Exploring Practical Tech Ethics with Mathew Mykta and Nathan Kinch from Tethix | #3 - The Strange Attractor

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
you.
Hello and welcome to anotherepisode of the Strange Attractor

(00:46):
.
This week we sat down with NateKinch and Matthew Mikter from
Tethics.
So Tethics is a collective ofpractical sociotechnological
ethicists yes, that is a thingand they are all about trying to
make doing tech ethics fun andinteresting and trying to ensure

(01:08):
that the technology you arecreating and designing
contributes to human andplanetary flourishing.
So we love these guys so muchso we actually have Nate on
board as our resident techethicists.
We think that a lot of the workthat they are doing is really
exciting and invigorating, andwe are actually actively

(01:30):
embedding it into the way inwhich we organise ourselves.
I do apologise for the somewhatwhack intro and throwing you in
the deep end.
This is all new for us learninghow to co-create a podcast.
So apologies for the lack of anintroduction, but we kick

(01:53):
things off with an informaldiscussion around new governance
structures.
So apologies for throwing youin the deep end, but you will
figure it out.
I trust you.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Interestingly, there was a political party here in
Australia called the Flux Party.
They helped set them up andthis was like 2014.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
It's like a photo of Heraclitus.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
No, but they are kind of underlying ways of
addressing some of the problemsthat we currently see in
democracy was to use liquiddemocracy or fluid democracy.
So it's essentially like ifthere's a bill being put before
Parliament that's on AItechnology and I accept that I

(02:59):
just don't have the expertise tounderstand the implications of
this bill.
I've got a vote that I candelegate to you because I
believe and trust in yourjudgment on whether this bill
should pass and becauseepistemic difference like this I

(03:22):
feel I'm not confident that Iknow enough, I'm going to give
the delegate the responsibilityof dealing with this problem.
I know I fix in the pipe in mybathroom to the plumber.
I mean I could do it because Iknow how to do that stuff.

(03:46):
I just don't have the tools todo it.
But that's actually anotherpart of the process.
You might have the theoreticaltools to deal with a problem
that I don't have thetheoretical tools to deal with.
So I'm better off delegating mypower and agency to you and

(04:07):
like, if you think about that inthat network sense, I mean what
Flux was doing was saying we'regoing to get people into
Parliament and they did.
They form.
We got formal political partiesin Western Australia, new South
Wales, victoria and the ideawas that that representative
that got voted into the Senate.

(04:30):
They didn't have a position.
They were obligated to make adecision that reflected their
constituents.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
I felt like I heard about this through FYA, yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
And what happened recently was they got
involuntarily disbanded as aparty with a change to the
legislation on political partiesthat the Morrison government
put in, and this was like my mumgot how this was better than

(05:08):
what we have in place now.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
Right, but the perverse incentives of the
current system were just likewell.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
This means that we can't centralise power, so yeah,
it was like a way to give powerback to the people.
Like you know, the wholetagline was like let's upgrade
our democracy, you know, andthere's a whole technology
platform that was being builtaround this that like involved
like a digital identitycomponent so that you could
prove you with a person that wasdelegating the vote to each

(05:36):
other.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
This is the one where you could vote right, Like,
like it'll be like okay, youhave to vote on this by this
time and anyone can log in atany time and do it within that
time bracket.
And then that was prior to theparliament.
Who's sitting right Like soit's no different to like
texting a mate or like usingInstagram, but it's actually
shaping the direction ofdemocracy.

(05:57):
You hear these things andyou're just like yeah,
absolutely, like fuck, yes, whydo we not?
Why do we not have thathappening already?
And then you hear that now it'slegislated against at federal
level.
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
So, yeah, why do we need some old foggy that has no
understanding about on theground realities of you know, or
, in tech, has an understandingof technology, making decisions
on behalf of a nation, a set ofconstituents that they're meant

(06:37):
to represent?
They're just not competent.
They're not competent Likethese institutions are, don't?
They may have worked in thepast where we didn't have a very
educated, informed, literatepublic, right, you know, and
that's why they were probablyrelevant 150 years ago.
Even then I would questionwhether they were relevant then.

(06:59):
But that's more about, like,distribution of power and social
structures at that point intime in history, like, but now
we have a literate population.
Most people can, like get evenabstract stuff, but probably
make some judgment that, like,I'm not, like I don't know about

(07:19):
what's the best form ofeducation for primary age school
children, as is Bill goingthrough parliament, so I'm going
to delegate it to Nathanbecause he knows he knows this
stuff better than me, like, andmost people will get that.
So, like these, these types ofapproaches to upgrade our kind
of civic engagement processes,like they're absolutely relevant

(07:40):
right now and this it is thenext phase of our evolution.
It's just like, how do youovercome, I guess, the the basin
of attraction that pulls it all.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah, kind of gravitating around at the moment
.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
But from a systems perspective as well, like who's
set to lose?
Absolutely, politician that'son a fucking super cushy wage,
that like sweet retirement yeah,even once they're gone, they
still have all these absolutelyludicrous benefits that they get
.
They're set to lose as a result.
You know, and it's the same aslike the other set.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
This is sorry to cut you off there.
It's like they're set to loseon one level of the scale, right
.
But if you, if you take a widerboundary perspective, they're
winning, because we're allwinning.
So it's like it's having tohaving to also have that, that
reframe that I think we weretalking about.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
It's like a metaphysical reorientation, 100%
.
A lot of this stuff isinteresting though, because,
having advised many differentgovernment departments,
supported various differentprocesses within the public
service, you've got a hugenumber of smart, motivated,
caring individuals.

(08:50):
They often enter the publicservice very early in their
adult life, they get hiredstraight out of university, etc.
There is a particular sort oflike deep narrative associated
with that, so it exogenouslycontributes to their motivation.
It supports the way thatthey're already thinking when

(09:11):
they go into these organizations.
I think there's many differentarguments that can be made about
the dynamics of the organizingstructures etc.
But one sort of concreteexample is let's say, you have
an MP talking about a particularissue, right.
In many cases and I'm going tomake a generalization, but I

(09:31):
think it's okay for thesepurposes In many cases, the MP
basically reads like a TLDRsummary of a briefing document.
Right, there might be hundredsof hours put into a particular
briefing document.
It depends on the context, timesensitivity, etc.
Often it's like shit.
We've got to turn this thingaround in like 24 to 48 hours.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
But you might still have like 100 or 200 hours worth
of huge working collected.

Speaker 3 (09:57):
Absolutely.
And then something very basicgets put together and the MP,
who may, in their own right, behighly intelligent,
knowledgeable in certain ways,etc.
Is engaging in publicsubstantive and consequential
discourse based on three to fivedot points.

(10:19):
It's preposterous, you know,like so, at every level of this
system that we sort of caringlyand compassionately, yet
critically, interrogate, thestuff breaks down, you know.
So we've got to be somewherenear an inflection point where

(10:40):
the types of stuff that thatMatt's referring to with flux or
any of the work arounddeliberative democracy, huge
amount of really interestingstuff going on in the EU, you
know stuff are in Coloradoaround quadratic voting, like
there's lots of cool experimentsbeing conducted.
We've got to be, it feels, likewe're at an inflection point.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
It definitely does feel like we're we're pushing up
against the boundary of howfunctional the current operating
system is, which is why you'regetting this like this, this
divergence, out into all ofthese experimental domains, and
then I think it's just going tobe a matter of time until that,
like the CUNY and I guess,revolution in way of thinking,

(11:22):
will change and switch and thenhopefully it switches to one of
those and not just a furtherconsolidation of power and we
have that like techno feudalismor just like outright collapse,
which are both potentially morepossible than this, depending on
less preferable, less, lessless preferable, but potentially

(11:46):
more probable at the moment,unless more people are made
aware of what we're talkingabout or a less more people feel
the desire to participate andknow that they can.
I feel like so much of thisjust comes down to the fact that
so many people are so busydoing whatever they're doing,
contributing to society inwhatever way, shape or form they
do, that they don't have thetime to even consider or reflect

(12:07):
on new ways of structuringsociety.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
It's an interesting parallel here.
So Matt and I led a body ofresearch.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
By the way.
We have started, so I justcan't be bothered with a formal
intro like that.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
So we did this body of work a number of years ago
with the Consumer PolicyResearch Centre.
It was titled A Day in the Lifeof Data and basically we were
trying to understand in thisparticular case, like how does
advertising ecosystem work, howdo e-commerce ecosystems work,
etc.
Like fundamentally at asocio-technical sort of systems

(12:42):
level.
One of the areas that weexplored was how do everyday
folks interact with thispresently and how do they
interact with it or how mightthey interact with it if,
throughout the process ofinteracting, they are made aware
of what's going on under thehood.
And there's this really sort ofinteresting mental model that

(13:03):
emerges.
So people feel powerlessOrganisations that use my
information.
They do like I don't have achoice, they just use it however
they want.
And so that sense of embodiedvisceral powerlessness leads to
kind of like a mental state andan embodied state of apathy.

(13:27):
And then the apathy plays outbehaviorally in all different
types of ways and we came upwith this thing called the
agreement bypass bias and thebasic gist everyone does this,
we all do this, like we'resigning up for an app and, let's
say, the onboarding process isdesigned to decrease our time to
value.
So give us something that wewant really, really quickly.

