Issue #31: Trolley Problem, Biases and What Does Not Change.
In 2016 MIT Media Lab set out to determine how human beings would respond to the ‘Trolley Problem’. The 'Trolley Problem’, as I was asked in my only ethics class in business school, asks ’if you are the driver of a trolley with faulty brakes, whom would you choose to hit between the five unsuspecting workers directly on your path or you could turn the trolley and hit one unsuspecting worker?’. The answers to this question, and the possible variations, has become important as we deploy autonomous vehicles. Only Germany has come up with anything close to the ethical guidelines for this advancement.
Some two million people from two hundred countries responded to the survey, delivered in the form of the game Moral Machine. Results showed people would spare groups at the expense of individuals, women over men and older people over kids. All seemingly fair. But the results also shows respondents would spare 'fit’ people over 'fat’ people and 'business executives’ (whatever that means) over homeless people.
Here’s my worry; this research will become input into the algorithms and laws that govern autonomous vehicles because it’s the most comprehensive study out there in a world where we rely on 'data’. But seventy percent of those who played Moral Machines were male college students and so the biases of a non-representative sample of the world will roll right along into the fabric of our new technology…unless we do something about it.
I’d love your perspectives on this…
Books
The recommendations from the last few weeks of reading can be split into two buckets
Old books that predicted what today might look like to help figure out what might lie ahead. ’Futurethink’ by Weiner and Brown provides a few thinking models, ’Microtrends’ by Penn and Zalesne show that what is old is new and, ’Small Data’ by Martin Lindstrom takes an anthropological approach to determining trends. You can throw in ’Future Shock’ by Alvin Toffler, he covered a lot of the ideas that he modernized in those other books.
New fiction on masculinity, race and class; ’How Are You Going To Save Yourself’ by JM Holmes and ’A Lucky Man: Stories’ by Jamal Brinkley. Some of the stories made me uncomfortable when I read them a few weeks ago. It’s a sensation I still feel as I write this.
Articles
This HBR article on how industries change was written in 2004. The framework still applies today. And, for Clayton Christensen, who’s spent 40 years thinking about/working on innovation, it still begins with asking the right question. Congrats to Efosa Ojomo for co-authoring the new book with Prof Christensen.
Apparently bigger books are better. Or maybe we just want to believe that’s the case because we’ve spent all that time on the book. And the future book is already here. It just looks different from how we thought it would.
We always read about the poor perceptions that the Chinese hold about Africans. Meet the African entrepreneurs changing those stereotypes in China.
Despite what you might think, the machines are now in control. George Dyson posits that big tech companies are now building machines whose nature is beyond programmable control. Good luck to us all.
83 science facts that’ll amaze you about the world we live in. A few of these lists come out every year and they continue to show that we know so little. And that’s fantastic!
The Oceans are warming fast and, in case you were wondering, that is not a good thing.
I wondered what might have been the issues of the day as I time travelled to Paris 1896-1900 in this video.
Steven Sinofsky writes a comprehensive recap of CES every year. The 2019 recap is a 46min read.
Product
I was gifted a subscription to Masterclass just under a year ago (Thanks M!). It’s been a great way to learn from the (um) Masters. You can learn about writing from Malcolm Gladwell, photography from Annie Leibovitz, leadership from Howard Schultz and many more.
I can’t believe January ends in a few days! We’re plugging along with Varuna and the next few weeks will be pivotal. Thanks for the continued introductions, I’m working through them.
As usual, I’d love your book and article recommendations. I’d also appreciate if you shared Polymathic Monthly with one person. One. Yes, Just one.
Till the next issue, all the best!
Seyi