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Like most designers who work in technology, Cennydd Bowles has reflected at times on the impact of his work and its ethical implications.
After a couple of decades of information architecture and interaction design practice, Cennydd stepped back from his design work to explore philosophy and ethics in depth.
His explorations have led him to extensive academic study as well as speaking gigs and writing on the subject, including a book, Future Ethics.
We talked about:
- his transition from interaction design to tech ethics
- his origins in the information architecture world and his career, including a stint at Twitter
- how we as designers have missed predictable mistakes and patterns that ethicists have long known about
- how he got hooked on philosophy and ethics
- his 2018 book on the connections between the worlds of philosophy and design, Future Ethics
- the ethical issues that can arise in even a seemingly harmless practice like A/B testing
- his prediction that AI will in the not-too-distant future permit almost fully automated product development and the risks that that brings
- how the difficulties of measuring trust might exacerbate the trust issues that arise with AI
- the “magical” nature of AI his observation that “the problem with magic is it’s intentionally deceptive”
- a new orchestrator role that he sees coming with AI
- his pessimism about the prospects for humans over the long term in the AI economy
- how Cory Doctorow’s notion of “enshittification” manifests in the design and AI world
- what he sees coming: “rapidly iterating mediocrity rather than considered excellence”
- the power, albeit diminished recently, of employees to influence ethical decision-making within organizations
- three books he recommends (links below)
- his advice to designers to listen to and connect with philosophers and learn from their prior work on ethics
Cennydd’s bio
Cennydd Bowles is a technology ethicist and interaction designer, author of Future Ethics, and a recent Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Elon University. Cennydd’s views on the ethics of emerging technology and design have been quoted by Forbes, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal, and he has spoken on responsible innovation at Facebook, Stanford University, and Google.
Connect with Cennydd online
Tech ethics books
- Future Ethics, Cennydd Bowles
- Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher
- Ethical Product Development, Pavani Reddy
- Ethics for People who Work in Tech, Marc Steen
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 36. In the flurry of activity launched by AI-technology investment, ethical considerations have been left largely unexplored. Cennydd Bowles is an accomplished interaction designer who has spent the last several years studying and writing and speaking about tech ethics and responsible innovation. What he sees unfolding now concerns him, leading him to predict that the near-term future is more likely to bring “rapidly iterating mediocrity rather than considered excellence.”
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 36 of the Content and AI Podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Cennydd Bowles. Cennydd is a technology ethicist and interaction designer based in the UK. Welcome, Cennydd. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Cennydd:
Hey, Larry. Well, so let’s see. I’ve just got back from America, so for the last six months, I’ve been in Elon University, North Carolina as a Fulbright visiting scholar. This is really a large part of my transition, essentially, from the days of UX and product design within industry, and transitioning from that into academia, and particularly philosophy, philosophy of technology, and ethics of technology.
Cennydd:
These days, I’m now essentially figuring out what’s next. I’m finishing up a master’s dissertation right now on the topic of the ethics of A/B testing, which I’ve got a lot of experience seeing inside companies, and think maybe I can offer something about looking at the ethics of it. After that, well, probably a lot more writing, probably a book or two. Then I think I’m probably heading down the academic path, so probably a PhD in some sort of philosophy, of technology, or computer science somewhere in that kind of space.
Larry:
Oh, great. I’ll have to check back in. I’d love to see where… Getting into the details of this. You just mentioned, well, I guess I would love to talk just a little bit more about your transition, because you’ve been an interaction designer for a long time. I can’t remember exactly how long, but we’ve talked about this and a little bit about your transition, but can you talk a little bit more about what motivated you to go from interaction design into ethics?
Cennydd:
Yeah, you bet. Yeah, so I started off as an IA back when that term was far more sort of current, I suppose. I read the Polar Bear Book, which some of your listeners may well know. This is Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s book. I started, I guess, in about 2002, so it’s been 20 plus years that I’ve been designing digital products. I don’t like the idea that you can design the experiences, but interaction design, UX design, whatever you want to call it, for a range of companies, a lot of consulting, a bit of freelance.
Cennydd:
I also worked for Twitter for three years, where I was heading up the design team in London. It was after Twitter, actually, that I started to consider, well, maybe there’s something that we’re missing here as a community, and maybe there’s something I can offer. It wasn’t that I was sort of filled with horror and revulsion for what I’d seen inside Silicon Valley. It wasn’t that I looked back on my career and said, “Wow, I’ve made a lot of mistakes.”