(13:50):
And as part of that process,baked into a typically hidden
away layer.
However you want to think aboutit is in order to get the value
that you've come here for.
You've got to sign your lifeaway and you know it's like
disconnected.
It's all this like complexlegalese.
It would actually take you anhour to get through if you took

(14:11):
the time.
So it's misappropriate in thatspecific context of use etc.
So people just go screw thatand they move on.
That's actually a fairlyrational thing to do If you
embody the belief that you arecompletely disempowered, right,
and then we observe some otherthings like so, through this
process, people then startalmost stepping back and, like

(14:34):
post hoc, rationalizing thecorporate behaviors.
So, instead of getting angryand going like, fuck this, like
this information tells anintimate story about who I am,
where I've come from, what mypreferences are, the type of
desires I have, the type ofperson that I want to be, how I
want to animate my life force inthe world.
However you want to think aboutit, they kind of go, oh yeah,

(14:56):
but you know, I supposecorporations kind of have to do
this, don't they?
And like, and it plays outconsistently across context.
And I think a similar sort ofthing applies more broadly to
what we're talking about here,because people don't know that
different is possible.
And in that particular context,we would share the spectrum of

(15:18):
possibilities in privacy,enhancing technology, et cetera,
and folks would go, wow, so Ican have the thing that I want,
all of this great utility, andmy fundamental rights and
freedoms can be protected,respected, et cetera.
Of course I want that.
I want the positive, someoutcome, and I think in the
context of how we organizesociety, how we relate to one

(15:43):
another, how we connect,collaborate and coordinate our
efforts towards somethingpurposeful, good et cetera, out
there in the world.
If we don't believe thatanything else is possible, of
course we're going to beapathetic, like all we have is
that vote every couple of years,and actually that means sweet
FA.
But that's not all that'spossible.

(16:05):
So I think that positioningaround possibility and then
enabling purposeful explorationtowards those possible futures,
so that we direct our effortstowards that which is preferable
Holy shit, we do that.
We can change games.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
Reminds me of.
Is it like Snowden who talksabout the narratives.
We want more narratives likethis, less narratives like that,
and that sounds like.
That's kind of like a goodframing for the sort of speaking
about there.
When you're dealing withcomplexity and this sort of
stuff is like okay, well, and ifyou present that to people it
could also make sense.
They're like oh yeah, that doesmake sense.
We probably want to have morestories where you feel empowered

(16:47):
and where you feel like you canaccess the tech without any of
the downside, and I'm sureprobably even the people making
the tech can probably evenunderstand that from that
perspective as well.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
Totally, which brings us kind of I think, somewhat
naturally to where we are today.
So we've been focusing for 12,13 plus years on this idea that
when people are building sociotechnologies, any instantiation

(17:16):
of how would you define that.
Well, you know socio tech,technical theories is whole
field right.
But like, if we allow ourselvesto like, summarize and simplify
, like technology is not somesort of abstract artifact that

(17:37):
we have full control of, thatexists only in service of us, et
cetera.
You know, sociotechnicaltheorists try and look more
broadly at the system and theygo well.
You know, like technologies aredeveloped in a socio-cultural,
socio-political, socio-economiccontext.
They're not values neutral.
We imbue our values in thesetechnologies and when these

(17:57):
technologies go out into theworld and we start interacting
with them, they change us inreally interesting ways.
Sometimes we're aware of thosechanges, other times we're not.
And you know Daniel Frager sortof refers to that through his
framing of ontological design.
You know you've got the folksat Concelion's that have done
some really interesting work inthis space.

Speaker 1 (18:16):
Also co-authored a paper about designing for
coexistence, making directreference to ontological design
Nice.
So yeah, very, very savvy withthat space.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
Yeah, so it's that sort of gist.
It's just this recognition thatthe things that we design are
an extension of us, in fact,they are us in some way, shape
or form, and that they're partof the living world, and that
humanity, technology and therest of the natural world exist
in relationship.
Now, you know, you could arguethat we exist in an unharmonious

(18:49):
relationship today and that oneof the you know the teleologies
, the purposes that we probablywant to orient ourselves towards
is creating contexts andconditions where humanity,
technology and the rest of thenatural world of which all of
that is one, you know, we arenature, we're not just of nature
, we are nature Can exist in amore symbiotic relationship 100%

(19:13):
.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
Well, that was the exact premise of so, yeah, I
guess, my section of the paperthat there was like three key
points.
The whole concept of the paperwas very transdisciplinary and
it was so.
The co-author was Oli Kosftisfrom RMIT and then Nina Williams
from ANU, I think.
And yeah, the premise was let'sbring people together from

(19:34):
different disciplines and placesand explore what it means to
design for coexistence.
And from our context it wasactually making, which is a bit
meta, because it was makingreference to the fact that we
were exploring at the time whatit would be like to have a
philosopher in residence, whichwe now have, hey, which is great
.
But yeah, the premise that I wasdrawing on was when we're

(19:56):
looking at designing andcreating technology, it's like
it's not human-centered design.
That's part of the problem.
Still useful, don't get mewrong Like it's a wonderful
thing, but it's again, it'sexpanding, it's a narrow lens,
to like a habit.
We take an ecological designthinking approach.
So it's like not only is itdesirable, viable, feasible, but

(20:17):
is it like ecologically soundand sustainable and does this
thing leave the world better offor does this thing abide by the
natural patterns and principlesembedded in, I guess, a living
systems worldview and thatfundamentally shifts whether or
not you have to bring atechnology, whether you should

(20:39):
bring a technology into thisworld.
So it is bringing in thatethical framework, but bringing
the ethical framework in from aground like grounded in a
biophysical reality and groundedin a relational approach based
in how living organisms or hownature functions, which I think

(21:00):
actually is somewhat akin to howyou both communicate as well.
I believe you also use a lot ofthe living systems metaphors
and language.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, and there's, like, I guess, an important part
of this and just before I diveinto that, like the different
scales, like when you'redesigning, thinking about OK,
well, designing for the human,and, like you know, taking this
human-centered design, caveatthis with the fact that the way
that most organizations usehuman-centered design is

(21:32):
actually business-centereddesign.
It's not actually about thehuman.
Put the human at the center andexploit them.
Let's extract value from themas best as possible, but we want
to deliver value back to them.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
It might be worth just like sitting with that for
a moment, because we've donemany presentations within
organizational settings, guestlectures, all this different
type of stuff where weexplicitly call out that sort of
like the oxymoronic nature ofthe framing and it seems it's
deeply uncomfortable for theaudiences at first.

(22:06):
When they step back and sit withit and be with it, it's like
shit.
That is actually what we'redoing.
We operate in service of thecorporation, which kind of has
one mandate, which is tomaximize shareholder value,
which is kind of a weird thingfor a designer, because a lot of
these folks are deeply sociallyand ecologically oriented, like

(22:29):
they look at design as this wayof seeing the world and
interacting with the world, sothat you know our contributions,
our efforts, can do some typeof good.
And yeah, just like sittingwith that realization is really
powerful.
Sorry, mate.

Speaker 2 (22:47):
Yeah, I mean like when you're able to, when you
give the time and you create theemotional cognitive space in a
social setting, like in aworkshop sitting down with
people yeah, they're in anorganization, but when you can
get to those deep levels ofrecognition, it's like, yeah,

(23:08):
shit, we're we're.
This is an aphorism, this isnot like what we know.
We're not actually designingfor people and to like designing
for their needs and empathizingwith them and that's quite.
They're powerful likerealizations to be able to get
to, but it takes a bit of time.

(23:29):
Some like to actually workthrough that in conversation and
examples and sometimes you knowthere's a, there's a a reaction
that comes from we're notwilling to accept that we're
doing this and that's a.

(23:50):
You know a defense mechanism,that's a willfully mate and
that's because you know theirjobs rely on it.
Like they get a wage, like theyhave to serve the higher order
value of shareholder primacy.
And you know and you know,referring back to Naomi Klein's
work from the nineties aroundyou know corporations are just

(24:11):
psychopaths, like if, if they'rebeing given legal rights as
individuals and in most, atleast Western jurisdictions
under law, that's basically whatthey have.
It's like it's an abstractinstitution that's been given
the same rights that anindividual has under law.
So it kind of because it'soperating with minimal

(24:32):
accountability.
Yeah, with minimalaccountability.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
Consequences if your everyday human does something
significantly wrong.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
Oh, you go to jail, but an organisation's not going
to jail.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, you know.
So it's a, yeah, we've gotthese kind of paradoxes in a way
that we, we think about this.
But I mean coming back, I guess, to the you know the living
systems approach and, um, liketrying to help people develop an
understanding that we, asNathan was saying, we, we are

(25:01):
nature and it's it's.
It's difficult because, like we, we live and we've been
educated in most, most, mostpeople in Western countries,
like here in Australia, um,through, through, you know a
model of education.
It's about its dualism, it's aseparation.

(25:23):
It's kind of evolved from aWestern Enlightenment period.
This forms of education reallystarted out in the industrial
period to kind of ensure thatpeople have the basic literacy
and numeracy skills.

Speaker 3 (25:34):
Well, which is born out of Prussia, which is, you
know, basically like smartenough to work in a factory and
no smarter to question it.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Yeah, Walk in front of a bullet when I tell you to,
you know, be able to kind ofread instructions, operate
machinery and things like that,so that, like you, you can see
that it's, it makes sense, likewhen you reflect on it, and most
people will tend to get it, butsome people don't.
Purely, you know, in this worldviews, there's ways of

(26:04):
understanding religious beliefs,cultural upbringing that shapes
the way that people might beable to comprehend, acknowledge
and come to a moment ofrealisation, like, oh yeah, this
feels like an absolute truth,that like is deep inside me.
But we kind of look at this asgoing okay, well, firstly, like

(26:25):
from a biomimicry perspective,going what are the?
What are the patterns that weobserve in nature, in, in you
know, for want to better term,in nature's design where there's
a designer or not, is maybepart of a discussion that we
could get into after that thathelp us to understand how we can

(26:45):
do things better.
And if you look at relationalaspects in natural biological
systems, everything lives inrelation to each other.
In itself, it's a whole in itsparts and it's that that's how
it's evolved.
Yeah, this is hundreds ofmillions of years of evolution,

(27:06):
you know, from that kind ofviewpoint, that have led to that
, those patterns being optimalfor adaptability.
But we can.
We can learn from that, butalso in the process of like,
using that understanding todesign, like our approaches that
we're using in our, our companyand building of our technology,

(27:31):
but also drawing attention toit through language and and
using nature based metaphors andthings that are more organic
and moving away from mechanisticviews and language.
That is probably much morecommon in the business world
than most people actuallyconsciously recognize until you

(27:53):
actually draw attention to it.
Get the better of sportmetaphor.
Let's just get the ball rolling,the ball rolling, or you know,
like the, the, you know examplesof this is like you know, data
is oil, right, and it's likethat and that's become this meme
over the past like 15 years.
And if you think about thatmetaphor, you know, and there's

(28:15):
organic component to it, theseoils, like this cum resource
that we extract from the ground.
But this, this has implicationsfor the way that we we actually
develop technologies and theway we use data.
So the language kind of shapesour perception.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
And it's metaphysical , like and you know the value
system here.
So, like, our burning of fossilfuels has enabled this, like
incredible appetite for energywhich has fueled Big P progress.
Right, and Big P progress hasbeen good.
You know like, when you startapplying that logic, that highly

(28:53):
literally, and you know sort offigurative, extractive logic,
we get surveillance capitalism,you know like.
So so all of these, all ofthese deep narratives, are
related.
One thing I'm interested inhere, though so if, if we, just
if we step back for a moment andwe do a little bit of like
problem framing, I think thatwill help animate why the work

(29:17):
that we're doing on Tefix hassuch relevance to to where we
are today.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
Yeah, and it's like bounding these problems
sometimes is is a somewhat of achallenge, but let's bound it
and and kind of frame it.
So we've got this context, youknow, drawing on this, this view

(29:45):
, that technologies aren'tdeveloped, they don't exist
independent of our socialrelations and our culture and
our values and belief systems.
We're developing technologiesin a way that reflects this more
dualistic nature of or way ofseeing the world, you know.

