AI, Disruption and Inclusion

"You might feel like you’re disrupting right now, but from the point of view of people 20 years from now, 30 years from now, you’re not a disruptor. You’re a founder." – Van Jones

I felt compelled to share a summary of this Possible podcast interview with Van Jones . You can access it here on Spotify |?Apple | YouTube | Transcript.

You’ll find it a good listen if you’re interested in the social impact of AI and tech, especially when it comes to ensuring it is deployed equitably, and without bias or discrimination.

Jones served as President Barack Obama’s special adviser for green jobs in 2009, where he worked to create jobs in the clean energy sector and promote sustainable economic development. He is the co-founder of multiple social enterprises, including the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights—a nonprofit focused on justice and opportunities for urban America—and Color Of Change, a racial justice organization. He has recently received a $100m grant from Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, and is an all-round activist and thought leader.

Jones comes across as immediately likeable, immensely smart, infectiously optimistic. He’s also disarmingly pragmatic and tells it straight regarding where tech and big business need to step-change their engagement with African Americans, and other oft-overlooked and marginalised — if not discriminated-against — groups in the US.

The podcast covers three areas that Jones is working to disrupt – Poverty, Prison and Pollution. I highly recommend you listen in full - and subscribe to the Possible podcast while you’re at it.

While Jones’s remit appears to be squarely US-focused, it’s no big leap of imagination to see how the same ideas and principals can be deployed more broadly, in our own countries, communities and businesses.

Here are a few quotes to give you a feel for what to expect, and why it would be worth listening:

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?????? On the radical shifts to civilisation that are underway:

“Well, I think that Afrofuturism, solarpunk, like, there’s certain aesthetics and cultural lenses that are gonna be required for us to make this leap into a completely different human civilization […] I’ve got an 18-month-old baby girl. She’s going to live in a completely different civilization than what I was born into. You know, in five or six years, when she has a crush, it’s not gonna be a cartoon character or a rockstar; it’s probably gonna be an AI. How do you manage that as a parent? In 30 years, if she wants to have grandkids—for me, she could probably design them on a laptop. Like, that’s weird. Eighty, ninety, a hundred years from now when she—heaven forbid—when she passes away, she might be buried on Mars.”

????? And:

"We are co-founders of a new civilization. That is a sacred task."

??????? On our planetary crises, and how culture and art can help us to prepare and adapt:

“And by the way, she’s gonna be growing up on a different planet than the one I was born on as well, because at no point in my lifetime, when I was a child, was the North Pole hotter than the Sahara desert. And Texas froze. That was called 2021. It was a hundred degrees in the North Pole, 85 degrees in the Sahara desert […] So how do you prepare the next generation to live in that? You’ve gotta use culture, you’ve gotta use art, you’ve gotta—there’s an imagination gap between, you know, what people see every day with their lives and what they’re gonna be dealing with.“

??? And (love this, partly I suppose as I love fiction):

"If you want new facts, you need new fiction."

?????? Continuing the theme of how art and culture provide a vital North Star:

“If you care about the communities I care about, Wakanda. Wakanda is the sort of example in pop culture of: What if science were in the hands of people who don’t ordinarily have it? What if they could use scientific breakthroughs and genius to make the world as they would? And so will.i.am and I have joined forces to do an event here in Los Angeles called Make Wakanda Real to get African Americans and our allies excited about what if […] all this technology got to the community in a way that made every kid smarter, made every household more healthy, and created more opportunities for more people? What if we could make Wakanda real? But again, I can’t even have that conversation if there’s not a pop-culture reference. Thank goodness we have one in Wakanda.”

?????? On how governments are limited in their ability to regulate, so there must be direct accords between stakeholder groups and AI tech companies:

“They [the US government] can’t regulate Twitter, handguns, or AK-47s. They are not gonna regulate artificial intelligence and biotech. The locus of where the future’s gonna be created is in technology. The future used to be written in laws. Now it’s being written in computer code. The future used to be written in Washington DC. Now it’s being written in Silicon Valley, Austin, Boston. When we talk about Make Wakanda Real, there needs to be an accord between these big AI companies and the communities that are usually left out. Whether you’re talking about Appalachia, whether you’re talking about folks who live in housing projects, whether you’re talking about folks in Native American reservations, the people who were left out and overlooked and underestimated in the old order, in the new order, let’s lock them in. So we aren’t just hoping it all works out. We aren’t just saying, “Well, the products will be out there. Everybody will have a tutor somehow. Everybody will get better healthcare somehow.” No, no, no. Let’s actually have an accord. But Velcro takes two sides to stick. Our community needs to be ready to have that conversation in a constructive way, in a positive way. And the AI companies have to be ready to receive that conversation.”