Cennydd:
Of course, I have, and a few things I wish I could have ethically questioned at the time, but then that’s common for all of us. I had an interest in the topic. Just even as a teenager, I was just interested in ethics as a concept, but I have no training in it. My undergrad was in physics, I had a masters in IT as well. I didn’t really have any kind of philosophical or ethical background. When I left Twitter, I had sold, I got some shares, and I sold them, not huge amounts, it was a Silicon Valley thousandaire rather than millionaire, but I didn’t have to rush into the next thing.
Cennydd:
I could afford to say, “Okay, what do I want to do? What’s going to be the next right step for me?” I thought, well, I don’t want to rush into a job immediately. I want to poke at this ethics thing. I think there’s something here, and I don’t understand it, and maybe there’s something I can do to try and raise that, the profile of ethics within the design community and the technology community. I started reading.
Cennydd:
I got myself a reader’s card for the British Library, and I sat there, and I tried to read philosophy. That’s quite hard to do without any background in it. There’s a reason why it’s seen as a complex topic. It took me a while to find the right types of things, but eventually, I stumbled across some work that blew me away. I thought it was just fascinating, complex, and perceptive, some of the work that I was reading by philosophers and ethicists, and also writers, and artists, and critics.
Cennydd:
They’d been looking at the social impact of technology for decades. What occurred to me is that we just hadn’t been listening. We’d been in this space, not really heeding their advice, not really listening to some of the warnings that they might’ve shared, and just convinced we were the smartest people in the room, and that we would figure it out for ourselves along the way. We’re not the smartest people in the room, I’m afraid. You read some of this work, and you recognize a lot of the mistakes and the patterns that you see within the modern tech industry.
Cennydd:
It just put its hook in me, and eventually it got to the point where I said, “Actually, I think this is the direction I want to go. I don’t think I want a regular kind of mainstream type design role anymore. I think I want to see what I can do to act as a translator, essentially, between the disciplines of design, and technology, and product, and the world of philosophy.” That culminated in a book which I released in 2018, which is called Future Ethics.
Cennydd:
Then ever since then, I’ve been trying my best to make a living consulting on responsible design and technology, doing some academic work, talking, writing, speaking, all that kind of stuff, to try and influence the industry, frankly, to raise its standards, to consider ethics as more central to what it does. I think I’ve been partially successful in that. There’s definitely been a change in how those discussions are happening since 2015, ’16 when I started in that space.
Cennydd:
I’m not saying we’re anywhere near winning that particular battle, but I think we’re starting to see some slow change. I think that’s going to be my continued role.
Larry:
Nice. We were talking before we went on the air that your current study, you’re working on your master’s dissertation, you said, and you’re working specifically on A/B testing. I wonder, that seems like a really good, is that a good lens into tech ethics in general?
Cennydd:
I think it can be. I think one thing that makes it a good, almost sort of microcosm of how the tech industry thinks about ethics, or fails to think about ethics, is that A/B testing is very rarely questioned as something that’s commonplace. Well, of course, we A/B test everything, and I’ve been in companies since 2007 when we A/B tested… Not really, there hasn’t been a lot of focus on, “Well, should we A/B test, or what should we test, or at what point might it become harmful?”
Cennydd:
I’ll grant that the vast majority of A/B testing is probably quite morally benign. If you’re just testing microcopy to see, do people click this button, or notice this menu? I’m fairly confident saying there’s probably not much ethical damage within it. Then you have other extremes of A/B testing. Back in, I think it was 2014 or ’13, OKCupid A/B tested a bunch of essentially psychological experiments, so they lied about matching.
Cennydd:
They told people who were some of the worst matches for each other, that actually, they were the best match. The reason they did this was just curiosity. What would happen? Would they still match? Do we still have the power? Do people trust us to do that? That’s a horribly unethical thing to do, right? You’re exposing people to harm. If these are some of the worst suited matches for you, and you’re telling people they’re your soulmate, all sorts of physical and new safety harms could come from that.
Cennydd:
You’re violating the expectations and the trust users have in you. You’re working against their interests in why they signed up for the service. Also, around that time, I think this was 2014, is the Facebook Emotional Contagion Study, which people may have heard of. Facebook’s research division essentially decided to look at whether there was essentially what they call social contagion, emotional contagion. Can you make people happy or sad if you surround them with happy or sad content, essentially?
Cennydd:
The answer is yes, that they found that you could affect people’s moods by what you showed them on Facebook. They had some people for whom they prioritized the happy stuff, and some people for whom they prioritized the sad stuff. Then guess what? The happier surrounded people posted happier updates, and the sadder people posted sadder updates. The big problem with this is they didn’t get any consent. They had 689,000 people in this study, and none of them knew it was going on.