(30:12):
So they're there from autilitarian perspective, to
serve some purpose withinsociety, in the case of the
legal construct of a corporation, a higher order value of profit
, capitalism, we might say andthat shapes the behavior, the
views, the language of peoplethat are responsible for

(30:38):
developing these technologies,you know, be that UX designers,
data scientists, softwareengineers, analysts, project
managers, product managers, whathave you?
You know, and this is kind of ina digital technology context
but people are human and they,you know, consciously,

(31:00):
unconsciously, recognize thatthey have values.
Most people, most of the time,will want to express what they
believe is good.
They don't always know how todefine what they believe is good
, but they want to act inalignment to what they believe
is good.
In an organization.

(31:21):
You'll sometimes define thoseas like these are our values,
these are the principles inwhich we'll guide our action,
but there's a gap between thosestatements that get made and the
behaviors that take place inthe context of actually

(31:42):
developing, building, deployingtechnologies.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
And just quickly.
So the way that we see in thebehavioral sciences the intent
action gap framed this lack ofrelationship often between what
we seem to want or say we wantand what we do, and explanations
of such a phenomenon, I think,are typically grossly

(32:11):
oversimplified.
But push that to the side for amoment.
We refer to this in anorganizational and institutional
setting, as the ethical intentto action gap, and there's
actually a body of research thatwas published by a group at MIT
in 2020, led by Donald Sull,and what they explored was the

(32:33):
relationship between acorporation's stated values and
its culture and the behaviorsthat emerge from that culture,
and the basic conclusion, if youwill, of this body of research
was that there isn't even astatistical correlation.
So this ethical intent toaction gap that we're talking

(32:56):
about, it exists at sort of alllevels of an organizing
structure, a formal organizingstructure, and it's exhibited
systemically.
It's all over the place, andthe problem that we're
effectively trying to solve ishow do we close that gap?

Speaker 1 (33:18):
It's a big delta.
And again going back to so,whilst you were talking about
all this, it made me think of Ithink it's Marvin Harris and the
concept of infrastructure,social structure, superstructure
, which we could loosely sort ofdefine as tech, organization
and culture, and thinking how,even though the organization

(33:41):
might say, ok, our culture isthis we believe in.
So I don't know, from our pointof view, our values might be I
should know this, they're on thewebsite but repositioning
science is one of our values, orredefining our approach and
essentially regenerating theplanet.

(34:01):
And I think there's one otherone that's probably profound
that I'm forgetting, but anyway,and we have those and they are
our values.
And then you know, and thensomething might happen.
I'm a prime example would bethis is a really strange example
but, um, uh, acoustic paneling,right, so we would love it to

(34:24):
be all upcycled, recycled.
We would love it to be this,that and the other.
And then, when it comes to it,um, it's like there isn't
anything within a, but like it's, because we don't do full cost
accounting, it's way cheaper tobuy something that's like
petrochemical based or somethingof the likes, rather than
finding a biobased alternativeor solution, and there's

(34:45):
literally nothing out there Likewe could, could grow our own
fungus to make it, but we don'thave the like and that's
something that we're looking atdoing, but we just don't have
the infrastructure to do it.
So, even even though that mightbe what you want to do and
there is the wheel and theintent to do it, there can be a
lack of infrastructure to allowthe creation of things which are
biobased, home, compostable andbased on green chemistry.

(35:08):
So there's that level of it.
And then there's also theorganizational level.
So, like from the the, thelegal perspective and from an
economic perspective, thereisn't full cost accounting, so
you're only paid for the cost ofextraction rather than what it
actually costs the environmentor society at large.
So you privatize gains,socialize the losses.
So if we, if we did take thatapproach, or if we switch things

(35:32):
up, then these things wouldcost way more than getting some
old clothing and recycling andpurchasing it from uptext, which
is so we are going to look atcollaborating with someone
locally who are actually doingthat.
So and you know it's circular,but at the moment very expensive
, hopefully in the future.
You know these things can belegislated in support of with

(35:55):
incentives so that they canbring the price down, instead of
incentivizing and providingdiscounts for people to use
petrochemicals or whatever else.
So it is interesting, I guess,and how that kind of relates to
what you were sort of saying isthat I can see how that delta
can appear essentially assomeone who is actively trying
to run an organization based offliving principles and striving

(36:21):
to be as regenerative aspossible and giving more than we
take and basing ourselves likean ecosystem, an organization as
an ecosystem.
But there's only so much youcan do.
It's like if you're in a sickenvironment, right, if the whole
thing is fucked and you're atree and you're trying to grow
and there's no mycelial networkto support you, there's no

(36:44):
nitrogen fixing bacteria,there's no rainfall here anymore
because we've just haddesertification, because we've
removed the top, so like you'rescrewed, yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
And this is the bounding problem as well, like,
like, why, you know, if you go,why does this gap exist?
Why is this delta so largeacross organizational,
institutional context?
You know it's not an easy.
It's not an easy problem tobound because it's so entangled

(37:16):
in every level of the systemdynamic, yeah, like our
political systems, our mindsets,how we produce things, like you
know, and that it's a wickedproblem, um, and like, we, you
know, acknowledge deeply that,like you want to have the most

(37:42):
minimum amount of dissonancebetween what you truly value in
the work that you do andactually what you do in the work
you do, because, for lots ofdifferent reasons, the more
dissonance that you experience,the less productive, the less
creative, the less innovativeyou're actually going to be able

(38:06):
to be, because the less well,yeah, the less well, um, you're
able to be.
So, you know, even from thatperspective, closing this gap,
um, like just making an economicargument, you can say, well,
like we can increase theproductivity of our nation just
taking this economic perspectiveby decreasing the amount of
cognitive dissonance that peopleface at work.

(38:27):
You know, like, and that'sprobably not the right.

Speaker 1 (38:31):
No, I think it's not your only framing but it is an
important contribution.
I think it's essential to frameit like that for your
psychopaths and sociopaths.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
The big encounters of the world.

Speaker 1 (38:40):
For sure, but it's acknowledging it's all
interconnected and it's like,yes, it makes economic sense,
but doing the right thing willusually make economic sense,
will usually make social sense,will usually make sense for the
individual and will also makesense for the ecosystem or
biosphere as a whole, dependingon your framing and how you look

(39:01):
at our system.
Yeah, absolutely yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:04):
Like.
One of the things I'd like tobuild upon here is in terms of
this ethical intent to actiongap.
Uh, just to again, for folksthat are interested, start
making it a wee bit moreconcrete.
So at the moment, let's say,you have an organisation that
wants to communicate some typeof value system.
It tends to be done in a real,uh, a fairly sort of like

(39:24):
paternalistic way.
It's very top down.
There's some type of mandate.
Uh, it'll tend to come fromthose that are responsible for
corporate governance, the board,you know, the CEO and
potentially some otherexecutives will interact with it
.
There will often be some typeof external contribution.
You might bring in aprofessional philosopher or
ethicist, uh, you might bring insome type of services firm.

(39:48):
Uh, one of the big mistakes thatcorporations make is they often
bring in one of the big four.
Uh, we'll just glaze over thatfor now.
And then these values, thisvalue system, these principles
are communicated and, um,somehow, magically, they are
then supposed to beoperationalised.
But it's, it's this reallydisembodied approach that fails

(40:11):
to reflect the reality of thepeople who are actually doing
the work.
It's not reflective of thetools, the practices, the socio
cultural context, the rituals,et cetera, et cetera.
And so what we're trying to doand we're we're we're attempting

(40:32):
to intervene in the system atsort of like different levels,
and I really like, um, you knowthis, uh, uh, sort of like
iteration that some of the folksat Griffith have done on the
iceberg model of systems theoryand they've used, you know, I've
sort of got it on my phone here, yeah, Give us a look, you know
the you know the oh that'sbeautiful.

(40:53):
Yeah, more of more of a kind oflike a fragile branching tree,
absolutely.
You know, which represents asort of mycorrhizal networks and
whatnot, and so we're trying tomake these different
contributions through, and we'llwe'll talk about what these
things are in a moment Smiles,elemental ethics and ethos,
which is a sort of product suiteof practical ethics products

(41:13):
and and operate at differentlayers of the system.
You know, smiles is a languagesystem, symbiomimetic,
interwoven language embodimentsystem.
I'm not so mouthful.
You know, elemental ethics isthis new type of ethics
framework, this alchemistinspired sort of ethics
framework that operates at thelevel of how folks actually

(41:37):
develop products and services inthe real world today, and it
meets them not just where theyare sort of socioculturally, but
where they are ritualistically,the actual tooling that they
use to get their work done.
You know, it's reflective oftheir workflows, their
collaboration practices, etcetera, and I think it's, you

(41:59):
know.
So we're trying to kind of takethis systemic approach and maybe
at this point it makes sense totalk a.
Let's talk a little bit aboutSmiles, a little bit about
elemental ethics, a little bitabout ethos, just how they fit
together.
And then you know, sam, thething that I showed you.
I think it it helps reflect how, instead of just doing the
thing that for the most part isdone, which is operating at the
level of event, symptoms, whatwe're told, et cetera.

