THIRTY-SIX

Image © Jose & MidJourney

Twenty years ago, I was working in Barcelona, and the company I worked with did a typical offsite, 3 days I believe somewhere fun, where 50% of the time you are completely wasted and the other 50% you are being included in brainstorms to come up with a plan (while still intoxicated). People tend to forget both, the first one because it’s usually embarrassing (on one of these 30 years ago I had an encounter with a small bull and the bull won… ruptured meniscus and a torn ACL that led me to surgery 30 years later), the second because as soon as it’s over, we all go back to what we were doing and the company goes on to do whatever management decided they wanted to do.

But I remember this particular occasion, because one morning after partying night, we were ‘asked’ to be in a meeting space at 8am. Needless to say, we were all still heavy headed and in need of plenty of water, a gentleman who by the tone of his voice had not been partying the previous night, had 4 different newspapers taped to the walls, several pages of different newspapers, with large red markings on them, all in all it must have been 20 newspaper pages, and we were afraid he’d make us read out loud! Instead, he introduced himself, a political scientist and a newspaper editor, he began explaining to us who owned each of the newspapers, the families, the industrial conglomerates, the business groups, the soccer groups they owned, the different interests each of the newspaper owners had, going three to four levels deep and with some history attached. That was already interesting. Then he proceeded to focus on some news and how they were being covered by the different newspapers, he would read the title and then the body of the article out loud, focusing on some keywords that he had underlined. He would then read the same piece of news in the second newspaper, which might not be on page 1, maybe on page 3, and do the same. Then, the third and fourth newspaper. As he did this with the first piece of news, it was already apparent how the same newsworthy situation had been covered so distinctly, then he started pointing out the keywords again, how a simple word, a comma or exclamation point, a break in the sentence, the inclusion or removal of a certain word, an adjective… this, while connecting why all these seemingly arbitrary, perhaps unintended choices were, in fact, very intentional, meticulously aligned with the ownership and positioning of each newspaper. There was nothing wrong per se with any of it, it was all really about choices, but all these choices were there by design. I remember that I was not the only one having a rude wakeup call about something that should be obvious to all (I was 40+ at the time), that everything we read/ listen to in the news requires an understanding of business context and requires asking questions and exploring alternative stories. I’ve never forgotten this morning exercise, and it led me to two behaviors that have guided me since then, 1) if all news are subject to an agenda, I’ll stick with news aligned with an agenda that resonates more with me, 2) for every piece of news you listen/ read, ask yourself what might be the agenda and imagine alternative ways of telling that same story.

On my way to work listening to my morning news, a story about the fact that it was discovered that some/ many/ all of the autonomous car companies have in fact people somewhere connected and connecting with the cars when something goes wrong, if there is a traffic jam cause by something that was not there yesterday. In this case, these people ‘drive’ the autonomous cars out of the mess they might have gotten into. The news underlined that the companies did not reveal how many remote drivers they had, where they might be located, etc. The reporter ‘driving’ the news stated that this was different from what the companies repeatedly stated about autonomous cars and that, the existence of these remote drives would in fact be like hiring drivers and that this was something probably not being revealed as part of the business model and investment. Fair enough, it is a reasonable perspective, and if I was an investor in those companies, if this had not been revealed to me, I’d be worried (could also mean shoddy work from my part as an investor…). If I am a UBER driver that has their work being taken away by these so-called autonomous cars, I’d use this to accuse these companies of finding a work around them. Lawyers and regulators might also be very interested in this.

But then I started thinking that, as a passenger, the idea that these cars can resort to a person when something goes wrong is probably reassuring. Knowing a bit about technology, there is a maturity curve, and no revolution of this sorts happens without a lot of ‘humans in the loop’, the machine learning programs and algorithms require many, many hours of human interaction and intervention before they perform well, and this is not even taking account safety concerns if there are no humans in the loop. No new technology that is truly revolutionary fits neatly into a profit-making plan, investors in this type of ventures know this. I played in my head with all the different angles and messages possible for just this piece of news, the more innovation/ tech optimist angle, the more human/ ethical angle. This is a muscle I don’t need to go to the gym to train, I can do it anywhere I listen to the news, love it.

How hidden humans help self-driving cars navigate city streets | The Seattle Times