Cennydd:
They also gave no consideration for what might happen for people with anxiety or depression. You’re intentionally making them sadder, that seems dangerous. We shouldn’t do that. There should be checks against that. We started to see there are problems with A/B testing. I think those really came from a lack of oversight and a lack of questioning, and a default assumption that, well, it’s common, therefore it’s fine, which unfortunately doesn’t carry any ethical weight. That’s one of the first things you learn. Just because something is common, that doesn’t mean it’s ethically good.
Larry:
Interesting. That’s my mother’s advice, “If everybody else is doing it, that doesn’t make it right.” Yeah, that’s really… Everything you said makes perfect sense, just the research ethics around it, not getting consent, and the lack of consideration for safety. Those alone seem like good reasons to not do it.
Larry:
You’ve been talking about this for six or seven years now or something like that. Do people hear that? Like you said earlier, that we’ve not been paying attention to these folks. Have you, in your dual role as a designer and ethicist, got any more traction around getting folks to pay attention to these issues?
Cennydd:
Do you mean to the A/B issue specifically?
Larry:
Yeah, like A/B testing in general. Just that example, getting people to think more like, “Well, oh, I never thought about that.”
Cennydd:
I have never heard a single practitioner question the morality of an A/B test they’ve done. That’s not to say it hasn’t happened, but I’ve never heard it.
Larry:
Okay.
Cennydd:
Now, it’s only recently that I’m starting to talk about it, so I’m getting this dissertation done, and then I’m almost certain that I’m going to do a practitioner-facing version as well, just like a short, not a full book, but a short guide of, “Here are some things you should consider. If you’re doing this, it might be harmful because of this, and this, and this.”
Cennydd:
I hope that most testing will pass through those fairly easily, will sail through those criteria, and then you can conclude safely, “Great. Well, we’re probably okay to do this test,” but I suspect some will get caught that might surprise people. Yeah, I’ve literally never heard a single practitioner discuss the ethics of A/B testing.
Cennydd:
Honestly, academics don’t talk about it that much, either. There are really only a handful of papers or book chapters that analyze this in detail, so hopefully I’m making a bit of an advancement on that field.
Larry:
I think about that. I have a lot of friends in medical research, and clinical trials, and things, and there, they have IRBs, and all these mechanisms for, and you have to demonstrate that you’ve got consent, and all those things that just doesn’t exist to this point in this craft. Yeah. Well, what about, now, this podcast is about AI, and I’m just wondering if there’s, one of the things that AI does is it makes trivial task work a lot easier, so it’s probably a lot easier to just do a lot of A/B testing now because of AI.
Larry:
There’s probably other things that I’m not even considering that might affect this. How does AI in particular affect the, or how do you see it, some of this might be speculation, I guess, how do you see AI affecting the kind of ethical things that have arisen in your looking at A/B testing?
Cennydd:
I think it’s not hard to foresee a future in which you don’t really have designers doing the grunt work, the Figma jockeying, right? You’ll just throw GenAI at it and say, “Well, GenAI, you’ve got to design systems. You’ve ingested all these patterns, you’ve ingested some basic psychological rules maybe on what should follow what, and now, please spit out 500 variants of this particular screen, or this user flow,” or whatever it might be.
Cennydd:
That can happen fully automated. Then as you say, you can have a fully automated test suite, an A/B suite, you throw it into Optimizely or something like that. You just ingest all these versions, and you just test the crap out of them. You say, “Well, of these 73 that we’ve tested, this one has this conversion, so we’ll go with that. We’ll ship it.” We might reach a situation where there really aren’t humans in that loop anymore.
Cennydd:
Now, there might still be a role for some kind of neo-creative director/AI wrangler sitting on top of it, and making sure that we’ve got some experiential coherence here, that this screen looks a bit like that screen, and you’re not diverging too wildly from screen to screen or flow to flow. Nevertheless, potentially you can automate all of this, and you can optimize for your chosen metrics. Designers, and writers, and so on, I think eventually, there’s a very good chance they’ll get cut out of that loop completely, so we have essentially fully automated product development.
Cennydd:
I think that it’s a certainty, frankly, that that will happen in design. I don’t think it will happen soon. I think the field of design, and content, and product, and so on will probably look very similar in 18 months to today, but I can promise you, it won’t in 18 years. I’m very confident that by then, the vast majority of this will be algorithmatized. This raises all sorts of challenging questions about, “Well, does this exacerbate the harms that might come?”