(42:20):
Like we start at values andmindsets, which has the capacity
to sort of influence.
You know, behaviors, spaces,interactions, practices,
patterning, et cetera.
And I and these are just models, right, they're simplifications
of the real world, that areapproximations maps, not the
territory.
But even though all models arewrong, we feel like this one's

(42:41):
useful.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
Absolutely, and maybe to circle back to what we
should have done at thebeginning, but I'm very
nonlinear as a thinker, sothat's fine by me.
Do you want to let us know whatethics is?

Speaker 3 (42:54):
Maybe just like a terrible idea.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
Let's not do it, or do we just have to figure it out
and piece it together like oneof those movies that you just
like?

Speaker 3 (43:01):
a Stanley Kubrick movie yeah exactly, yeah, yeah,
this is tenet, this talk istenet.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
Yeah, look, I mean, what is ethics?
I mean we're a, we're a kind ofa social venture that is
essentially trying to helpPeople reimagine and develop
technologies that support andenable human and planetary

(43:30):
flourishing.
Ethics, you know, is, is arepresentation of its founders,
as you would imagine.
You know it's an expression ofour belief systems, values,
systems in that sense.
But we're building.
We spent the past three yearsalmost in like R&D, kind of

(43:55):
really falling in love with thisproblem that we're solving.
And that's a symptom that's atthe top level of the system,
like the ethical intention gapis a symptom of all these
underlying structures, thesepatterns, these mental models,
these belief systems, these waysof working and being and
learning that are really rich,tapestries and interwoven.

(44:17):
It's really hard to kind of getat that.
So, no, we're not like we'renot solving some simple problem.
And, you know, likewise withthe work that you do.
You can kind of acknowledge that.
So we have to come at it fromlots of different angles and
perspectives and use lots ofdiverse fields.
You know we'retransdisciplinary in our

(44:40):
approaches inherently and we'rebuilding.
We've spent a lot of timefocusing on learning and how
people learn and looking at how,how do you actually close this
gap?
There's a skills and knowledgeelement to this.
There's an ability element interms of the behavior within an
organization.
There's a cultural change.

(45:00):
There's an authorizingenvironment from the board level
, as Nathan was talking abouttop down, bottom up, middle, in
and out.
But there's also a broadersocial stuff that is you can't
like, you can't separate it,because why a product manager is
you know, is you know thatmight actually be responsible

(45:22):
for prioritizing a team's timein a cross functional product
team is not able to followthrough on the intentions or
these commitments that they'vebeen making as a team is, is
interpersonal and it's it's.
It's not separate from hispersonal context in life,

(45:43):
because the next feature releasemight actually be related to
his KPI, is OKRs and that's tiedto promises around.
I don't know buying hisdaughter a pony or something
like that, maybe not pony bit,you know going on holiday with
his family, right, and promisesthat he's made that sense.
It's like oh crap, if we, if wetake more time, you know, in
this next feature that we'redeveloping, oh shit, that's

(46:08):
connected to my KPIs, myperformance bonus.

Speaker 3 (46:11):
There are critical past dependencies, many of which
are imaginary orintersubjective.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
So I mean roundabout way, you know where we're, you
know we're helping to, helpingpeople to, to understand tech
ethics in a way that makes themsmile, make it fun and
accessible and playful andrelatable.
You know where.

(46:36):
You don't need to die.
You don't need to be likesomeone that reads and dives
into ontology and epistemologyand moral philosophy and
understands complex systems andlike you don't.
It's helpful.
That's great.

Speaker 1 (46:50):
It's kind of like traditional storytelling, at
least from what I'm aware of inthe Indigenous Australian
context is the stories and themeanings of fractal.
So you can listen to it, youcan read through it and you can
take it at the literal level.
You can listen to it and takeit at the metaphorical level,
you can listen to it and take itat the spiritual level, and

(47:12):
then it just keeps gettingdeeper and deeper and deeper,
depending on how you interpretit, given the framing or the
teacher or the, the, the medium,like it.
Just it constantly is changingand it sounds like what you're
expressing.
There is kind of similar here.
It's like you're gonna, you'regonna be able to offer and meet

(47:33):
people where they're at and andtry and find a way to, I guess,
embed this, depending on whatlevel of developmental journey
both people and the organizationare at.
Is that like a?

Speaker 2 (47:45):
Yeah, that's a good way to to situate it because,
you know, acknowledging that,like you know, we're all diverse
, we've all come from differentbackgrounds, we've all got
different cognitive abilities,we've all got different
interests and curiosities andquestions that we might ask,
some people want to dive intothe detail and, naturally,
curious, they're like oh yeah,wow, okay, I got this at the
service level, the, you know,the surface level, great, like,

(48:07):
give them an opportunity to gomore, to go on a journey to, to
kind of dive down Wombat holesand come out like a new.
And that's important because,you like, I think, naturally
there's, there's an innatecuriosity that he, like we, we
learn, we people love learning,we're just not provided with the
context to learn in ways thattap into our innate curiosities.

(48:29):
You know, and again, noteveryone's gonna want to delve
into Wombat holes.
Yeah, wombat holes, right, andsometimes just don't have the
time.
Right, there's a, there's akind of utilitarian aspect to
this that's quite important,right, we don't have the time to
kind of, you know, it's like,you know we're having this
discussion the other night,right, like, survival first,
science second.
Right, like, if you don't havethe, if you're worried about,

(48:51):
like, your income, and you know,I don't know, meeting the needs
of your family or what have youright?
You don't have time to sit downand spend three hours engaging
in deep philosophical inquiry.
That's just not.
But that's also a culturalthing.
Referring to indigenous people,like deeply, as part of their
interactions and rituals andstuff, wasn't.

(49:11):
You know, it's the storytellingand you can go at different
layers.
There's these different levels,these fractal patterns.
How deep you want to go isdependent on that context or the
time or the story.
Having the yarn around thecampfire and we've got this
concept of getting around thecampfire.

(49:33):
We use elemental ethics as likeair and earth and fire and
water, and these representdifferent skills and skill sets
that are relevant for teams inbuilding technology.
And we come from a backgroundin building tech like where

(49:53):
we're deeply practical but we'vegot a reasonably solid
philosophical background and setof experiences that help us to
abstract away some of thatdeeper complexity and kind of
surface it in a way that'sactually meaningful to people.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
Like kind of through like a miso-poetic framework,
yeah absolutely.

Speaker 3 (50:15):
Why don't we dive into that a little bit further?
So our sort of like collectivephilosophy gave rise to smiles,
right.
So our smile sort of gives rise, to some extent, to elemental
ethics.
Elemental ethics in practice issort of like embodied,
operationalised, if you will,through ethos and the suite of
products that are integratedinto everyday tools.

(50:35):
Let's talk a little bit aboutthat stack and how that operates
at different levels of thesystem in order to hopefully and
very positively contribute todifferent conditions from which
we build thesesocio-technologies that
contribute to human andplanetary flourishing.
Yeah, it's a lot to unpackthere.

(50:57):
Easy question.
I'll give you 31 seconds, gofor it.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
I mean, firstly, there's always this framing
problem that we come becauseit's not like a linear process
but for the purposes of theconversation here, let's try and
make it as kind of layered andlinear in this kind of vertical
stack as possible, becausethere's an emergence, like one
of our principles that we've gotis like playfulness and

(51:24):
following our curiosity andletting things emerge through a
process, and that, like dealingwith ambiguity, is also in this
kind of co-design principles onour website.
Following through on these,like dealing with ambiguity is
hard, sitting with ambiguity ishard, but actually that tension

(51:44):
and discomfort can actuallybring about a whole bunch of
things.

Speaker 3 (51:47):
You've got to trust in the wisdom of emergence to
some extent.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
And I think, especially if you take it in the
context of serious play,because that makes it almost
like an antidote to thevolatility, uncertainty and
ambiguity that you're surroundedby.
And you see this even in likethis is strange, I guess, loop
out.
But even in like warfare, or ifpeople in context like

(52:11):
especially I know the Britishthey'd always crack jokes about
this, that and the other, andyou always hear this in the
stories about like in thetrenches, it would just be
making jokes about the contextand the situation and the
setting, and I feel like it'salmost like a natural
evolutionary response for humansto do that.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
But because our context is like well, you can't
make jokes about that or youcan't be playful in this
situation, it's too serious andyou're like that's why we yeah,
I mean those beautiful paradoxesthat we face and it's core to,
I guess, how we approach stuff,because we acknowledge the

(52:51):
benefits of serious play and howthat just activates different
areas of our cognition that arereally helpful for innovation
and enabling that emergence.
Because, like you know, smilesis emerged actually more out of
a reflection on.
You know it was probably, youknow it was there as a something

(53:14):
that was influencing us andI'll kind of, I guess, try and
explain that as thisfoundational layer.
We so in our R&D process wemoved from like traditional
courseware type stuff to muchmore social and organic ways of

(53:36):
exploring challenges and we useda framework that came out of
Apple classrooms of tomorrow,today program, which has
actually been running since the1970s, but the second version of
that was run in the earlynoughties or came out of that
was called challenge-basedlearning.

