This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. BFM 89.9, other Business Station. My name is Rich Bradbury and I'm turning in for Jeff Sandu. Be nice.
Not a phrase we often associate with Culture Pops and Matt Armitage, but we're here. It's Friday, so what the heck? You can't say BFM isn't willing to give people a chance. Should technology companies be nicer and act more ethically?
That's the question Matt is going to fail to answer this week. Let's get to it. It's time to Matt's plane. No killer robots this week.
We finally finished this big data and brain hacking stuff. Kind of freaked me out a little bit last week. Yeah, hey Rich. No, we ended last week talking about having chips implanted in your brain.
That's right. Yes. And those chips might contain artificial intelligence, so there was that idea that you might actually have two separate personalities inside your head talking to each other. And you asked me if that kind of thing keeps me awake at night.
I did. And it doesn't. I'm looking forward to the future. That doesn't mean I'm looking forward to everything that's going to happen, but it does mean that I don't want to keep things as they are.
Are you excited about the future? I am excited about what comes next. I know that some of it's going to be good, some of it's going to be bad. That's the story of human history.
And I don't think that's going to change. We make good decisions. We make terrible decisions. And we like to think that we learn from the decisions, but generally speaking, we don't learn anything at all.
We're just as likely to repeat our failures as we are the successes, or just to ignore absolutely everything and do something completely different. Indeed. All of the traits that make us destructive also make us creative. It's part of the same thing.
We don't just spawn, eat and die. We've evolved slightly beyond that. A little bit. But with that comes chaos.
We are a chaotic species. And we don't really have much idea of what kind of outcomes that the chaos is going to bring before we get started. Yeah, I'm just trying to scare us, Matt. It can sometimes be difficult to put innovation and technology into a context.
So the last few weeks, I've been trying to sketch a line from the way commercial companies treat our data to the rights of sentient machines in the future. And that's not a straightforward or even a really obvious journey. But it's not something that I'm choosing to try and scare people. I think the biggest danger we face is just sleepwalking into this future where we accept how other people want to define the technology and innovation we see.
There is rarely just one way to use something, but when you see things communicated or presented by companies, it often looks so their way is the only way something is supposed to be used. And certainly we're not saying that if you listen to this show, then it's going to give you all the tools you need to determine how the future is going to roll out for you. But with a bit of luck, it does make it clear to people that there are options that they do have choices. They don't have to accept someone else's vision of the future.
And there are ways that they can play a role in shaping and guiding the future in ways that potentially are going to be more beneficial to them. You're trying to scare us to be nicer, aren't you? Yeah. Well, I mean, you say that is actually one way that technology could go.
We're seeing social credit systems being rolled out in countries in China, where you are actually rewarded with points for being a good citizen. Like technology nudging goes into acting in certain ways. Yeah, exactly. There can be a lot of issues when these things come into conflict.
What is good for society is not always best for the individual. And that kind of scheme could be set up as a way to control people rather than to empower them, especially when you're scored not just on your own behaviour, but according to the behaviour and profile of the people who are in your social circle. Then you start to set up a very kind of stratified society where social mobility is decided along the lines of social media patronage. And I bet no one expected to hear the phrase social media patronage when they got up this morning.
So you want to talk about social credit, the idea of us being nicer to each other? Well, I'm not going to go there so much today because we talked about that a little bit a few months ago. I'm going to have a look at another side of the ethics and social responsibility debate, and have a look from the more corporate side. Part of the reason I'm doing this is because I had a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago, and he was asking me why I thought that tech companies didn't act more ethically.
And at the time, I thought it was a bit like asking why a triangle has three corners. They act like that because they can. And why should we expect them to act any differently? But over the course of the series on data, I started to think that maybe my view was a bit simplistic and that this is a topic that warrants maybe a bit more discussion and examination.
So this is more about taking a look at why technology companies behave in certain ways. Yeah, and also why we have such high expectations of them. We hear a lot of the business stories, whether they're good stories or bad stories. But we don't really know why companies act the way they do.
We find out what they do, but we don't necessarily understand the reasons behind it. We know that they'll present a face that is socially responsible. So you balance that with the positive things like their campuses and their social outreach programs and the fact that they are amongst the most sought-after places to work. But then we hear stories about profits channeled through shell companies offshore.
We hear about cultures of discrimination. So today next week, I thought we could have a look at two things, the kind of consumer facing social responsibility aspect. Yes, I said consumer facing. And also the ethics of the products themselves, because that's also a big area of concern.
What happens when you're developing a piece of technology that causes harm or a technology that is conceived for a possible beneficial purpose is then used in a negative way. All right, let's start with this clip. This is annual dash, the respect to tech blogger and the CEO of Fog Creek Software. Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival last year for the Atlantic magazine.