Cennydd:
Is it more likely that, for example, these systems will tend toward deceptive patterns, that they will manipulate, coerce, and deceive users into believing certain things, or clicking certain buttons, because there’s no human oversight, or because they haven’t chosen the right metrics to optimize for? If you’re just optimizing for profit, for example, then your algorithm will say, “Great, well, this is your design,” but you might be overlooking more like a guardrail metric of, “Does it really annoy people? Are they canceling their accounts in six months time because they’ve lost trust in your service?”
Cennydd:
I think there’s a strong possibility that these systems will actually be far less trusted and trustworthy than human-curated experiences, if you like. I think a lot of this potential for automation just increases some of the risks we see with A/B testing, and I think they’re going to be very tempting to companies, because in the long run, they’ll be cheaper and less difficult to work with than experienced people will be.
Larry:
Yeah. You just mentioned trust, and it’s important. You also mentioned just before that, the time span over which you see some of this change happening. It seems like there’s some kind of dynamic maybe at play there, that people will migrate away from less trustworthy experiences, I’m thinking, and so there’ll be some need to create trustworthy systems. One of the other things we’ve talked about before this conversation was the notion of how AI inspires magic over transparency, that you don’t really know what’s going on there.
Larry:
That’s just one element in establishing trust. How important do you see trust in this whole dynamic? It sounds like if money’s the main incentive, and they can just keep making more of it, buying, we won’t worry about the trust so much, but if the money starts to go away because people don’t trust you, how might that look, I guess?
Cennydd:
The problem is, that’s quite hard to metricize. You can optimize an AI to get the highest conversion, or the highest margin, or profit, or whatever it is out of a certain flow, but it’s quite hard to optimize it for a very human and subjective thing, like, “Does your user trust you?” That idea that we’ve relied upon magical metaphors for AI is absolutely true. It’s no accident that the icon that the community has seemed to stumble upon is the sparkles. It’s this kind of magic, shiny artifact, and that’s what AI means.
Cennydd:
The problem with magic is it’s intentionally deceptive, right? Magic is all predicated upon misleading the participant or the audience. I’m not saying AI is by its nature deceptive, but it relies upon user not really understanding what’s happening behind the scenes. These systems aren’t very interrogable, right? You can’t explain, you can’t dig in and say, “Well, and here’s why we’ve taken this decision,” or, well, you ought to, but that’s not happening very frequently.
Cennydd:
That does lead to a diminishment of trust. I hope it is the case that even systems that just optimize for profit eventually will realize they’ve made a mistake, because the profit starts ebbing away, because users say, “I feel hoodwinked by this company or this system, I’m going to go elsewhere.” I don’t know whether that will happen. I would like to think it will automatically, but I think this is where you need those guardrail metrics.
Cennydd:
This is where you need some kind of proxy to say, “Well, we ought to just check we’re not infuriating our users here, or breaking the trust that our brand has spent decades trying to build.” How you do that is tricky, yeah. That’s a good use of researchers for sure you need on that case.
Larry:
Yeah. Well, that’s a whole other area, like research, and there’s all the talk about everything from synthetic data to tagging qualitative research, and there’s so much in there. Where do you see humans really thriving at this? I think a lot of people are likely to be scrambling, or not scrambling, but negotiating and navigating their way in this. Where do you see that? You mentioned the human in the loop earlier. Where are the most humans going to be needed in this new terrain?
Cennydd:
That I don’t know. That’s hard to predict at this stage. Like I said, there’ll be that orchestrator role. You’ll need someone sitting on top of everything and trying to align things. I’m seeing a whole ton of copium on LinkedIn about this. Designers and people in this space are all sort of scrambling to say, “What’s our relevance in this new world?” You’ve had a lot of people say, “Ah, well, AIs don’t have taste. They can’t align things in that kind of way. You need a human to do that.”
Cennydd:
I agree. Problem is you need far fewer humans to do that than you have working in the design, or content, or product industry right now. I think that is a legitimate role for designers, for example, but I just think it’s a highly competitive one, and we’re going to end up jostling each other for position there, and pushing our peers below the automation waterline, I think, if we’re not careful. The short answer is I’m fairly pessimistic on the future for humans in that space.
Cennydd:
Now, this is not to say that I think humans would do a worse job. I think humans will do a better job than the AIs on this for a very long time still. Eventually, probably the line will get crossed, but certainly for years, I think humans will do a better job than just spitting systems on it. The problem is the robots will do a good enough job that at some point, execs don’t care, or at some point, users don’t care.
