of that and why he might be doing it in the performance thereof and how it relates to his many other businesses which are also Tech businesses and getting a lot of headlines Tesla and SpaceX there's the crypto story of FTX and binance and what that means and again you kn
ow the majority of people on this planet are not involved in cryptocurrency and they're not on Twitter and yet we're hearing such a huge disproportionate amount about them and what are we not necessarily hearing about is we're living in a cost of living crisis we've got people who really need to do Energy Efficiency measures to make their homes and businesses more energy efficient to keep their costs down not hearing a lot about how to do that we've got climate change as a sort of dominant conce
rn this is the cop 27 second week and yet you could really be forgiven for not even knowing that that's happening you know you can follow it if you want to but if you don't want to you can also very easily ignore it then I suspect many people are just because it's not flashy and and exciting and entertaining I mean Elon Musk said are you not entertained recently yeah it strikes me there's so many issues to unpick there will lose Tech a threat do you think to conversation in the public sphere and
we've had so much conversation around since 2016 and the impact of of tech on brexit and then the election in in the US and we've seen it most recently in in the midterm is it good or bad how do you characterize it I think and I had to be really careful that I might be bringing personal bias into this because I focus so much on technology but that caveat the side I feel like there was this Spirit of optimism about the technology sector that wasn't simply about this is a great way to make money
for a lot of people and it was genuine enthusiasm about the start of the internet and the.com boom in the early 2000s late 1990s and then I would say even when social media came on board in the sort of mid-2000s to about 2015 let's say it was exciting it was changing Commerce it was changing connection there was this idea that it was going to help democracy and you know give more people a voice than ever before and hold power to account and I think we can kind of bookend that little Halcyon peri
od for many people and say that it ends in a sort of Darker phase with a lot of this stuff begins I guess from 2015 to 2016 for people in the United States or in the United Kingdom who saw some of the social media companies basically become weaponized um and of course around the world the role of these companies in facilitating genocide in Myanmar in the case of Facebook or auctioning off child Brides in Sudan also in the case of Facebook um just the trolling and we saw the effect on Democracy i
n terms of misinformation disinformation certain politicians particularly people of color women and of course women of color getting it worst of all being really harassed and sometimes chased off these platforms or feeling that they had to censor themselves to avoid getting that kind of aggro it's turned a bit darker and also because of Edward snowden's Revelations and you know the Cambridge analytica story with Facebook again in terms of election interference in the U.S 2016 presidential contes
t we realized I think everyone everyone has realized that anytime you are going on to any of these platforms or using these tools they are harvesting data about you so you've got your Amazon Alexa at home it's listening to you while you're having sex it's listening to you while you're having dinner with your kids it is taking all of that data and it is doing something so there's this sense that it's not just that you're using Technologies technology is using you the human it's using us and I thi
nk that leaves a sort of dirty feeling for a lot of people so you hear people thinking about you know taking Tech shabbats you know taking the night off taking the weekend off from Tech stepping away the mental health implications the way that we know these firms know that it hurts people's mental health but they keep doing it anyways particularly with kids getting all that surveillance Tech even into schools that school is not a safe space anymore I just think that we've probably all um lost ou
r innocence when it comes to Tech if we ever had it I think some of us did though and now it's difficult to feel that sort of unbridled optimism it's very much a tempered optimism if you are optimistic it's with it's with caveats I grew up in the 80s and 90s when the web was very optimistic place it was full of promise and we see I mean we're seeing a a little bit of that comeback with the revolt against Twitter and the move to Mastodon but you know it's terribly terribly complicated and open so
urce doesn't seem to be a solution either right no I mean that Mastodon I don't think is is a model that will scale easily in its current form for most people most people don't have time to be messing around with this stuff they want things that are easy so the more friction that you have in adopting a product or a service the less people are going to do it I mean I think there's also this question of like maybe for some people they're like I kind of hope Twitter does tank because I'd love to ju
st be off it you know I'd love to just turn off that tap first of all of noise but also of data collection about me in using it and I think that's really the question is like is the party over for social media or are people just going to use it and understand that you know we're in a fractured environment now and we make these trade-offs so we accept them in terms of privacy versus convenience and fun or good for your business or whatever or are we going to potentially start to have to think abo
ut the new phase like a sort of post-social media phase like what happens next it doesn't have to necessarily mean more of the same it could be something totally new and we could look back on this in 20 years and be like why did we ever use those products I know you're a fairly active user of social media why do you don't draw the boundaries in your own personal and professional use of of these networks yeah so I'm only on Twitter and Linkedin LinkedIn is obviously for the the sort of profession
al world if people want to contact me for things Twitter I feel that because I do so much work in technology and also with the media I'm on it because that's where a lot of journalists and political leaders are and where I can get stories fast I found it a really useful tool back when I first joined I think in 2011 back in the day when I was a political risk analyst covering the Euro crisis I would see information being released much faster on Twitter than I would ever get from reading the tradi