We're already starting to see the signs that trust in tech is eroding very quickly. The average citizen is starting to feel more and more like, I'm not sure that I feel good about all the ways the technologies interact in my life. Technology is already reshaping things in a way where the laws become obsolete. And certainly the tech leaders realize now that if you're the CEO of a major tech company, you are a political figure whether you choose to be or not.
That of course seems to be part of the impulse behind why Mark Zuckerberg is out there campaigning. What it means is he's got to be thinking about what the political impact of Facebook is on the world and what it means to be in his position. And that's good. We want to encourage people to be thinking about their role in society and their role in how governance and law evolve.
We're just starting to see the first efforts to put a set of frameworks or checklists around technology so we can evaluate them. You're seeing this sort of consumer report style model where people are saying this is everything from the environmental impact of the servers that run this service to the human rights aspects of whether this company discloses information to governments or protects people's privacy and security. Is my information secure? What's their track record on keeping my passwords private and not getting hacked?
We need to bring that same model, that same mindset into when we evaluate technology. If I buy this and I use it every day and I put all my personal data and information into it, is that going to result in something that makes me feel better about myself and it's going to make me feel good about my place in the world and it's going to make me feel secure going forward about the way my private information is used. Everybody loves technology and if we're going to be the industry that everybody packed on the back and rewards then we've got an obligation society to be worthy of all that praise. Although that was filmed quite a long time before the current issues around data and Facebook, it's quite a neat summary of where we are with technology at the moment.
There's quite a lot packed into that two minutes. A lot of it's pretty self-explanatory but I'll try and tackle the areas that will maybe a little light on explanation. I think one of the main issues I have with that clip is that it finishes by saying that tech CEOs have to be responsible but it doesn't really point to the reasons why they should be responsible or why we should expect them to be responsible. And I'll be honest, I'm not sure that I have an answer to that either.
I'm generally fairly cynical about these things. I have pretty low expectations and even those expectations rarely seem to be met. What about that part where Anal Dash talks about the erosion of trust and I'm wondering whether the technology is having a positive influence? Certainly.
I mean we've heard a lot in the media this year about the Silicon Valley backlash and even before the current issues with Facebook, we were starting to see the evidence of the tech giants becoming slightly out of touch. You don't have to Google very far to find stories about tech companies that contribute very little to the local economy. They might have three or four or five billion dollar campus but they give very little back to the local communities. So you have local businesses that see little or no patronage from the staff of these firms because everything is catered for them on site and deals that mean very little money in local taxes back into the surrounding neighbourhoods.
While pressure on housing is forcing out long-term residents, especially in terms of the rental sector as prices go up and up. Is there a genuine sense of resentment there? Of course. One of the big social movements in the US is the anti-gentrification movement but it's much wider than people who are being misplaced by high-paid programmers especially with younger generations.
I think I've seen it from the talks and interactions that I've done in the public recently. People recognise how pivotal technology and social media companies are to today's lives but they resent how little power they have to influence or act outside those structures and I can completely understand that. That's why we talked about this topic quite a few times on the show over the past few months but we've also talked about the ways that people can make a difference. Today I think is subtly different because we're asking what actually makes companies behave better.
Alright let's just now take a break then. Of course you are tuning in to BFM 8 and I.9. This is Matt's Blaine. We're talking about being nice.
Don't go anywhere it will be right back. bureaucratic failures multiply BFM 8.9. BFM 8 and 9.9 at the business station. My name is Rich Bradbury.
I'm sitting in for Jeff Sando. Of course I've got CulturePods very own Matt Armitage here in the studio. It is Matt's Blaine. We're talking about being nice.
Now we were talking about trusting resentment when it comes to tech companies. Are our expectations too high? Yeah I think in a lot of ways they are. We seem to have expectations for technology companies that we don't seem to have for what we think of as traditional companies.
When we see an oil company embroiled in an environmental disaster we don't immediately think oh how did that happen? Right as in we acknowledge that tragedy and the horror of those accidents or situations but we're not really surprised by that. Exactly you know we see it as part of the risk. If you make dangerous chemicals they're probably going to spill into a river or onto the ground at some point you know no system is perfect and the way companies around can make those events more or less likely.
So ideally we want catastrophic events not to happen but it is part of the risk of manufacturing the product. We seem to feel more shocked that there might be say sexism or discrimination in one of the new economy companies than in a traditional or an old economy company which is weird because it's as though we imagine entirely different species of people work in these different sectors. Do you think we imagine that the tech industry has a purer and more noble goals? Well yeah I think Google has a lot to blame for this I mean you know in a tongue in cheek sense because we've bought into their whole idea of don't be evil.