Cennydd:
They won’t be able to tell the difference, or the difference is slight enough that a CFO says, “Well, look at this cost sink that is this design team, or this team of writers,” or whatever it is, and, “We’ve been offered this Anthropic,” or whoever, “Have said, we can use their API for X million, and why don’t we just do that? Yeah, sure, the results aren’t quite as good, but we’ve done the A/B test, and it’s a 2% conversion drop-off, so there we go, problem solved.”
Cennydd:
Businesses don’t, particularly right now, they’re not optimized for excellence, are they? They’re optimized for compliance, and simplicity, and good enough. That’s our competition, unfortunately. I don’t think excellence is actually going to matter in that arithmetic for too much longer.
Larry:
Interesting. When I think about, could the next Apple possibly emerge in the environment you’re describing? There’s like, whatever that genius that Steve Jobs had, that this thing that came out of that, and you’ve done a lot of product stuff. What do you see? Do you see we’ll just be condemned to average stuff for the rest of our lives, or how do you see that unfolding?
Cennydd:
Yeah, I think we probably are. Cory Doctorow has written about enshittification, right? There’s this whole idea that you start off with a compelling product and service, and then eventually, the grip of growth capitalism gets into it and has to reduce cost and increase margins. Generally, it gets worse and worse, and everything tries to add a Discover tab, and add new cloney features that everyone else has got.
Cennydd:
I don’t think there will be another Apple, in terms of a heavily curated and sort of expertly designed suite of products. I don’t think we will have that anymore in the digital world. I think there will be more money to be made from having impressive and magic automation that gives off the impression of highly curated expertise. I think that old model is going to prove too costly. You’ve got to hire the literal best people on the planet, and you’ve got to pay them the best possible wages to keep them. You’ve got to try and convince them to do 12-hour days for five years.
Cennydd:
That’s how Apple has succeeded. They got the very best people, or they certainly used to back in the day. I don’t think that’s how businesses are going to seek to excel anymore. I think they’re just going to say, “Well, we just need a better algorithm, a better model than our competitors, and we’ll stay ahead from them.” Now, at the moment, that’s not working, because everyone’s overtaking each other.
Cennydd:
All these sort of LLMs and the foundational models that are being built are all leapfrogging each other, because there’s still such change. Maybe that’s not sustainable either. That’s an advantage, but I suspect that’s the way we’re going to go is rapidly iterating mediocrity rather than considered excellence.
Larry:
I just wonder if in that kind of environment, that I guess that’s kind of speculation about how Steve Jobs might act in that environment, just a guy determined to do something, but I guess kind of related, in the same family, a lot of what you’ve described as the dynamics driving this are kind of top-down management incentives, and financial prerogatives, and things like that.
Larry:
We were talking in another conversation a couple of weeks ago about there used to be more bottom-up, that employees had a little more influence and impact on these kinds of things, but not so much anymore. Can you talk a little bit about, do you see maybe an opportunity for that kind of internal pressure from employees to have any impact on this?
Cennydd:
Yeah, it’s definitely still there. If we go back two years, this was probably the biggest lever I could pull with companies. If they brought me in to consult on ethics, usually it was a team that had brought me in. It was never the chief exec, but it was a VP of design or a director of product, mostly because their team is griping about ethics. Like, “We need to do something better on ethics and we don’t really know how.”
Cennydd:
Then that leader sort of panics a bit and they go, “Oh, you’re a designer, and a bit about ethics. Maybe you can help.” That’s generally how I’ve been brought in. Yeah, the lever I could pull was mostly around talent, that you go back a couple of years, and you remember all these movements are changed that was happening, were happening across the tech industry. Think of the Google Walkout, think of Tech Won’t Build It, which was this website where essentially, people would pledge not to work in certain industries that they considered harmful.
Cennydd:
Essentially, there was a strong argument that, “Well, if you don’t do this, then your workforce is going to be unhappy, and they’re expensive, and they’re hard to hire, and they can also stop production. If they lift their hands off the keyboard, nothing’s going to get built. That’s a real problem for you.” The tech crash has changed that quite significantly.
Cennydd:
I think it is plausible, if not likely, that part of the motivation for the tech crash was essentially punitive, was execs saying, “All right, enough of these uppity employees. They need a bit of precarity in their lives, so we need to take some of the power away from them.” The way you do that is by firing people. You saw very prominent, particularly AI ethicists, being fired. You saw teams being disbanded, and then of course, this has happened across the sector. Everyone has felt the precarity of the crash over the last 18, 24 months.