???? And this is so important because (love these, again):

"The future used to be written in laws. Now it’s being written in computer code."

?????? …and:

"Nothing good happens for poor folks by accident. It really does take planning, intention, and purpose."

?????? On the business model for disrupting the prison ‘industry’ in the US:

“So we can bring crime down, rehabilitation up at a lower price point if we use technology, innovation, and financial incentives. For instance, you lock up a kid here in California, It’s $100,000 per year per kid. At the end of that year, you’re gonna have the same kid with new tattoos. That’s all you got for $100,000. What if I gave one Black grandmother and a tech bro the same kid and $100,000? What do you think they would do with that kid? What do you think the outcome there would be? Why can’t that Black grandmama compete with the incarcerated? Now listen: If the kid is a, is a terrorist or an axe murderer, the incarceraters might do a better job. But for most of these offenses, I’m quite sure that home confinement with some technology to monitor, plus a tablet that could give, you know, world-class education […] you could get a lot of lives turned around.?“

???????? On the need to see people like yourself doing thing before you can aspire to doing it yourself, and the work that CodePath (an organisation that Jones is partnering with) are doing to change this for the tech industry:

“It’s so hard to do something or to be something you’ve never seen. The reason you see all these Black and Brown kids who want to be entertainers and?sports stars is ’cause that’s what they’ve seen. So of course I wanna be a rapper. I want to be a ball player. I want to be Barack Obama.?Whatever it is, it’s what you’ve seen. The great thing about what Michael Ellison is doing with CodePath is […] he’s not only helping the Stanfords and MITs—God bless them—but he’s helping schools that working-class kids go to, often Black, often Brown kids go to, and he’s re-engineering the curriculum so that those kids can be successful in tech on those campuses. Because in the old system, there was a limiting factor on the campus, which is the number of kids that can be in upper-division classes. [Michael Ellison] puts a jetpack on every teacher […] You’ve got the curriculum, you’ve got all the information at your fingertips, so you eliminate that scarcity, and now more kids can succeed.”

???? And here’s that positivity, with Jones talking about mending divisions and finding common ground to enable a common good (my inner Buddhist likes this a lot):

“Showing up with positive solutions. Showing up with “I need you.” Showing up with “we can do it.” Showing up with “I love you no matter who you are.” You’re in jail, you’re in prison, you did bad stuff: I love you. Nothing you can do about it. You voted for Trump? I love you. Nothing you can do about it. You voted against me every time? I love you. Nothing you can do about it. Showing up with that I think is the only way out of it. I don’t think we can divide our way out of it. I think we gotta unite our way out.”

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There’s way more, this is just scraping the surface - so be sure to listen if you like what you’ve read here: Spotify |?Apple | YouTube | Transcript.

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??????? Before you go: Possible is one of the best podcasts out there (IMHO) on the topic of AI. It is well produced, makes excellent use of storytelling, and the expertise of the hosts – Reid Hoffman (founder of PayPal/LinkedIn/Greylock) and his Chief of Staff Aria Finger – is evident at every turn. With it’s focus on purpose-driven AI, taking the perspective of exploring “what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way?”, it provides a welcome – and highly refreshing – counterpoint to the doom-and-gloom camp.

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About me

????I’m Marcos: I’m a Tech for Good strategy, transformation and innovation consultant and executive coach, with 25+ years experience across a broad range of industries, organisations and scenarios.

?? I have a clear focus - on helping individuals and organisations working at the intersection of technology, the environment, and social impact.

??I live with my family in Wimbledon, London; I love playing tennis, being in nature, and I'm a big music fan.

If you’d like to find out more about how I could help you or your organisation, please get in touch.

#AI #inclusion #disruption #artificialintelligence #tech #socialimpact #pollution #prison #poverty #impact #purpose #sustainability

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