On this, the penultimate show of 2023, Chris and Matt answer audience questions about the year ahead…

Automatically created transcript…

Matt: at the beginning of 2023 on show 248 no less if you want to go back and listen to it. We did an episode where we thought about what might be the things that a CIO or a CTO might be being asked about in the year ahead.

So we’re going to start with a question from Mr. Chris King, who in his inimitable style asks, Review your predictions for 2023 and own your poor judgments, you cowards. Not so much a question as a statement. We’ve all seen those ones when people stand up at the bit where they’re supposed to be asking questions at events.

Anyway, Chris, we are going to go. Step by step through what we said in that first show at the beginning of the year that we thought would be important topics for Technology management in this year and see how well we did First up artificial intelligence and we said that you should probably start really playing with it with some seriousness How do you think we did on that Chris?

Chris: Well, I think we did pretty well in as much as everything is now, , AI, crazy, isn’t it? I’m not entirely sure we knew that LLMs were about to be launched upon the world and create such, , havoc. But, do you know what? I’ll take that as a win, Matt. You know, I think we were right.

Matt: Yep, I think so. The next one hybrid working,, and our conclusion was that this was something you just needed to be able to work out how to do.

, because if you hadn’t by now, then you’re in real trouble. Interesting one, this, with , continuing calls from large organisations to be able to return to the office. , but I saw some, , analysis that was from the US market that said now that return to office is pretty much flat lined. So as much returning to the office is going to happen has happened.

What do you make of it?

Chris: I would agree, you know, that’s, it’s kind of, you know the pendulum’s going to swing back. , but I’m going to, I’m going to mix my metaphors horribly as usual. So the, , genie was out of the bottle after COVID, wasn’t it? A lot of the things that stopped us working from home or working remotely, , because it just wouldn’t work, , actually did work to a, to a point and people found ways around the problems.

And I always. said that it was, it was like the elastic would pull back, but the elastic has been overstretched. He’s never going to go back to his original. point, but, but it always feels like it’s going back because you, as you, as you head towards the, what was the status quo, everybody then decides it’s going to go exactly that way it came from.

Well, it never does. So I think , the Hooke’s law, if that’s the thing that I remember from my physics in school, I think the Hooke’s law thing has been, tested and, and the hybrid thing is really important because guess what? We aren’t. All in the office all the time.

More of us are at home or working remotely. And more of us are working from locations other than a head office. So, finding ways to combine those people who are in the office and people who aren’t in the office, or aren’t in, you know, a dedicated company office, continues to be the challenge. And I don’t think we’re far wrong with that, Matt

, The next one that we were talking about was the looming recession, and how do you recession improve yourselves? So, what do you think?

Matt: It feels like we’ve been waiting for the recession all year, and whilst it hasn’t arrived, it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s gone away. And I’ve seen from a number of points, and particularly talking to freelance people, this year has been absolutely horrible.

, actually just in the last few days, I’ve seen people who were very successful freelance consultants, thought leaders in their world and all that, and talking about how they’ve run out of savings. , so whilst technically two consecutive quarters of contraction of the economy might not have been met, it does not feel like a strong and, growing economy in which we’re operating in the UK at the moment.

It feels like nobody’s making decisions. I think that there is, in a public sector, we’ve I’ve seen a lot of, , retrenchment in spending from departments that we’ve been working with. And I think that’s a, common thing. , and it also feels like there’s a kind of waiting for the new government thing.

And, and I don’t think that’s just public sector. I think in private sector as well, there’s that kind of. Something’s got to change, but we don’t know what it is, but we’ll just wait for a bit, shall we? And it’s a very, very hard market to be in.

Chris: ,

I’d definitely reflect that in terms of, I think, at the start of the year, one of my, , strategic planning Axioms was to say, look, everybody’s going to want to do more with less.

Everybody’s going to need to save money, be more efficient. I mean, of course, we all try to do that all the time, right? But this is going to be really important because I thought a recession was almost certain. , as you say, technically it hasn’t happened, but I think the way I would describe the business, , outlook this year and the market generally has been soft.

So projects have started or they’ve been mooted and then the budget has been approved in organisations and then it’s been unapproved. So you’ve seen quite a lot of people, and I’ve heard from quite a lot of people who, I’ve applied for jobs this year and got the jobs or I got through to the next stage or whatever and then everything goes quiet and then it turns out that the job has gone away.

And that’s really frustrating as a, as you know, if you’re a job seeker, especially if you’ve kind of mentally checked out of wherever you are or maybe you don’t have a job, it’s Really terrible. So I, I’ve seen a lot of that and I’ve seen a lot of people blaming recruitment teams or whatever. But guess what?