(53:56):
We took that and you know andwe've got a background in
instructional design andlearning experience design and
you know building curriculumsthere's, you know there's a
richness in diversity of ourskill set knowledge that we've
drawn upon.
So we took that and we lookedat the literature and how it's

(54:21):
been used and you know it's gotthis great kind of mapping to
the, actually the way that webuild technologies.
Well, it's like start with thisbig idea, let's call it tech
ethics.
Let's explore that, let's kindof make sense of what that means
, you know, and then you kind ofinvestigate it, you dive in,

(54:45):
you know.
So it's like, oh, we've gotthis big I don't know this
problem, this feature that wewant to develop.
Oh great, let's actuallyexplore it from lots of
different angles and startdefining it.
Oh great, let's actuallypractice it like and actually
put, like, put it intoimplementation, but reflect on
the process.
So we took this, we took this,this learning model, to, you

(55:06):
know, and we ran a pilot programin March last year using this
model.
But to bring it to life, we,you know, we actually drew on
inspiration from serious playand serious gaming and thought,

(55:26):
okay, forget, like gamemechanics and things like that.
A lot of it was about like,let's, how do we create some
epic meaning Like, how do wehave stories that drive this and
what we?
One of the things that we'dlearned through a lot of our
experiences, like the, creatinga bit of separation between the

(55:47):
seriousness and the playful bycreating the space, the story
space, for that is always reallyhelpful.
It enables people to actuallydeal with ambiguity much more
easily than if you deal withserious stuff where they're
prefrontal cortex and defaultmode.
Networks like actually doeslike control and draw on this

(56:08):
existing mental models.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
That's such an important sorry to kick you off
there, but that's such animportant framing.
Like you see this a lot in likeIan McGillchrist's work about
the left and right hemispheresand about creativity and it's
you need to have that defaultmode network interrelated and
interconnected and inconversation and dialogue with
the executive functioning, andso much of our society is

(56:33):
focusing on the executive ratherthan the default mode, sort of,
I guess you could say, themaster versus emissary, if
you're going to use his language.
And it's really fascinatingthinking about yeah, how do you
create contexts where you canhave more coherence between the
two brain regions so that youcan come up with more novel

(56:55):
solutions that aren't justbounded by one way of looking at
a context?

Speaker 2 (57:00):
Yeah, it's like you know, integrative kind of lens
that you're trying to put onthings and like what.
So, getting, I guess, to thepoint here, what we did is we
created this representation of alearning world, like this world
that you explore, and we calledit the archipelago, and these

(57:20):
places and spaces, we hadstories related to them.
So there was Zoria and Zoria'sSlovenian and Slavic mythology
and one of our co-foundersearlier she's from Slovenia.
She's brilliant, love her to bein this conversation, but she's

(57:41):
in Slovenia.
Timezone definitely didn't workfor her, and you know.
And then there was this willthe land and this is a place of
exploration and research and andpracticalia, which is this
place of practicalimplementation and co design and
sage aisle, right.
So we created this fictionalworld and and that resonated

(58:02):
with people, like it enabledthis different approach to
learning and smiles kind oflater defined it was this, this
kind of kind of observation,essentially that once we started
anchoring like, firstly, to aphysical space, right, you did
like an, even coming up with thestuff, you dealing with logical

(58:23):
inconsistencies that you needto dress, and it's like you
actually have to deal withphysics, yeah, actually have to
deal with what is a naturalsystem, what's going to make
sense to people?
You know, and this kind of outof this process emerged all this
, this, this way of you know,this language system, like this

(58:45):
metaphors and stories, and youknow, and inherently we come
from a place of acknowledging adeep sense of relation to the
natural world.
So that's infused in ourapproach.
Absolutely, it's not.
It's not like oh yeah, we, weimposed it was actually caught

(59:06):
to our being, but smiles wasthen defined as like what is
this thing?
And this came, you know,through me.
You know it's sitting inreflection drinking some
mushroom tea, but, you know,maybe that helped.
We'll just attribute this to tothe line fungus.
This is just like, and you knowit's like, what is this thing?

(59:33):
Is these patterns that areemerging, that have been
emerging in our work, like, canwe, can we like, name it right,
give it, give it?
You know, because when you namesomething, you kind of give it
this, you give it life, you know, and that's kind of core to the
, the, the threat, the termitself, because we see languages

(59:55):
, symbion, we see languages,this almost it's, it's got its
own life in its use andrelationship to us as a
technology, is one of our firsttechnologies, as as a species,
you know.
But it's also, you know, it'sgot this mimetic nature, you
know, and kind of like, goingback to the, the idea is, you

(01:00:19):
know, kind of ideas, words,concepts, framings as these
having this mimetic nature thatactually evolve over time
through usage, and the fitnessof the meme is dependent on
context, you know.
So it's like symbion, symbion,mimetic, interwoven, because
it's interwoven in the way thatthis language comes about in the

(01:00:44):
system and it's aboutembodiment.
It's embodied firstly in thenatural metaphors and language
that we're using.
So it kind of creates thisexperience that, like people,
people can much more readily getsomething that is tangible,
that they've directlyexperienced, and there's almost

(01:01:05):
like a sense, a basic sense ofthe complexity of this is when
we use that natural metaphors,you know, so that this acronym
kind of emerged, that throughthe, through the process
essentially of going what isthis?
What is what's happening here?
Yeah, sure, thank you, thankyou, fungus, for supporting me

(01:01:27):
in that process.
What was the OS system system?
It's a symbion, mimetic,interwoven language embodiment
system.
So it's a way to embody thislanguage that helps us to
recognize our the symbioticrelationship between humans,
technology and the natural world, but also the symbiotic

(01:01:49):
relationships that play outwithin organizations, within our
teams and these environments.
So that that kind of that wasin elemental ethics already.
We just kind of managed to finda way to kind of name it and
start actually going.
Yeah, there's all these thingsthat we're actually drawing upon
, like from cognitivelinguistics and cognitive

(01:02:10):
sciences to cultural theory, andlike there's a written, there
was a richness that actuallycame and emerged through us
going yes, this, this is a thing, and actually that accelerated
a whole bunch of our process.
As soon as we were able to goyeah, this is a thing, it was we
were able to kind of see itright and language has that role

(01:02:32):
, like as soon as you got thelanguage to explain something,
you can start.
It works with you in adifferent way.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
It's like making the unconscious conscious and then,
from knowing it's conscious, youcan work with that as you can.
You have a, it's got a position, you can understand where it is
, you can triangulate it, youcan locate and then work with.
Yeah, that's super exciting.
I had no idea.
I was in my mind.
I'm like which mother vodkacame first?

(01:03:01):
The smile, elemental ethics.
So so from that, in thatcontext, the smiles emerge from
elemental ethics, Like to someextent like.

Speaker 3 (01:03:12):
I think smiles emerge from this process of exploring,
building, experimenting andinteracting with all different
folks throughout the pilot andyou know it builds on decades of
our work prior.
But and this is to Matt's pointthat there isn't a clear

(01:03:33):
linearity here, becauseelemental ethics to some extent
helped give birth to smiles.
Smiles also helped clarify andgive you know, like, give
rebirth to elemental ethics.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
And there's there's kind of feedback loops between
them, between them all right,and I think there's like and
that's helpful for us, even justin that framing, because we see
this thing as living, like it,you know, and that's that in and
of itself is, is something thatwe want to bring to life in how
this applies in solving theproblem that we're very
passionate of falling in lovewith around the ethical

(01:04:08):
intention to action gaps.
So elemental ethics is is thisembodiment of smiles.
Essentially, that works withthese four elements, with with
air representing communication,collaboration.
It's like you breathe, you knowit's the flow of air through

(01:04:29):
our processes when we're tryingto actually communicate, build
shared understanding, createpsychological safety so that we
can talk and express and worktowards shared objectives.
Like we need that.
Those skills are essential fordeveloping technologies in a
responsible way, you know.
And then we've got earth, andearth represents research and
exploration.

(01:04:49):
And like to do you need to drawon diverse perspectives, not
just internally but externally.
Talk to the stakeholders inthat are going to be impacted by
decisions, incorporate, youknow, their views into the
process.
Look at you know what's beendone in the past.
You know that's just good.
You know, you say that that'sjust good, like product design,
and, but it's not, it's not done, you know.

(01:05:12):
So we've got these elementsfires, technology and practice.
Water is pause and reflectionand you know, and these are
represented in the archipelagoas well.
Like you know, there's NPCs andlike these, you know, great
vision stuff, but you know,pragmatically, building the tech
, it's, you know, start, youknow, think big, build tiny,
which is another one of our kindof principles, you know.

(01:05:36):
So you've got this.
This is about balancing theseelements.
If you've got too much fire andyou're too much focused on the
tech and the practice and build,build, build, build.
This is the move fast, breakthings, mindset right.

Speaker 3 (01:05:47):
Leads to incessant fire fighting.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
Or you have a wildfire it breaks out of
control and burns it down.
That's what I would love todouble click on that.
So the positioning of tech asfire is a really interesting
sort of thing.
So, rather than like earth,where you're like, oh, this is
the grounding of that, you'vechosen fire, do you want to
double click on that or unpackthat?

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Yeah, I mean, firstly , you know fire as a, as a
metaphor, like you know, yeah,literally just say it's like you
know, first, technology, youknow, is discovered in that
sense because fire alwaysexisted before, before humans,
in terms of a chemical reaction,but it represents warmth and

(01:06:37):
lights and but alsoextraordinary power and danger,
and it's like it's thisfascinating thing and when we
think about fire as, as astechnology in our practice and
interaction with technology, itis this kind of magical thing
you know, like you can likerelate to, like yeah, wow, I'm

(01:06:59):
playing with fire, like I'mplaying with generative AI, and
it's like, oh, great, you know,and you know so the choice of
these, these things, and likehow that emerges, and like just
like, oh, yeah, going, oh, thismakes logical sense, which is to
do that.
It emerged through a wholebunch of our process and talking
to people and figuring out whatmeans work.

Speaker 1 (01:07:19):
I think it's a beautiful, beautiful summation
and also it intentionally or notit reminds me a lot of the
Emerald podcast that came outrecently, the AI podcast that he
brought out.
Thank you so much for bringingthat up, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:07:35):
So what's really interesting there is.
So when, when we listen to theEmerald podcast and then I
shared it with a bunch of folks,matt and Ali are included we're
all like he's talking aboutwhat we're doing 100%.
This is uncanny.
And then center for humane take.
And we were just, you know, ona call with them earlier today.