tional media and I could contact people directly and people would chat I thought it was it was a really useful tool now I try to use it still to keep up with what's going on but I'm also spending a lot more time away from social media in general and reading a lot more books and attending a lot of talks here in London and just trying to to get away because I think Twitter is very fast I think social media can be very fast and it's curated because of these algorithms of course and it just makes me
a bit nervous about what that might be doing to my thinking and Analysis so I've just noticed that very naturally I've I've changed how I use it and I don't post personal information at all like you should not be knowing anything about my life based on Twitter you might know about my my work interests or stuff I'm falling but nothing about me just to follow that point for a minute then you talked about the overreach of technology companies in collecting and harvesting data the UK at the moment
is trying is looking potentially to weaken data protection legislation what's your view on gdpr and what the UK is trying to do that's a really tricky one on the one hand gdpr is you know better than what came before so we want to acknowledge that I don't particularly feel that it's been enforced very well which is a different point I would like to see a Regulators being much more active um in enforcing gdpr and I still think you know oftentimes you have to be a lawyer or a tech policy person to
even really understand it if you're just an average person or particularly a kid a teacher somebody's working with kids trying to understand your responsibilities and also your options in case you do get into trouble who can you turn to for help it's very opaque still the UK with its like Online safety bill that's had a lot of criticism in some quarters and a lot of commendations and others and I think the fact that it's just it's so hard grinding through data protection legislation is such a g
rind my concern with these things always is just how relevant does this feel to the ordinary person you know stepping away from the Specialists and experts if you go on any British Street today and ask them to explain what the gdpr is or what they should do if they're having problems with the data violation I bet you most of them will not be able to answer you and yet that legislation has been in effect since 2018. you've talked a little bit about big issues that were missing related to climate
and this is something that really concerns me that while there's all this focus on Tech and the drama of Facebook Twitter and and so forth we're missing so many big issues I wanted to ask you what do you think the economic and political issues that are occupying your mind and concerning you at the moment that you think organizations are missing because of so much oxygen being pulled out of the news agenda by Tech so one of the things that's been on my mind that I wrote about it for a magazine ca
lled the wired World in 2023 that's where you sort of look at you make a prediction for the following year I'm looking at the ESG market so environment social governance investing one of the things I thought was really fascinating about that because I'm very pro-business and I like the idea of business having a positive role to play in society as it so often does but what I didn't know about ESG and so I started working on it was that understanding the metrics for accountability for ESG investin
g and if you wanted your pension for instance to be invested in an ESG fund or a green fund or an ethical fund the way that I had understood it was I thought it meant how is the company's performance you know impacting the environment impacting Society or impacting governance is it a Force for good in the world or not and I wanted to be able to reward or punish companies with my custom if you will my investment and what I learned looking into it was that's not actually how it works at all ESG me
trics are all about how the environment or Society or governance affects the company so to how does the world affect the company rather than how does the company affect the world and so that is something that our friends over on the continent in Europe also had cotton down to and legislation has been passed and is underway to start getting this thing it's called I think double materiality to get it where companies have to report on both both how the world affects them and how they affect the wor
ld according to these metrics so I thought that was really cool and I'd love to see more about it because I think so many people are desperate to if not do the right thing at least to do better right in their lives to decarbonize their lives and decarbonize their companies as much as possible to play a better more positive role in society and it's again it's so grinding it's so opaque it's really confusing most people studying legislation in Brussels are looking at the sec's position on this bac
k in the U.S no right so like how do we constantly my challenge as a researchers how do we take these things that are happening in certain fora and translate them so that the ordinary person reading a newspaper listening to a radio broadcast going to a conference just having a chat with their clients can do better things with their lives and so it means I'll never be out of on a business because unfortunately that problem is yet to be solved but I do think there's a communication piece and it's
a real responsibility for anybody trying to make changes like are you taking people with you on that change and empowering them I want to just talk a little bit about artificial intelligence if we can we we seem to be in around the hype cycle several times of innovation computers are going to take our jobs completely overreaching ethically and then there's a reset where do you think we are right now in the processing power of computers the data being collected and the application of machine inte
lligence to to act on those data sets say in one sense we're in kind of a golden age of AI in that we have an enormous amount of data that is being generated and collected probably more than ever in human history algorithms have evolved to levels of great sophistication to be able to do all sorts of things and then the final piece which is what we were really missing before is we had the computer processing power because of the computer chips that we've been building since really sort of mid 20t