Recruiters don’t get paid until they play somebody. And for recruiters to have to go through that process as well, to interview a whole bunch of people, put people forward and then suddenly the job goes away. It’s just as, it’s just as annoying for them. So yeah, the market has been soft. The, the ability to make decisions of organizations has been kind of questionable.

And I really can’t see that changing in the short term simply because as you say, there are some unknowns going on, , in terms of the political landscape. So, so yeah, I think we’ve still got that. How do we keep costs down? How do we change our business models? How do we, , just act in a more, you know, faster and leaner and more effectively?

I think that that’s just going to be a continuing pressure for.

Matt: So the next one that we had was about the metaverse. And we concluded at the beginning of the year that 2023 was probably going to be the year when the metaverse didn’t really do very much. That feels like a reasonably prescient prediction.

Chris: The what a verse was it? What was it? I mean You bought , a headset didn’t you? And they are really cool, right? The, the, what was it called?

Matt: The, um, Oculus. Well no, it’s the, uh, the, oh dear, see I can’t even remember the name of it. It’s the, the, the Oculus, but it’s not the Oculus, it’s the Meta. Because they re branded it.

Chris: Whatever, it’s, it’s, but, but, do you know what? It’s really good, isn’t it?

Matt: It’s great.

How much have you used it in the last three months?

Every so often I will put power into it to be able to update the software on it. And then I’ll put it on my head for about half an hour and then I’ll take it off again.

Although, actually, interestingly, one of my coffees in the last week, 131 and counting, , was with somebody who works for Mural. And he was talking about some of the work that they’re doing with Meta around platforms for collaboration and collaborative working and what you would do on a whiteboard, but in virtual space.

And really interestingly, what he was talking about was one of my big criticisms of the whole Meta collaborative workspace in virtual reality is it’s just like, And what’s the point in having just right reality when you don’t have the constraints of things like gravity? From what he was describing that they’re doing at the moment, it sounds like some of that is being worked on and bankrolled. The question will be whether enough will be able to be continued to be able to put into that for it to sustain without any revenue from it whatsoever.

Because I can’t see revenue coming in 2024 either.

Chris: Yeah, it’s a real gamble, all of that, because people’s habits are hard to change. , and even though the technology is really cool, it’s not compelling enough in terms of what you can do with it. wHether that changes in the next 12 to 18 months is another matter.

I don’t think so, but I think we were right last year, Matt. Indeed. And the last one was, we, we were talking about China, Matt. We said that, , that should be on our risk register in terms of, I guess, um, I’m trying to remember why we thought China was going to be on our risk register, but I guess through either, use of intellectual property or, you know, the expansion of the Alibabas and, , you know, the Baidus and those kind of organizations.

Matt: Yeah, and I mean the other big thing was the way in which the U. S. banned the use of American technology by Chinese firms, so people like Huawei who, I was reading their latest smartphone, the P60 or something, has, satellite calling built in. You know, the Huawei make incredible mobile phones.

Unfortunately, they’re not allowed to use Google software. So therefore they have incredible phones with no software. And that’s their problem at the moment. , I think, China is as much of a risk and a threat and a challenge. And is this, massive, manufacturing base of all sorts of stuff.

It’s interesting how you’re seeing increasing things like, , Chinese brand, , vehicles on the roads. It’s the way in which Chinese stuff is increasingly creeping into our day to day life as opposed to Chinese manufactured stuff with Western brands on it. And, , I think really in the last year, the combination of the continuing conflict in Ukraine and then what’s been happening in the Middle East has To some extent, diverted attention away from China, but it’s still a big lumbering threat to who knows what.

, because everything that we seem to consume is made there these days.

Chris: Yeah, that’s right. You know, as you say, the world, , geopolitics has changed, hasn’t it? So, we probably missed out on that one as much as it wasn’t the big issue that we thought it might be. But as you say, that may be just other stars have shone brighter, , this year.

Matt: Right, so having hopefully shown, , some credentials in not being able to make complete arses of ourselves, , for , the year that has gone, let’s have a think about the year ahead and maybe some of the things that might be happening there. With obviously the big, big illuminated caveat that past performance is not an indication of future performance.

, so the first question we’ve got comes from a friend of the show, Lisa Remers. And it is this. I have heard some horror stories of people using LLMs to fill out job applications, which look great at a distance, but lack the specificity needed. Real examples or well, any sort of reassurance is not a pack of lies.

But with applicant tracking systems also auto rejecting things without the keywords, how can we fix the job application process?

