Charity Insights

Hey, I was one of those ‘100 radical speakers’! Or maybe they added an extra slot for me and I was speaker 101. Either way, speaking at FutureFest was a pretty memorable experience.

On both days of the weekend-long festival I spoke about ‘the history of the future of automation’, and both audiences seemed to enjoy themselves. Actually, one of my supervisors put it best when she came over to chat with me after my Saturday talk:

Supervisor: “So how do you think the talk went?”

Me: “Okay, I guess. I forgot to break the seal on my bottle of water before I went on stage so there was a weird pause where I finally had to say to the crowd, ‘Oops, this is an awkward pause.’ And then I think I wore my microphone too high cuz my beard kept rubbing against it which made a weird swishing sound…”

Supervisor: “Stop. If you’re concerned about minutiae after a talk, that’s when you know it went pretty well.”

Me: “Oh… great point!”

Truth be told, I cheated a little bit with the talk. Rather than try to talk for twenty minutes (who wants to listen to that?), I included 5 clips from various films and documentaries from the past century. The clips illustrated points that I was discussing in my talk, but for the most part I included them because I thought they were funny.

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In the run up to the festival I was asked to co-write an article for the Guardian with one of the supervisors of my project. The article argued that as the use of artificial intelligence grows, we will need to find ways to acknowledge and tackle people’s concerns about AI in order to help build public trust in the technology. When I opened the Guardian app on my phone I have to admit I was slightly bemused by the choice of image. HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Really?! I’ve had a think, and I haven’t been able to come up with a more clichéd image to represent artificial intelligence. One of those skinless Terminators from Terminator 2: Judgment Day might have been a close second. All things considered, though, I guess I should be happy they didn’t go with a screengrab from Johnny Depp’s abysmal AI film, Transcendence. (Disclaimer for Johnny and the Guardian: All in good fun.)

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I am extremely grateful for my time at Nesta and wish them success with their future projects. I’ll miss the free (nasty) coffee, the free fruit on Mondays and Wednesdays, and the free pencils (at least I think they were free). But most of all I’ll miss the people.

Wow, that was cheesy.

Read #3: The History of the Future of Automation in full

What a strange, circuitous, six-decade trip that must have been! I recently spent some time in the BBC’s archives tracking down the script of a radio programme about the effect of industrial automation on employment – the topic of my research for Nesta – and I was struck by the long journey the script had to go through before it could become a word document on my laptop.

In this age of instant access to information and the [Ctrl + F] search function ([Command + F] for you mac people), it can be easy to forget that tracking down information was not always this easy. Which is why my time in the BBC archives left such an impression on me. For the aforementioned script to make it all the way from 1956 to my computer in the year 2016, the data went through a dozen different forms: What started out as a handwritten script became a type-written script; became a carbon copy of a type-written script; became a photograph of a carbon copy; became a microfilm image of a photograph. The microfilm then sat in various filing cabinets for sixty years until, at last, in August 2016 it became a projection of a microfilm image onto the screen of a microfilm reader; became a photograph of the screen of a microfilm reader; became a photograph on the memory stick of a DSLR; became a JPG on my computer; became a PDF; became a simple text analysis by an Optical Character Recognition programme; and, finally, became a word file on my computer. Considering the iterations the script went through on its way to my computer, it is hard to believe that the OCR was able to recognise anything!

I also find it hard to believe that so much of the BBC’s historical records exist in forms of memory such as this – especially considering that microfilm has long since surrendered the mantle of ‘Best Way to Store Data’. According to one of the archivists who helped me operate the microfilm readers, few companies manufacture parts for the clunky, aged machines, so there is little the archivists can do when one breaks down. Even worse, the machines are also starting to damage the microfilms themselves. As I was sitting at the microfilm reader I came across a two-page section that I really liked. When I rewound the film to read the passage again, however, I found that the microfilm reader had left a gouge on the film itself. The words that had waited six decades to be rediscovered – and had existed only seconds before – were now lost to history. It was a sad moment.

One can only hope the BBC sees fit to digitise its archives before more information is lost. Perhaps they could even build a machine that would automate the process. Though, were that to happen, I suppose I might be out of a job.

Read #2: Microfilms and Memories in full

During the summer of 1998 I visited Disneyland, built a zip-line, and got a new bike. It was the best summer of my life. And then I went to work for Nesta. I’ll leave it to my older self to sort out which summer was better, but working for an innovation charity was pretty darn great.

Nesta is an innovation charity with a mission to, as they put it, “help people and organisations bring great ideas to life.” I was stationed in the Futures team with a bunch of ‘futurologists’ working on projects related to education policy, the ethical implications of big data and machine-learning, ‘playable cities’, and innovation in the media. (A word to the wise: never call a ‘futurologist’ a futurologist to his or her face. They hate it.) My own research at Nesta was meant to look at the conversations that have surrounded automation over the past century and deliver a talk on my findings at Nesta’s semi-annual festival, FutureFest. Futurologists mingling with historians? These are strange times, indeed.

My main question heading into this placement was how well historical research would be able to inform Nesta’s more future-focused research. Even if I was able to identify a historical trend I would not necessarily be able to say whether that trend would continue in the future. However, in my first week at Nesta I came to view my role not as attempting to predict what will happen over the next decade, but as challenging my audience at FutureFest to question their own assumptions about what they believe will happen over those years. As my first blog for Nesta showed, many generations have convinced themselves that they are unique – that they are experiencing unprecedented and rapid changes relative to the changes experienced by the generations that came before. My work has focused on drawing people’s attention to this recurrent belief and challenging them to think critically about why they believe they are the exception to this rule.

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It was a nice change of pace to work as part of a team again and to work toward a common goal. Writing a humanities thesis can be quite lonely, isolated work. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it (who wouldn’t enjoy sitting at home in your pants – the British kind – writing for 10-12 hours a day?) but there was also something really great about having colleagues to bounce ideas off of, plan projects with, and receive guidance from. Nesta is definitely the kind/type of organisation I could see myself working for somewhere down the road. I get the sense that Nesta researchers are able to delve deeply into a research area for six months to a year, then delve into another related but different area after that. A research career that moved from interesting project to interesting project definitely appeals to me.

Plus, there were two burrito places and three artisan coffee shops near the Nesta office. For a Californian like me, that’s damned near Nirvana.

Read #1: Best Summer Since ’98? in full