(01:07:55):
You know they ran a sessionrecently, like a virtual session
with the host of that podcastand it's, it's, it's.
You know, the embers aren't likesmoldering, like that, like
they're, they're alive and welland there are folks gathering
around the campfire right now inthe tech community and so what

(01:08:17):
it's what it, what it feels tous like we're doing, is we are
breathing mythopoetic life, touse that framing, if you will,
into this and what's more thanjust the, the, the power, the
richness, the connectedness, theembodiment of the narrative, we

(01:08:39):
are making that deeplypractical and relevant to the
folks who are connecting to it.
So it's kind of like, if youlisten to the Emerald podcast
and you go, how do you?
I haven't thought about it thatway before.
That is amazing.
I really connect with that.
What do I do now?
I think we have an incredibleanswer to that, or at least have
begun answering that throughagain collectively, decades of

(01:09:04):
work, but more concretely inthis context, the last three
years and and everything that'scome out of that.
So to some extent I think we'reunsurprised that that podcast
has been so popular, but inother ways it's kind of
surprising because it's so faroutside the normal distribution.
It's crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:09:24):
I mean for context, for those who don't know, the
Emerald is a podcast from JoshuaSchrey.
I don't actually know how topronounce your name, josh, I
hope that's right.
So it's exploring like a mythstory and imagination through a
mythic lens.
So very interesting podcast.
I might have to pause here andtake a leak.

(01:09:45):
How's everyone else going?
Cool with the mission?
I could easily do that too.
Yeah, let's, let's bathroombreak, bathroom break, nice.

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
Did you send out that email yet?

Speaker 1 (01:10:04):
Sitting in my house.
I'm sending it out with a.
There's like a.
We were trialling doing like aweekly update, so it's that.
And having to put our prices upbecause CPI inflation, all the

(01:10:24):
fun things We've tried.
We've tried to put it off forthe last like two years, but it
gets to a point where it's likeI can't live on minimum wage, so
we're going to have to passthat on, yeah, which kind of
sucks a bit.
I would suggest moving theseslightly closer so that you
don't have to lean in as much.
Oh yeah, it's pretty.

(01:10:47):
They're pretty, they're prettychills.
They can, they can take a bitof a beating.
I feel like I'm looking a hot,like a whole lot of phallic
stuff right now, but phallic Didwe capture that on video Cause.

Speaker 3 (01:11:03):
That's epic.

Speaker 1 (01:11:04):
Yeah, unfortunately, that that actually is there.
I didn't think about that, tobe honest.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
So much phallic in tech, let's start there.

Speaker 1 (01:11:12):
That's, I mean that's .
That's an interesting concept.

Speaker 3 (01:11:16):
Maybe let's arrive there rather than just randomly
start in there.
So let's like, let's see wherewe yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
Phallic.
So I believe we're now backfrom our break, are you sure?
No absolutely not.
No, no, no, I have no idea.
So I, I, I pushed, pushed pausewhen we were just talking about
the emerald podcast and how itrelates to your work.

(01:11:42):
Feel free to jump back intothat.

Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
Maybe something I'll say really quickly and then I'll
hand to Matt, cause it might beworth him telling a little bit
of a story about how some of histime presenting at intersect,
which is kind of like thepreeminent financial technology
fintech conference here inAustralia.
So one of the things that'sbeen really interesting with the
language system and elementalethics as a framework is that

(01:12:13):
when we utilize this framingthis, the language system, when,
when, when we, when we embodysmiles in our interactions, the
ease and seamlessness with whichfolks pick it up and naturally,

(01:12:35):
just as part of the interactionor conversational dynamic, play
it back to us.
So I guess thus far has justbeen like overwhelming, and I
think, matt, you know some ofwhat happened yesterday is a
really great way to describethat using a use case or like a
real life, lived example.

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):
Yeah, and I guess, like again, this is kind of like
languages, like this livingthing you know part of how we
communicate as a species, thatlike it.
It, you know you introduce aword to help convey something
and give us some communicativeintent in its use and you know

(01:13:21):
the receiver, you know it's kindof it's in the mind and it's in
the working memory and it kindof gets, it gets used.
But if it's kind of sticky asthis kind of meme that's got
this contextual fitness for oneof you know like to use that
framing around medics, yeah, itgets used, you know.
So you know, yesterday atIntersect and I was doing this

(01:13:45):
talk as part of the consumerdata right, which is like an
area of economic kind ofcompetition technology reform
that's been going for severalyears but interacting with
people during the day and justcatching up with people on you
know what we're doing at Tethics, because I was in a role from a

(01:14:09):
policy perspective in that areafor the past year that I've
kind of recently stepped awayfrom updating them on.
You know, and using thesemetaphors immediately in some of
these conversations people likethey get it, you know, and it's

(01:14:29):
referring to.
You know talking aboutelemental ethics and like
playing with fire and likenaturally the terms start being
used back in the conversation.
And that's like we know this,like that's core to why we're
doing it in this way.
You know, and part of theunderlying theoretical grounding

(01:14:56):
, like incognitive linguistics,is called conceptual metaphor
theory and conceptual blendingand this is, you know, the
blending of words and you've gotlike a source.
Source for us is like nature.
You know, target is likebusiness acumen and technology
ethics.
You know, and you create thisconceptual mapping and that,

(01:15:22):
like it works, it sticks right.
This is how we use language.
Most language is metaphorical,particularly when we're dealing
with abstract concepts, so whenwe relate it to something that's
concrete and physical.
You know, and there's variouslike arguments and in the
cognitive sciences around theconcreteness of terms and
abstract versus concrete.

(01:15:42):
And you know we're not going todelve into all the academic
literature debating all thisstuff, but you know there's a
high, there's a big body ofevidence to demonstrate that
this stuff works.
And another example, like Iguess from a workshop that we
ran around generative AI.

(01:16:03):
And you know, generative AI islike it's this fire, it's like
stolen from the gods, it's likewe're attracted to its warmth
and its power but also cautiousof its like destructive nature.
You know that we're holdingthis in our hands and we use
this metaphor in the workshopwith, you know, and exploring

(01:16:25):
lots of different things, butwhen we got to the kind of
interaction activities and thediscussion, like people using
the language, right so it's.
It has this utility in helpingpeople to understand stuff, but
it also creates a new frame ofreference for people and that's
a critical focal point for usbecause we're trying to actually

(01:16:46):
break down existing mentalmodels that people have and if
you operate at that languagelevel, it becomes much easier.
You know, and in thatparticular workshop setting, it
was, you know, people talkingabout, like firefighters do we
need now firefighters?
And they made the conceptual,they did the conceptual,

(01:17:08):
blending themselves with themetaphor, talking about
regulators as firefighters, youknow.
So there's this, there's thisorganic process to language
that's like really interesting.
You know, there's a lot ofreally solid evidence to say
this is like something thatworks and you know, relating

(01:17:33):
this back to the Emeraldspodcast, right like.
There's also these underlyingthings that you know culturally
through lots of differentexposure points, through media
storytelling.
You know mythology and fairytales as kids, like.
There's these things that, like, like, resonate with our being

(01:17:55):
in terms of stories, you know,and every.
There's cultural nuance tothese things, of course, because
, like you know, indigenouscultures have got different
mythologies and methods oftelling story.
That's like, you know.
Ironically, you know, thewestern scientific mind will
realize oh holy shit, they'vebeen actually being kind of
right all along.

(01:18:17):
It's the same damn thing thatwe're finding out now.
Oh my God, you know.
So there's this fascinatingpart of using language in this
way that, for us, is actuallyoperating and you know, nathan,
you know, referring to this,this, these layers of the

(01:18:38):
broader system where thelanguage smiles is operating at
this, this kind of values,beliefs and also the practices,
because language is something weuse as well and that has these
sometimes very imperceptibleresults.
Ultimately, we've got to figureout how to measure this stuff

(01:19:00):
and like keep track of it and,you know, find the right quality
of quantitative data, kind ofto, you know, validate, you know
test our hypotheses andassumptions and things like that
.
But yeah, it's reallyfascinating.
The Emerald podcast is, just,like you know, really powerful
recognition that even the deeper, mythical ways of telling

(01:19:24):
stories like that resonates withpeople, and there's probably
lots of reasons for why.
At this point in time, that isattractive Because the current
mindsets that we're using tokind of actually understand,
like what is this role of us?
And this new tech likegenerative AI, large language

(01:19:45):
models we're lacking thelanguage to be able to really
relate to it and understand itand whenever you elect a
language from something, youtend to go to the mythopoetic,
yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:19:56):
ways of relating and talking about something.

Speaker 2 (01:19:59):
Metaphor, allegory, simile.
You know deeper stories thatjust like they tap into, you
know that, that part of ourbeing, that part of on, you know
ways of trying to understandand make sense that like a
pretty ancient fish.

Speaker 1 (01:20:16):
I mean, I would, I would play with this, I guess I
would say and say that even withthem, science as a concept
somewhat has become an ism inits own right and it is like
there is a religiosity.

Speaker 3 (01:20:32):
Oh, we're going here.

Speaker 1 (01:20:35):
A fervor and say everything, which is just
fascinating.
So it does like it doesn't?
There's always going to bereligion, even when you remove
religion.
The religion of atheism is areligion, you know what I mean.
Like even the religion of noreligion is really like.
So it's fascinating to thinkabout how it's always going to

(01:20:57):
be there and rather thaneradicate and then just have it
manifest in some unconscious wayin which we relate to the thing
.
It's like calling it out andgoing, this is really useful
framework for making sense ofthings.
How do we work with this in agenerative way, consciously
acknowledging how it will haveiterative effects on us and then

(01:21:17):
, knowing that, going out withintention into the world with it
?

Speaker 3 (01:21:23):
There's a couple of things to pick up on there I
wanted to just touch on reallyquickly before we get into kind
of like the metaphysics,philosophy of science and stuff.
Who knows where that's going toend up.
You know, wittgenstein said thelimits of my language are the
limits of my world.
I actually think the qualitiesof my language are the qualities
of my world.
Like I think it's that slightlydifferent framing can be quite

(01:21:43):
powerful.
I just want to leave that shitin the air for a moment.
Like I deal with this becausewe're building this thing
ourselves.
We will actually go to themarket for funding sometime soon
.
So if you're interested infunding something like this, hit
us up y'all.
So we do other stuff.
We have a diverse portfolio ofinterests.