Chris: Well, okay. You know, this is, comes pretty much straight to that point that you often make Matt about us heading towards a time when we’ve got AI writing stuff for AI to read and there’s nobody in the middle of it.

But I think this does hit another point. And again, I’ve talked about, just talked about recruitment, a lot of recruitment, especially the kind of cheap and nasty recruitment does use tools, applicant tracking systems to then just. Whizz through keywords and figure out, you know, which app, which application should be surfaced to the top.

And if you are using pretty dumb systems to do that, then people will game it. They’ll know that that happens and they’ll just game it. So it’s kind of not surprising that people would then use tools to make that easier. The question we’ve got to ask ourselves is when we And I would like to think that our recruitment team is, , a better recruitment team.

Focused on outcomes more than just lobbying CVS at the wall until one sticks. , and I would hope that what that will do is it will drive out the, the bad recruitment and the bad recruiters and the people who don’t add any value beyond. Having a portal that people can apply to and the real recruiters that understand the market that can give advice that can really help to get the right person to fill a role will actually maybe be more valued, right?

So,, to fix the job application process, we’ve got to be just got to value the job, right? If you don’t value the role enough to try and put the right person into it. And if you think of it just as filling a gap, I think , that’s part of the problem. But maybe, , the way that AI is going, the way that LLMs are going and that these tools are heading, they’re actually removing some of those roles that actually could be filled by anybody.

And it’s the, experience and wisdom and knowledge and analytical ability of people that, that will be more valuable. So maybe, yeah, maybe this comes full circle and it, it all works out. Or maybe I’m just a hopeless optimist. What do you think?

Matt: Possibly the hopeless optimism. I think that the, the year ahead in the next few years, this, so the thing, and I’ve written about this recently actually, that the, , the idea that we have a world which is consisting of interactions and transactions, and the interactions cannot be scaled in anything other than a linear .

fashion because they represent interaction between two people and transactions can be scaled in a exponential way because they are purely mathematical constructs and and so on and so the example i’ve always given is that if you go to tiffin is to buy an engagement ring that’s a good example of a very high touch interaction and if you buy that same ring on the internet that turns it into a transaction and what you lose along the way is a bunch of social and cultural significance And if you’re getting married and you choose the latter over the former, you will notice the difference in cultural, , and social value.

At the moment, it might change over time, but people don’t think about this stuff. Anyway, what I think we’re starting to see with the way in which, natural language processing and, the generation of content through, , Artificial intelligence type technologies is actually a simulation of interaction.

Now a CV, the point of a CV was never as a data transmission protocol. It was part of the dance of recruitment and it was actually something that somebody gave to somebody else. But what has happened at scale already is the applicant tracking systems and all the gizmos have been stuck into those have removed much of the interaction and it’s led to a world where people think that you don’t need those interactions for people to be able to recruit.

I can think of one of my clients in particular this year who believed that and thought they could just do their own recruitment with one HR person and LinkedIn. And they have spent months and months and months and months not finding candidates because it is so much more than that. But this isn’t just a question about recruitment for me.

I think that we will see loads of examples where, because it’s easier just to automate the existing process and to be able to actually think about fundamentals, we will end up with AI talking to AI and madness will ensue. And we will see this in all sorts of places. And for the year ahead, this is where it’s going to start.

And I just hope there are enough of us saying this is insane. Stop it immediately for us to not get into a world where it won’t be that we will have, , a super intelligence that we can’t control. It will be that we will have mass loads of stupid that we can no longer control. And we’ve already seen that, you know, things like financial markets.

, we have mass loads through high. Frequency trading and whatever, and we’ve had a number of instances over the years now where stupidity at scale has almost collapsed the entire global economy. And it’s that stuff where previously it was only applied to things that were about numbers, but are now going to get applied to things that traditionally have been about interaction between people that we need to be really, really wary of in the next few years and in the next year in particular.

Chris: Cool. So. Having knocked that one , , into the basket. Let’s move on to the next one. So this is, , John Wilshire. We’re still talking LLMs here. Matt and John, , has got an example that he’s picked up from the internet, , about what It’s called an SEO heist, so search engine optimization heist using AI, where apparently these people, they exported a sitemap from a competitor’s website, they turned all their URLs into article titles, they created a couple of thousand articles from those titles using AI, so a bunch of thousand , worthless crap, I suppose, but you know, enough to then bend the, the, the light of, the search engines towards them.

And, and apparently 18 months later they’ve stolen 3.6 million total traffic, 490,000 k. Monthly traffic, I guess those are visits or visitors or something. So John said, in the light of LLMs being used to hack the web in that way, what becomes of the concept that we think of the web in 2028 24? At what point is it just bots writing for bots?

