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.
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
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?