Should your resolution this year be to banish your traitors?

Like millions of people in the UK, I have been avidly watching the latest series of the TV strategy game The Traitors. In case you don’t know, this multi-award-winning show, currently produced in 30 different countries, features members of the public competing for a significant cash prize. The only problem for most of the participants is that, unknown to them, there are traitors in their midst who are trying to prevent everyone else from succeeding.?

It’s gripping, and provides a fascinating insight into human behaviour. Although the participants must work together to build the prize pot, the cracks soon appear as they realise they must be entirely selfish if they want to win. You may have noticed a similar characteristic in a soon-to-be President or a tech billionaire who uses his company’s social media system to promote his personal views.?

Ultimately, we are all selfish. It’s part of our in-built survival system to ensure we do not suffer. If you have read “The Three Musketeers”, you will know that “All for one, and one for all” was not entirely true as Milady, the wife of Athos, betrayed them. There was a traitor in their midst.

At work, you have traitors. You may even be one yourself. Bosses are fearful of them. This is why we are seeing a widespread increase in “RTO” (Return to Office” notices being issued. Amazon, for instance, has abandoned all home working, except in specific circumstances, and now requires all its staff to be in the office five days a week. Part of the reason many companies are sending RTOs is a lack of trust that people are not working fully at home. They are perceived to be traitors of some kind. The theory is that it is better to have traitors under your nose where you can manage them.

However, every business has much bigger traitors to deal with. One is the Internet itself. Your work colleagues will search for information and frequently believe that what Google presents on the first page is “the truth”. Yet, logic tells you it isn’t always the case. Indeed, it is easy to manipulate the search results, no matter what the algorithm might try to do. Those “information traitors” are one step ahead of the engineers at search engine companies.

Indeed, such traitors are all around you. Just this week, knee surgeons said they are concerned that they may be unable to trust the information they read in their professional journals. Similarly, health experts in Canada are worried that there are traitors among the participants in scientific research. It appears people are busy ensuring that scientific and health research is inaccurate.

And this is all before we even consider that massive potential traitor of artificial intelligence. People using it as an everyday tool could have admitted a traitor into their business. After all, AI programs are entirely selfish. All they want to do is to harvest information and add it to their datasets. When humans arrange that, they get into trouble. Ask Apple.

The fact is, there are more traitors in our business life than ever before. And like those TV traitors, they are only out for themselves. So what can we do about it? The answer might come from the world of computing itself. In constructing computer networks, the concept of Byzantine Trust is used. This is the assumption that something will be faulty, operating in traitor mode. The rest of the network then reaches a consensus about what is defective and agrees to continue, ignoring the problematic part.

New research from the University of Texas has tested whether such Byzantine Trust could be used for home-working to detect and deal with those individuals who are slackers, operating as traitors. The idea is that as a group, we can more easily deal with the traitors in our midst and minimise their impact, much like Byzantine fault testing allows computer networks to “self-heal”.?

It turns out that when we work as a team, we can deal with the problematic people in our workplace. It also means that by sharing what we discover online, we can come to a consensus on what is true and what is masquerading as fact. Goodness me, who’d have thought it? Dealing with all these modern-day traitors is down to human beings working together.