The idea of technology don't be evil but that's really odds with the whole idea of disruption which is the idea of moving fast and breaking things. The things that get broken are entire industries they are communities they are laws and I don't think we were prepared for the social cost of the technology industry and I think that's something we're only really coming to terms with now and part of that realization I think is behind the tech backlash sentiment it's something that the tech industry itself I think has been almost entirely unprepared for. So that's another topic that we should go into who are they breaking things for? Well to use the old world analogy I think that's probably hitting the nail on the head or easing silicon from the chip if you want to more up to tape response I know I'm terribly cheesy.
I have to stop doing this. That was part of the conversation I had with my friend you know if someone starts a grocery shop or a plumbing supply company we don't ask them if they don't doing it for the public good. We don't ask a diamond mining company what its motivation is we already know it's there to make money it's not trying to fulfill a social mission to put a diamond on every finger. We have this weird disparity that technology is generating these immense IPOs for companies that make no money yet for some reason we don't think that the founders of these companies are motivated by money.
Because these are the same founders who have become over iBillionaires. Exactly you know we have to get past the idea that if you wear a hoodie and sneakers to a board meeting then you're out to save the world. I would suggest anyone who's interested in going behind the scenes of this subject they can read or disrupt it by Dan Lyons he's a former tech editor at Newsweek who went to work at a start-up based in Boston. It's hilarious and it's also frightening it goes to show how much of what we know about the technology industry is just PR and marketing gloss beneath the surface it's chaos and people who are making it up as they go along.
Which brings us right back to your beautiful chaos idea. Because you don't know what outcomes that chaos will bring about if you get a bunch of 20 something who start a company with some friends and by some miracle that company explodes in popularity and suddenly has thousands and thousands of employees you're going to have some problems. We don't really look at bureaucracy as being a good thing but big companies need a certain amount of red tape and regulation because amongst those thousands and thousands of employees you'll have great people terrible people and a really huge amount of average people yeah and those people are not all going to get along. If a bunch of frat boys start company you're going to have to wait a long time before they decide that frat boy doesn't make for a healthy corporate country right may take a while before they burn through all the venture capital money and come to the conclusion that beer pump tables are not the ideal backdrop to extracting money from clients.
That's more about internal culture. Why do we have high expectations of the way they behave toward us? Well like I said I'm partly because we bought into the don't be evil myth but when you look at a lot of the big tech companies you know Bill Gates is a money guy. Steve Jobs was a money guy.
Those guys were great at marketing and branding. The product guys were always some way in the background. Look at Tim Cook he's a supply chain logistics guy and I'm not saying this in any way in a negative way because those people were able to use their knowledge to build really successful companies and great brands. It seems odd to me that we don't expect Mark Zuckerberg to act in exactly the same way.
So, maximize profits from self in the investors? Yeah because Facebook is not a registered charity. Some of the other social networks for all the money they make you might as well register them as charities. So why do we feel so let down?
Because I think we have a much more personal relationship with the product. You know it's hard to get emotionally invested in a jar of coffee and I suppose part of it is also down to the whole brand evangelism thing. In a very real way Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg. Apple is mostly Steve Jobs and a little dash of Tim Cook.
Bill Gates stepped away from Microsoft years ago yet it's still hard to think of the two as being separate. I like Sachin Adela but he's Microsoft CEO. He's not the personification of the brand. So when that idolatry works it's really powerful.
When it doesn't work you get companies that have to eject their founders because of the risk of the brand becoming toxic. Why do you think this current bank lashes caught the tech industry so much on the back of them? I think the manufacturing tech companies have been insulated from that a little bit because except when it comes to making really stupid stuff like walled garden juice blenders and smart hair brushes you know they live in the public eye. I think the consumer goods market both in and out of the technology industry has had to come to terms with customers who are more demanding and vocal.
So it's seen those companies putting on a much friendlier face looking at their environmental footprint their hiring policy and the quality of the goods they sell. All right does it matter if the companies are only doing it to quieten the public eye? Not really because it's about the bottom line for them. Of course you're going to get some senior management staff in any big company who have their own passions and priorities so you see Apple being much more proactive and supportive of LGBT rights under Tim Cook and that's very much a personal decision that is driving company policy.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if the company is being nice for the sake of being nice or because it's forced to be nice. That's one of the reasons we've heard so much about shareholder activism over the past few years. There are quite a few ethically minded hedge funds and unit trust providers and by buying up blocks of stocking companies they can start to introduce new policies at the boardroom level. You don't think this is so much the case of a service oriented tech companies?
Well I'm going to start banging my gun again now so you might want to put your hands over your ears to block out the ringing noise. We have a different relationship with the companies that give us something for nothing or at least the ones that appear to be giving us something for nothing. It's been interesting this week to note the departure of the second founder of WhatsApp Jan Coom from the company this week. It's been widely reported to be down to issues over encryption and privacy with the parent company Facebook.