Cennydd:
That has undermined worker power. That has undermined the strength of that lever. It’s harder for me to go in and say, “Ah, your staff are going to quit, because the response is generally, ‘Well, we don’t care, because we kind of want that, or we’ve been trying to reduce headcount, or we’ve got 12 applicants per job anyway, so we don’t mind losing a few.'”
Cennydd:
However, there are always still good people in tech, and there are some that companies don’t want to lose, and there will always be a need for practitioners to be making practical moral decisions. A lot of people say what we need is regulation, and maybe that’s true, but regulation will only ever go so far. You will always need people to be taking that call inside companies. Now, you might say we need a chief ethics officer or something like that to help structure that to be a sort of oracle, and take those calls.
Cennydd:
Even then, there are going to be designers, content strategists, UX writers, software engineers, making ethical decisions inside companies. I want them to do as good a job as possible. It’s important that we equip these people with the skills to try and make the best decisions they can ethically. There’s always going to be a need for that, and they still have influence on a direction of a company, even if that influence has been diminished from the more kind of activist days that we saw in maybe 2021 and 2022.
Larry:
Yeah. Hey, to that point, can you recommend any resources, books, people to follow besides you, in addition to you, to sort of empower themselves to be ready when they see an opportunity to inform the ethics or to guide ethics in their work?
Cennydd:
Yeah, so let’s think. Okay, so a couple of books spring to mind, Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher was one of the early books talking about the harms that particularly social media can do. That’s a good primer. Pavani Reddy wrote a book called Ethical Product Management, I think, or Product Development, I think it may be, which I thought was quite good and looked at it from the PM point of view.
Cennydd:
One book I think has been a little bit overlooked by industry, but I do recommend it, it’s called Ethics for People who Work in Tech, and it’s by Marc Steen, that’s S-T-E-E-N, who’s a philosopher of technology at I think at U Delft or one of these Dutch universities, I’m not sure which, which is still a fairly advanced read. It’s still philosophy, but it’s accessible, I think, for the intelligent and curious practitioner.
Cennydd:
That will help give you a foundation, so that when these problems come up, you can say, “Ah, okay, I’ve read something about this. I’ve got some tools in my armory to allow me to navigate these tricky decisions.” Yeah, those three books, I think, are probably a good starting point. Yeah, of course, my book Future Ethics is designed for that audience too.
Larry:
Yeah, fantastic. When we first started talking, you talked about how hard it was to find, for you to get settled in, and so thank you for doing the hard work and coming up with that short list for folks. Hey, I can’t believe it, we’re coming up on time, Cennydd. Before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything you want to share before we close?
Cennydd:
I think maybe I’d harken back to that earlier point, that a large part of the success or otherwise of technology ethics is going to be about how open practitioners are to those discussions. We need to acknowledge that we are not the first explorers on these shores. There are people who’ve done the legwork before us, and it’s time we listened to them. Ideally, I think we should be reading the work of philosophers, and artists, and sociologists, and critics.
Cennydd:
We should be inviting them into our companies. We should be asking them to come in for talks or brown bag lunches. We should be sharing their literature with each other. The old approach of this sort of slightly insular and ahistorical perspective we’ve had on technology is just not going to work. Technology operates at such scale now. It isn’t just about, does it solve user needs? It’s also about, how does this affect society, and cities, and communities, and groups of people?
Cennydd:
We’re not very skilled at that. We’ve been individualistic in our focus. User must be able to do X, Y, Z. As a user, I should. Well, how about changing that? As a community or as a democracy, we should be able to. We need that external expertise, I think, for that. We can do some reading, and we ought to, but we also need to identify those people and connect better with their work.
Larry:
And bring them in. I love that perspective. Hey, thanks. Oh, and one very last thing, Cennydd. If folks want to connect with you or follow you online, what’s the best place to find you?
Cennydd:
Oh, sure. Probably my website, so Cennydd.com, so C-E-N-N-Y-D-D. I’m very easy to find online with a name like mine. I have a newsletter that goes out, it’s a very informal thing. It’s sort of free of thought leadership. It’s just here’s on my mind right now. Yeah, the websites and the newsletter are probably going to be the best bets.
Larry:
Fantastic. I’ll put those in the show notes as well. Well, thank you so much, Cennydd. This was an awesome conversation.
Cennydd:
Thanks for having me.
