New Adventures 2020 – Akil Benjamin's Clean your studio. Draw on walls. Don’t break things. Radical is close to home.

The first talk of the day was so thought provoking that I was still processing it when Akil got on stage. He did something I've never seen on stage before, got the entire audience doing a breathing exercise together. That peaked my attention and the thoughts I was having went straight to the back of my head while I was again gripped, hearing how Akil had "chosen to live" and really be an active participant instead of just going with the flow. This was a brilliant talk that would be applicable to probably any person on earth, all about making radical decisions. I met Akil in the evening and it was quite a remarkable couple of minutes, but that's a whole other blog post.

Here are my notes:

• Decided to live and live differently
• Don’t make same mistakes
• Played a video of a rapper talking about "making sauce"
• “When you’re broke you can still have sauce”
• “You can get lost in the sauce, you can take it too far you can get lost in it”
• “No one is born with the sauce”
• “Comuzi's goal is to make sauce”
• Choice between doing nothing or move forward
• “Chose to live not stand here and die”
• “I choose to plan”
• Eisenhower matrix works well for planning
• “Shut open, open your ears and listen”
• You give yourself options if you listen
• If you get stuck making decisions you will make the same mistakes over and over again
• “Are you brave enough to listen?”
• Think “does this help or hinder me?”
• “Did we learn from the first, second or third iterations of the internet?”
• “Many lives have been ruined by the internet”
• Anything AI in front of you probably isn’t
• “What happens when your mortgage rate was said no?”
• “We found out about PPI and had this whole mess, I don’t think we will even find out now”
• Reflect how it might affect an individuals life before you click go live. Not saying don’t do it but think
• Embedded ethics
• Consequence scanning by Dot everyone
• Work out the things to mitigate, amplify or take further
• “Invest 30 minutes and impact a million lives”
• “Do no harm trumps don’t be evil”
• Simple
• What choice do you want to make?
• "Radical is close to home"
• When you do the same things over and over again it’s insanity, so radical is just a decision away
• Even if two problems look the same they are different based on time alone
• Radical vs insanity. See it as a spectrum. You have ample opportunity to move the needle. Shift the neediest forward using the opportunity to progress society.
• BBC R&D
• what’s the future story formats for the news? Hard first project!
• Insights from research: “the news assumes too much of me. It was written for a white man. I hate reading”
• Created perspectives, take one story but view from different points of view
• Specifically choose situations such as knife crime
• Another project was to explain algorithm without explaining it. Showed graphs and asked permissions etc
• “Imagine AI asking permission, crazy”
• Wanted to understand where data was stored and how it profiled their mental health
• Underlined text to show variable etc
• That’s embedded ethics
• Built out patterns that could be used anywhere to encourage ethical usage of conversations with AI.
• Work our how it’s working, know it isn’t a human
• Young people much preferred chat not over form
• Always test but make the radical choice. Every project has radical choices possible
• Use a retrospective. Are you brave enough to hear the truth. See where it could be better
• Made an invisible mask for Mozilla
• Works like a GDPR toggle for real world
• What choice do you make next?