(01:22:04):
Sam alluded earlier to having aphilosopher in residence and
that is now yours truly.
But like so there's lots ofthings that we're doing.
One of the challenges that Ideal with a lot in my work is
working on like really practical, like embedded approaches to
ethics within like a very largeorganization.

(01:22:25):
Like how do we, how do we bringthese value systems to life in
a meaningful way?
And you know, a lot of thatdraws on like a sort of
landscape of moral theories, orformally framed as, like, a
pluralistic approach to moraltheory.
One of the things that's toughfor me, though, is folks have
these value systems, and theydon't really know where they
come from.

(01:22:46):
So when we're trying toproductively work with tension,
as in why does one particularparty, you know, to this
particular dialogue, prioritizeone value system over another,
we necessarily have to get intometaphysics.

(01:23:06):
Now, there are many ways inwhich you could do that, from
the most esoteric to somethingthat's actually like, super
accessible, right, and I thinkthat's something that like has,
I think, significantsocio-cultural implications.
We have these axiological,ontological and epistemological

(01:23:31):
beliefs about what is what canbe known, about what is what we
ought to value, and often thesesort of remain in the unknown
unknowns, and there are manyphilosophers in it.

(01:23:52):
There's been a resurgence ofmetaphysics over the last two to
three decades because it verymuch fell out of flavor, and I
would argue that there is a hugeamount of power to scientists
and science communicators andthose that are interacting with

(01:24:12):
different scientific disciplinesor fields to also spend some
time trying to healthily andhumbly relate to metaphysics,
because there are lots of folksthat Bjorn Ekberg, for instance,

(01:24:33):
does a really good job of this,describing the relationship
between cosmology andmetaphysics.
Now, that makes some scientistsvery, very uncomfortable, but I
think he makes some verycompelling arguments.
So like, yeah, not that we haveto necessarily get into
scientism per se, but I thinkthere is an opportunity for us

(01:24:59):
to open ourselves up todifferent ways of knowing, being
, seeing, thinking, doing,feeling, et cetera, drawing from
these diverse perspectives.
And we recently communicatedour philosophy, what grounds our
philosophy, and I think it's afairly interesting and concise

(01:25:19):
piece, and you would talk aboutthis sort of oscillation, this
dance between critical realismand metamodernism.
These are just these labels andthese build upon theories that
have developed as a result of orin response to other theories
and their strengths andweaknesses, based on different
orientations or value systems.

(01:25:40):
And we recognize again that themap there is not the territory,
but we're still interactingwith that stuff and I think it's
really important.
So we can be scientific whilstbeing somewhat mystical or
mythological.
We can be mythological whilstbeing deeply philosophical.
You know, these things don'thave to be direct contradictions
.

Speaker 1 (01:26:00):
They can in fact exist healthily in relation to
one another To an extent theyactually are needed to enhance
one another and if we actuallywant to progress further than
the point at which we havecurrently got to, there is going
to have to be this integrativeapproach where you transcend and
include, which I guess harkensback to that sort of

(01:26:23):
metamodernism call that you justsort of made there of the,
rather than throwing the babyout with the bathwater.
When we look at modernism andpostmodernism, it's like how do
we take the postmodern critiquewith the modern progress
narrative and you know all ofthat sort of stuff, and how do
we find, you know, sit with thetension of that and then Put
that shit into?

Speaker 3 (01:26:42):
the Vitamix.

Speaker 1 (01:26:43):
Yeah, Right and just yeah, and then-.

Speaker 3 (01:26:46):
Drink it all up.

Speaker 1 (01:26:47):
Exactly bring out like a really really nice thick
shake, yeah, Of-.

Speaker 3 (01:26:52):
With some dried mushrooms, of course.
Yeah, yeah, shhh.

Speaker 1 (01:26:56):
But it's no, it's an interesting space.
So I mean, did you want to?
Did either of you want todouble click on that a bit
further?

Speaker 3 (01:27:05):
That could be an Alice in Wonderland type on that
whole that would be challengingto come back to.

Speaker 2 (01:27:10):
I think it's important to just, yeah, just
reinforce that, creating thespace for both ends and
acknowledging the unfixed natureof a position.
You know, that's kind ofpostmodern, but it's also like

(01:27:32):
we're dealing with, like, as yousaid, like you know, the
modernity, the narrative,progress and these grand
narratives and you know, andthat's like they're helpful for
some ways of knowing andunderstanding, but also
concentrating yeah like you know, kind of going okay, well,

(01:27:53):
there's no kind of fixed trutharound this and these narratives
have created all these problemsfor us and acknowledging those
at the same time, but enablingthat tension to actually to be a
force of creation and a forceof learning, you know, is quite

(01:28:14):
powerful.
And again, like coming back tolike us going, we have to name
this, like you know, draw theline in the sand, put ourselves
in the box.
However you want to kind offrame it in that sense is that,
you know, it's like you know,personally, I got diagnosed with

(01:28:37):
bipolar when I was 19 and Ikind of like the label itself
was like something I kind ofstruggled with.
And when you, you know, and tosome degree it was helpful, you
know, it's like well, I've gotthis thing that I can now play
with and go, I've named it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:56):
What are the enabling constraints of this thing?
Yeah, being boundaryless andnebulous.
It's like, okay, great, let'swork with yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:29:05):
Exactly right.
And you know you name an object,you name a thing, you kind of
give it like, you animate it.
It becomes something that canbe worked with in your conscious
mind much more readily than ifit's like there's that that's
over there, like that, or I'mexperiencing all these things.

(01:29:27):
Now I can put it in a containerand deal with it.
It's like a visualizationprocess is even you know, and
it's a bit of a tangent, butlike therapy sessions where
you're, you know, you put yourexperiences, your emotions, your
feeling, you know, and youmight kind of visualize it like
putting the stuff into a box, orlike it's that chair over there

(01:29:51):
sitting across from me, andthey like even that distance,
like sure, all this stuff isentangled and it's like you know
, kind of wave particledualities and again, when we
create that separation, itenables us to kind of explore
and that's helpful in so manydifferent ways for us and we

(01:30:15):
don't actively try and use thisunderstanding of how we kind of
work cognitively to support usin like improving ourselves,
learning to just be withourselves.
It's an, you know, underexploredarea.

(01:30:37):
It's definitely definitelyuseful.

Speaker 1 (01:30:39):
Like, just speaking from personal experience, that's
actually what you described asalso a practice in
metameditation.
So if you can then imagine andposition someone opposite you
that you love, or you startmaybe with a puppy, something
which you can just, there's nocomplicated feelings and you
just manifest love for thatthing, and then you switch it in

(01:31:02):
for someone that you, you know,maybe a parent or someone that
you are somewhat antagonistic to, but then still share that love
with them.
And then you, you know, flip itand you put yourself there and
then start trying to expressthat to yourself and, my gosh,
like I'd realized that I'd neveractually sent myself goodwill
or love ever.
And I've.
And I realized this in thismoment of first practicing

(01:31:25):
metameditation and actually,like, teared up a bit, I'm like,
oh, wow, cool, like, so I guesswhat I'm the reason why I'm
saying that is I have directfelt experience of what you're
sort of referring to, where youcan do these.
I don't know, it's almost likemagical tricks with
phenomenology of the interiorsciences and go, you know, just

(01:31:47):
put that there for a minute andyou're like, oh, gosh, okay, and
sometimes, yeah, there's a lotof power there which, for the
most part, we're just coming tothrough cognitive science and
these other ways of relating,but are very, very healthily
developed in wisdom, traditionslike Taoism, confucianism,
buddhism, all of the, a lot ofthe Eastern stuff.

(01:32:10):
I mean there was actually quitea lot in the West before we
kind of destroyed it all.

Speaker 2 (01:32:17):
But yeah, you hear that Well, dominant kind of
preferences or preferences forparticular ways of being knowing
.
You know we're popularized andthey become.
You know that it's hegemonicforce, the dominant force in

(01:32:40):
shaping the narrative.
You know, and I think that's aninteresting point there just
around, like we caricaturize theWestern viewers is something
that was absent of a lot ofthese things that were relevant
to wisdom.

Speaker 1 (01:32:58):
Have a look at the Celtic tradition.
Yeah, exactly, have a look atthe.

Speaker 2 (01:33:01):
Druids man, there's a deep history there that tends
to be, yeah, dismissed becauseof these caricaturizations.
That is helpful to kind of beaware of.
As much as that, you know, wekind of thought the Eastern,
Western, the North, the South,it's.
You know, we create them to beable, again, it's like we name

(01:33:26):
them, we create these simplisticrepresentations so that we, you
know, with our small monkeyminds, oh, it's bounded
rationality.

Speaker 1 (01:33:33):
It helps us easily function quickly rather than
have analysis paralysis.
So they're useful, right, it'sjust.
Everything can be useful in itsown way.
It's just understanding wherethe edges of that puzzle piece
that fit into the puzzle you'retrying to make with different
ways of looking at the world,and which piece to pick up and
use at any one time.

(01:33:54):
Well, lens is probably a bettermetaphor.
What do you think?
I feel like you're thinkingabout something over there.

Speaker 3 (01:34:00):
Well, I'm trying to be respectful of those who have
taken the time or invested thetime to tune into this
traversing of many beautiful andinteresting topics, and I
wanted to suggest that, althoughsometimes there's a beauty in
just leaving shit in the airjust like drop the mic and walk

(01:34:23):
off, I do think we shouldrespect the investment that's
been made, if people have gottenhere, and maybe just offer some
basic practical guidance.
So, if you're based out ofcollabs and you're trying to
explore how do we better animateour values, how do we live in
closer alignment to them, rightlike to the best of our ability,

(01:34:47):
what might that mean If I amworking in a cross-functional
product development team in thecontext of a digital product,
and so what are the types ofthings that I can take away from
this discussion and use to helpsort of animate my way of being
in that context of life?

Speaker 1 (01:35:06):
Sounds like a good way to wrap it up.

Speaker 3 (01:35:09):
Yeah, I do like a tight conclusion, definitely.