So

Matt: I think it has been for years. I think if you look at the whole world of search engine optimisation and the particular form of this that annoys me more than anything else. I don’t really look at recipe books these days. I go onto the internet and search for recipes and there are good reputable sources of recipes like BBC Good Food and Jamie Oliver and various other places where you start with the list of ingredients And then you can work out from that whether it’s worth looking at.

However, the internet is stuffed to the gills of recipes that start off with about 2, 000 words of preamble talking about what it is that they were doing on the day when they thought about this recipe and yadda yadda yadda and it goes on and on and on and you have to scroll through pages and pages and pages of absolute guff.

Before you get to the actual recipe because those pages and pages of guff are then loaded with adverts and those adverts are where this website gets his money from and that’s fine, except it means that it’s an awful experience because it is exactly this. It is nonsense content that has been generated Possibly by bots, or they possibly by people acting with the intelligence of bots following horribly algorithmic kind of ways of thinking to create content that is there to enable as much advertising space to be sold as possible, but not in the way that newspapers and magazines used to do it, which was to have compelling content, but just by having loads of swarth that you have to be able to try to pick through.

And the idea that the internet is not already full of this stuff. I think is quite preposterous. It’s been full of this stuff for as long as people have been selling advertising space at scale on the internet and it’s got worse and worse and worse and worse and will bots make it worse? Yes, of course it will.

Would it mean that we’ll get to a point where we can’t actually find anything useful? Possibly. And that’s where it gets interesting, because I think maybe what the search engines need to do to be able to try to help you get to content that isn’t just bot created swarf. Because if you want bot created swarf about a subject, just go to ChatGPT and ask for it, you know, at the time you need it, rather than going to a webpage that’s been published already.

I’ve gone into angry old man mode now.

Chris: You really have. , I mean, which is what I do with recipes actually, because I don’t, uh, I don’t go to recipes anymore. I, I look in the, in the fridge and say, okay, I’ve got half a, half a bit of garlic and some cheese and , some onions and, and then I’ll go to the chat and I’ll go, right, this is what I’ve got.

What can I make?

Matt: And it was like a trip to the supermarket.

Chris: It’s quite good at that. It will come up with something. And I’ve got a slow cooker and I’ve got these things. What can I do? I think you’re right. I think that it has been like this for some time, but it’s getting worse. And it just depends on the way you look at the web, isn’t it?

I think Google has got worse over the years. I think Twitter or whatever you call it now. It’s pretty much unusable these days. I mean, it’s just no fun. So, I think we just end up moving to different places, right?

So, I use Blue Sky a lot more these days. Probably as much as I use Twitter. And that’s quite a nice place to go. It’s still not got quite as much content as Twitter. And the kind of people, , that are on Twitter aren’t always on something like Blue Sky. But enough of the kind of people I want to hear from are.

Right? So that, that makes it a much more valuable experience now. And the only reason I go to Twitter is because it’s still where a lot of the sort of news organizations, etc. are post. But yeah, I think, you know, it’s, it’s an interesting, , proposition

we’re getting computers to write things for other computers to read. , but I do think when you do that, actually very quickly becomes obvious that there’s very little value in it. And then the people that. start to do something slightly different are the ones that get the value from it. My son, for example, who’s at college, he uses GPT all the time and he uses it as a kind of learning assistant really.

He’s doing his college course and the, the, the tutor will say, can you do this, right? Do a presentation about, you know, how marketing is used in business or whatever. And he’ll use GPT. But he’s seen daft people use GPT and essentially just copy and paste the output into a presentation and then come unstuck when they get asked about it.

He knows that what he’s got to do is use it as a structure, you know, for a structure, ask it some refining questions, ask it to explain some of the stuff he doesn’t understand, and actually use it. To learn, right? And, and sometimes you’ll come unstuck doing that, but then again sometimes you can come unstuck going to Wikipedia,

sometimes, even when you and I were younger, Matt, and if you had to, find something out, you might look in a book, , Sometimes you look at a book, and actually, the book would be 30 years old, and when you actually tend to talk about it, your, the knowledge you’ve got would be completely out of date because you just read the wrong book.

It’s, you know, it’s, it’s always been possible to be wrong. You just need to cultivate your judgement so you are less likely to be wrong.

Matt: So another question, I think, sort of in this field as well from Elias Williams, um, who asks about the commoditization of software.

He asks the barriers to writing software are getting lower and being accelerated. wHat do we think the impact that this could have on things like software as a service businesses, development shops, consulting and in house development teams?