WhatsApp's fellow co-founder Brian Acton left Facebook last year and actually announced his support for the Delete Facebook campaign to its back in March which is quite incredible. So you're starting to see the schism where founders are reacting negatively to the direction that they're publicly owned or bought out companies are being taken. So to go back to something I've said before we are users rather than customers of a lot of these services and companies and that means they listen to us in a very different way. Because they meet their bottom line by selling us their parties.
Well yeah I mean I'm not trying to make a case that they're like slave traders or anything but broadly speaking yes you know if Facebook or most of these freemium companies were farms we'd be the livestock not the supermarket they do what they need to do to keep us fed and healthy but only because they have to sell us on to the supermarket later on. You know nobody's going to eat me if I'm a drizzly and tough and diseased the supermarket wants me plump and tender so preferably not glory much. So they're surprised because the cattle are lowing? Well yeah exactly the farmer doesn't usually expect the livestock to complain so this is a new scenario for the tech companies and as we're seeing they're having trouble adjusting.
You know you can move fast and break things but that really only works for the short term. Eventually you have to live with the things that you break and if you break the trust of the people who use your site or service then you know you're putting your livelihood on the line. Alright should then we be waiting for lawmakers to jump in on our behalf. Well that's an obvious thing for lawmakers to do right but it's another reason that the Facebook story has been so revealing over the last few weeks.
It proved a lot of the things that we suspected that lawmakers opt for self-regulation in technology partly because they don't have a clue where to start with regulating the new economy. In many cases it's not a small gap it's actually a fundamental one not just a generational or language issue. It's the very basics that people don't grasp. The one end you have I think Vladimir Putin saying a few years ago that he doesn't watch the internet or Donald Trump talking about the cyber as though that's actually a thing and the Facebook congressional hearings showed that you know this same lack of understanding is pretty widespread and common amongst the political class who broadly speaking a male and over 50 pretty much wherever you look in the world.
So the answer to the question is no some countries or blocks like the EU will be more forward-thinking and conceptually better armed but don't bank on anyone else shaping technology in your image. This is another one of those things we've got to do ourselves. Yeah because it's never single-handed laws play part and so do we. It was public outrage and changing tastes rather than laws that ended the use of fur in most fashion houses.
For sure the use of data and the rights of individual users should be legislated but Facebook isn't a chemicals company. Twitter isn't selling arms. You're not going to die of an overdose of snapchat. So it would be perfectly understandable if lawmakers thought eradicating lead in water supply was a better use of national resources than making sure a disreputable tech company can't buy the photo of bananas that you took this morning.
Which means it really is down to you and me and our listeners and all the people who aren't listening to hold these companies to account. All right then what should we do? Make some noise. Tech companies really don't like it when you make noise.
It takes the shimmer off the platinum slicked image. People that great and chaotic mass are one of the reasons that a lot of garment companies started vetting their third party suppliers more closely because the customers were demanding they do something. In action hurt their bottom line more than spending money to improve conditions. So tell the tech companies what you want.
Remind them that we own lives. That's what hashtags were invented for. I'm definitely not saying insult them. I'll call them names.
That's not helpful. Technology companies only have access to our data because we give it to them. So think about what you share. Delete Facebook or Twitter or whatever if you really can't stand what they're doing.
That's a bit further than I would go personally. Limit what you're willing to share. Put different things on different services. The less complete a picture anyone service has of you.
The harder it is for them to sell. And also find out who owns the tech services that you use. Are they a subsidiary of one of the giants? Do those companies share information?
Most of that stuff is easy to find out in a couple of quick, searchable steps. Okay. So what then happens if we disrupt their business model? Then we have to be prepared to do what it takes to repair it.
If you value a service, you have to be prepared to cover their commercial costs so that that company can make a profit. If we want more control over our content and that means limiting the money that companies can make from third parties, then obviously we have to make up that shortfall. That's it. That's my gong banging again.
You know, you could try and convince the US government to nationalise Facebook and make it a public service. But even if they did nationalise it, that wouldn't work out for most of us because we're not US citizens. So they would either exclude us or make us pay anyway. And we'd still have no control over how our data is used.
And you know, you have to remember as well the standards we hold others to, we have to hold ourselves to. When we move fast, we break stuff as well. And that stuff is not going to work again until we have to fix it. And then once we fix it, we can get on with the important business.
It'd be nice. For those at, for these and other unpopular opinions, you can head over to culturepop.com where you can also find out how to bring a bit of Matt Splaining to your company. You are, of course, listening to Matt Splained here on BFM 8.9, the business station. Oh, don't go anywhere.
Come in that very shortly. We've got Geek Squawk here on BFM 8. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm89.9, the business station.