Speaker 2 (01:35:16):
Yeah, I guess the starting point for this, like
practical recommendations, Imean acknowledging that, like
following through closing thedelta, you know, and like really
grateful for theacknowledgement and context that
you shared, sam, just aroundthe materials that you're using
for kind of soundproofing, likeyou're dealing with your

(01:35:37):
constraints, like acknowledgethat this is challenging and,
particularly for businesses,that already there's this core
beliefs, there's things thatyou're like doing, like from a
kind of social entrepreneurshipperspective that that's powerful
but there's gonna be a gap.
And acknowledging that it'skind of a process you're gonna

(01:36:03):
work through.
So we've got the concept ofpledges.
You make these statements andcommitments that are pretty
concrete and bounded by timeproject feature.
What have you?
Or to whom?
It might be internal, it mightbe to your kind of end users,
stakeholders, customers, society, future generations can create

(01:36:27):
lots of different scopes there.
When you create those, you know, acknowledge that you might not
be able to follow through rightfor whatever reason budget time
, crap, we can't find a supplierright.
It's not binary, it's a reallyimportant point.

Speaker 3 (01:36:43):
Following through is an active living, breathing
process.
You know, and just to clarifywhere to where to principle see,
in lots of ethics frameworksthere is a purpose of teleology
that helps sort of animate someorganization's purpose for
existence.
There are values that which webelieve to be good and there are
principles, action-orientedstatements that encourages,

(01:37:06):
based on our values, to do thatwhich we believe to be right.
And pledges take it to anotherlevel and this comes from our
colleague, alia and hercolleagues work on responsible
tech and it's a wonderfulframework, you know, deeply
baked into the architecture ofTefix, and it encourages, rather

(01:37:27):
than this loose interpretationof principles, something that is
so hard to do Like.
We see this in so manydifferent organizations around
the world and we've had veryprivileged exposure to many
different types of organizationsacross jurisdictions,
industries, contexts, et cetera.
Pledges take things to that nextlevel.
They encourage you to likedeeply connect with one another,

(01:37:50):
collaborate towards describinglike what it is you really want
to animate in the world and thenshare in the process of
bringing that to life.
You know, and then you monitor,you assess, you may communicate
the progress that you're makingbecause you want to have
visibility of tangible progress.

(01:38:10):
You know you may communicatethat externally as part of like
a real embodied commitment tolike radical transparency, right
.
So there's so much that can bedone within an organizational
setting and that doesn't matter.
You could be a two-personstartup you really could or you
could be a global multinational.
Like many of the corporationsthat we've worked with

(01:38:32):
throughout our careers, you know, pledges are a way to
concretize, make tangible thetypically abstract, often
unrelatable, fairly disembodiedprinciples that many
organizations tend to overlyrely on and that, in part,
actively contribute to whatwe're referring to as the

(01:38:56):
ethical intent to action gap.

Speaker 1 (01:39:02):
So, for context, this the pledge is different to a
principle, is different to thevalues, is different to a vision
, is different to a vision.
So you're sort of saying it'san additional level that can be
added on to add a deeper contextto how you function as an

(01:39:22):
organization.

Speaker 3 (01:39:23):
Well, it can be.
You could call it a pledge ofprinciple.
What actually matters is thesubstance, right, and you know.
So the purpose, values andprinciples framework that we're
referring to there comes from abody of work Dr Matt Beard and
Dr Simon Longstaff from theEthics Center back in 2018, but
it's a common sort of framingand you know we argue all of

(01:39:45):
this type of stuff within theprofessional philosophy
community, even though moralityand ethics have somewhat of a
similar etymology, but obviouslycoming from different sort of
regions, cultures, et cetera.
You know we tend to drawdistinctions in many cases.
Other times we say no, no,they're basically the same thing
.
So there's lots of stuff aroundlanguage, lexical, semantics, et
cetera, but what we are sayinghere is, let's say, you have a

(01:40:11):
mission which could be likenedto a purpose, a reason for
existence, right, and that'scool.
And then you have values thathelp describe what you believe
to be good.
You know this is sort of youknow, formally drawing on
axiology or whatever it may be,but this could come from
anywhere.
Then you have principles, whichstart describing how do we

(01:40:36):
orient our actions based on whatwe value, right?
So these are sort of driven byverbs, if you will and should be
.
Sorry, yes, really important.
They're often not.
That is a really importantclarification.
They're often not, which is oneof the problems.
So can you just restructure thedescription of your principles

(01:40:59):
through a genuinely diverse,inclusive and highly
collaborative process and thentry and bring those to life
Totally?
That's totally valid.
But you could also take the workon pledges, and there's a very
distinct structure there andthat forces a concreteness, it
forces an action orientation.
It's bounded in sort of like asocio-technical reality, if you

(01:41:20):
think of it that way, asocio-cultural reality because
there are rituals that you bringto life, there are monitoring
frameworks that encourage you tokind of like check in, assess
progress.
You relate the pledges to therituals, to the actions, to the
things that you're actuallydeveloping, to other sort of
metrics or matrices or valuesystems that you're working with

(01:41:42):
.
So yeah, again, there's lots toit.
So what's the domain for pledgeworks?
What is the actual domain that?
So?

Speaker 2 (01:41:51):
responsibletechwork Work.
Yeah, so that's a creativecommons framework.
It's a kind of community-basedproject that Alia started with
one of her partners, daniel, andpledge works.

(01:42:11):
Is this kind of framework thatthey developed to really, as
Nathan said, animate somethingin a practical sense, to make,
like, here's a pledge, it's acommitment that you're
expressing with veryaction-oriented language that

(01:42:32):
can be bound, monitored like,reflected upon and, quite
honestly, much more practical,particularly for people that are
focused on building, buildingstuff.

Speaker 1 (01:42:44):
Yeah, no, that sounds fascinating.
I mean, I know we've goteverything but the pledge.
So it's fascinating to hearthis and I guess, potentially,
maybe that's even something thatwe can explore Absolutely With
the ethics team.
It's like, okay, well, giventhis is our mission, vision,
values and principles, what doyou think are some logical

(01:43:07):
pledges that can come from this?
From our point of view, that'sjust like a fascinating thing to
have anyway, because whenyou're trying to measure impact
and regeneration and all ofthese things that are, so much
of our work is qualitative andeveryone loves numbers, so it is

(01:43:28):
an interesting space.
So I'll definitely double-clickon that another time.

Speaker 3 (01:43:35):
Just a super quick note on the measurement stuff.
We're certainly not againstmeasurement.
We have research collaborationswith leading organizations.
It's really important.
It's an important way ofknowing, assessing progress,
contributing to the world,speaking the predominant
language of the culture fromwhich we largely emerged today.

(01:43:59):
But a quick note here that Ithink is important we have this
overwhelming bias and propensitytowards counting everything,
and what I would encourage, evenin that specific context of
your pledges, is that youconsider both qualitative and

(01:44:20):
quantitative data acrossattitudinal and behavioral
dimensions.
It gives you a fuller picture ofnot just what's going on, but
why might that be going on andhow does it make people feel?
How does it make you feel so,just that slight sort of
evolution in terms oforientation.
It's not just what we can count, it's qualitative and

(01:44:44):
quantitative data acrossattitudinal and behavioral
dimensions, and a lot of folksthat do user research are
familiar with that, because thatframing is quite popular and
was communicated by theNielsen-Norman group, nng, back
in 2014 off the back of TimRower Christian Rower's work

(01:45:08):
describing the landscape of userresearch methods.
It's really helpful because itbasically says you're in this
particular context, there's somestuff that you don't know.
What are the questions thatyou're trying to ask as a result
of what you're trying to answer.
Okay, here's how to direct yourfocus, and so I think, if you
combine that orientation withpledges as these concrete

(01:45:28):
commitments towards doing whatyou believe to be most good and
most right, you are in a reallygreat place, but a really
practical place to start movingcloser towards the future that
you envisage as a result of thecontributions you make in your
work or everyday life.

Speaker 1 (01:45:48):
Right, so Would the pledges be.

Speaker 3 (01:45:52):
I wanted to drop the mic there.

Speaker 1 (01:45:55):
We can.
We can.
If you want, we can actuallydrop the mic there.
It was not going to be anythingcrazy important.
It was probably just me wantingto keep double-clicking on that
at Infinem.
So yeah, is there any otherpoints that we might want to
mention before we wrap up?
Maybe like where can peoplefind you?

Speaker 3 (01:46:16):
What are you guys?
I'm not giving away my homeaddress just yet.
That's a little assumptive.
So tefixco, t-e-t-h-i-xco, mattand Alia have their own blogs.
They publish really awesomecontent there as well.
You can find us on LinkedIn,and you know we're trying to be.

(01:46:40):
You know we have this reallyclear-stated intention to be
amongst it and contribute tothese conversations.
So I think you will see agreater volume and density of
content from us over the comingweeks and months, and we have
some incredibly excitingprojects An upcoming pilot with

(01:47:04):
a bunch of organizations,commercial and research context,
lots of different types ofcontent.
Some of them may be in a sortof like harder form, like that
Won't give away too much, butyeah, so check us out on
LinkedIn.
Head to tefixco.
If you've got comments,questions, queries, if you want
to collaborate, we will welcomeyou with open arms and big hug

(01:47:25):
if you're into that sort ofthing.

Speaker 2 (01:47:29):
Yeah, I'd drop a mic.

Speaker 1 (01:47:33):
Perfect, now that works for me, my gosh.
Thank you for joining us onthat absolute adventure of a
conversation.
Hopefully, these podcasts aregetting more and more nuanced
and professional as time goes on.
Who knows?
It's a fascinating art form,learning how to share

(01:47:53):
communications and conversations.
So any feedback, any thoughts,any conversations you'd like to
see here on the Stranger Tractor, please let us know, and we
look forward to seeing you nexttime.

All Episodes

Exploring Practical Tech Ethics with Mathew Mykta and Nathan Kinch from Tethix | #3

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

1. The Podium

2. In The Village

3. iHeartOlympics: The Latest

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Exploring Practical Tech Ethics with Mathew Mykta and Nathan Kinch from Tethix | #3