h century up until now they are just so impressive and the science behind them is incredibly impressive but so is the manufacturing and like productizing of them to say nothing the supply chain that is global that's required to produce them so all of these factors have sort of met in this perfect storm and it it's also a case of there's not a lot of legislation governing the use of artificial intelligence or really even data to be completely honest it still feels to me very much like a wild west
with lots of lots of room for improvement and lots of room for Innovation so I think it's probably a pretty exciting time overall and I also think what's hopeful if I may be optimistic unusually is that I think there's a lot of people thinking about the ethics of all of this and therefore you know just because we have something doesn't mean we should use it or how do we want to use it how do we make it more transparent explainable accountable all of that stuff so I think a number of factors are
coming together to make this a really interesting in time for the field of artificial intelligence there's a point you make in your book about ethical red lines for Tech picks up on this last point about where where do you draw the line do you think between the sentience of technology and the sentience of human beings what's your current thinking about that how do we keep the computer how do we ensure that we have the governance in place to prevent harm from machine intelligence one of the thin
gs I explore in my book is like what it means to be conscious and this is you know this is an unresolved question we're still debating it we still don't really know there's no agreed upon definition of what Consciousness even means so in the book I started by thinking like you know let's just start at the basics like we'll look at plant life and we'll look at animal life and then we'll look at humans and then we'll take on machines because you just want to sort of take people through who've neve
r maybe thought about it before to be like that's true actually like is a plant on its own sentient that's a question but you can also be like is a forest sentient like a group of plants working together providing an ecosystem and then there's like just plant life Flora around the world right and like that's these are these are questions that are centuries old by the way so it's like you know nothing new Under The Sun It's fascinating and ditto for Animals you know we've really evolved in as hum
ans it's not that animal Consciousness necessarily has changed it's our our wisdom and knowledge and understanding and what we think about animals and what we think about animal rights and Consciousness and all of that has evolved substantially and no doubt we'll continue to do so as I say my my big fear as a historian is that historians in 100 years time they're gonna be looking back at us you know even this chat we're having right now and being like Oh So basic how did they not know how did th
ey think that it's so medieval um so much less before we approach machines you could say you know Twitter is like a technology it's a tool does it become conscious though as a as something that you could study as a conscious entity when all of us are using it so what happens if everybody just stops using Twitter can you imagine what a peaceful day that would be twitch is an interesting point that I challenged you in the preparation for this call that we wouldn't get into it a discussion about El
on Musk but here we are we're going to talk about Elon Musk don't you think that Elon Musk you know it works in a product environment and you know we can they can design brilliant rockets and Brilliant cars but actually what he's got in Twitter is a network of Human Relationships and actually it's a hive mind it's a living thing right just exactly to your point and and it now trying to create governance around that it just is showing up the the challenges of doing that yes which is really weird
because just a few days ago he said something to the effect that Twitter was like a software company I think it was like a services and a software company and I just thought wow that's such an interesting way for you to see that and he's obviously entitled to his opinion he as a person but also as the owner I'm not sure other people would necessarily agree with that though I don't see it as a software company or as a services company at all I think its value is in that Hive Minds mentality and l
ike what you could potentially study and learn from something like a Twitter and it doesn't have to just be done it could be frankly any social network is fascinating so is it sentient though it's conscious I mean ultimately I still think no because as I said if everybody just stopped using it you know and had a little holiday it would just be what it would just be lots of code a bunch of Engineers sitting around waiting for all of us to come back on and Infuse it so we are the oxygen and the bl
ood that makes it alive and then when we're not there it's what it's just a a bunch of Bones and meat and skin to make the the analogy it's the shell but it doesn't have the animating Force the animating force in that case is all of us I'm not a shareholder I should just like to say just a user just a user likewise honestly it's so refreshing to hear your perspective of it seems that in so many spheres in research that Cycles repeat themselves over history and here we are the same is happening a
gain and we we always ask guests on our podcast one one final question I want to put it to you simple question what's the one thing you think leads to Better Business outcomes in organizations Integrity would be a great place to start yeah yeah Integrity I think if you start with that at your core that's going to affect how you view everything and how you act and conduct yourself I could really expand upon that but I don't I don't want to to waffle and fill up our time but I would say Integrity
it's a great place to start you get that right I think the rest of it'll look after itself that's a brilliant place to end thank you so much Stephanie for joining me thank you well that's the perfect wrap to today's Better Business outcomes podcast my thanks to Stephanie here for joining me please don't forget to subscribe wherever you usually find your podcast and if you enjoy what you hear please also leave us a review I'll see you next time [Music] thank you [Music]
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