Chris: I think it’s a similar answer as well, right, in as much as this has happened a lot in the last few years.

When I was, when I were a lad, what we used to call programming before we were coders, , you would sit down and you would write code from first principles, really. You wouldn’t have much to go on. You might have a manual or something, or a book of words we used to call it, which is like, you know, the function guide of the language you’re using and it would have little snippets of code to explain how the function works, so you might use that as your starting point and then build from there.

And then, one marvellous day, you get Usenet and you start to ask newsgroups, you have newsgroups where programmers would , congregate and you’d say, oh, how, does anybody know how we do this, or has anybody got, and some people might then supply a bit of snippet of code. And then, a few years ago. Things like Stack Overflow came around, and we got a lot more code that was being shared.

A lot more examples that could be used, and we were reusing software more, code libraries started to appear. We were, that’s, that’s accelerated coding, no end, right? And, but you’ve also, also ended up with people not really understanding how the program they’ve written works, even though it does.

They can compile it and sort of put the seal on it and then just run away and hope it never goes wrong because they don’t actually know how it works. And I think it’s just an extension of that. It’s great that some of the more, you know, the easier bits of coding, which are just a bit of a grind, can be taken away by things like LLMs and advanced software.

But if you asked an LLM or For an AI system to write a complex piece of software, you’d really want to look at it before you pass it off because, you know, that’s so risky to just give it to somebody else to do, who can’t explain how it works or you’re going to use it just to accelerate the, easy stuff and then, and then add your own value on top.

So for me. It’s just the continuation. Software gets more and more complex. So we’re barely keeping up with the increasing complexity of software, frankly. So I don’t think it’s going to change that much. What about you?

Matt: , I think I would advise you to listen to next week’s show when we’ve got Lewis Crawford, who’s a colleague of mine, who has been doing some experiments recently building virtual software development teams in AI environments.

So actually, just experiments is not to replace developers yet, but being able to set up agents that act as a team and being able to get them to be able to build things and what he’s been finding through doing that is absolutely fascinating., we’ll talk about this on the show more next week.

Chris: Okay, so we’ve got another question from , Nick Drage, who asked us about what technology will have AI levels of impact on common discourse in 2024, regardless of its actual effectiveness?

Is web 3 due a comeback?

Matt: , I think that the technology which will have aI levels of impact on common discord in 2024 is going to be AI. I think we’ve got another year of this at least. , I’m picking up on his point about, you know, the regardless of actual effectiveness, there’s definitely useful stuff that you can do with AI technologies that are around at the moment.

, but there are huge, great gaps in them becoming. properly operationalized and being able to put in to organizations to be able to do things that will deliver, large scale value. At the moment they’re delivering value to software companies because they’re being used as a way to be able to sell more software.

, if you think about how long it takes for organizations to be able to make change happen, the idea that LLMs and the like are going to accelerate the ability for organizations to implement change, I think is really quite. optimistic to say the least. , ,

Chris: I would say also, from my point of view, now, common discourse might mean, you know, down the pub, I’m not entirely sure we’re talking about that level, but I think automation is getting to the point where, and again, I think it’s the impact of the vendor, really.

I think Microsoft, that low code stuff, the Power Platform, what I kind of call tactical automation, where people can just automate a small bit of their process. The kind of thing that people used to call me up for when I was an IT manager, and 20 years ago, and they’d say, no, Chris, this is really, it takes me three days to produce this report.

Can’t we do something about it? And I would then spend. A couple of weeks working with them and then they would have a report that they could run in 10 minutes and it would save them, genuinely save them days and days of work. And that was great. Used to, I used to enjoy it, used to make their lives much, much, much easier.

, but they had to come to somebody like me to do it and we still kind of have to do that to a, to an extent. And the idea that you can then take to somebody, you know, here’s a tool,

, I read something, , around, , I think it was Austin, , who, some engineers who had to get an email and that is take the email and transcribe the email into their head.

ERP system. I think it was an SAP system before they could start work on something. And this was like the morning job and it was the job that they really hated it ’cause it was just a re-keying job. And then they automated it, , for a fairly naughty tool. And that to me is a nice, is, is a little bit of tactical automation.

It would never get automated from the top down. It would never be something as part of a big digital transformation project. But actually, if you are , an end user with a, a bit of drudge that you can automate away. With a few hours work and maybe a few pointers from somebody. Suddenly that’s massive because everybody can do it.

And will that happen this year? Don’t know. But I think it’s on the horizon. I think that kind of tactical automation thing where you’re not trying to solve one massive bottleneck, but you are continually Shifting smaller bottlenecks. I’ve just got to hunch that’s on, that’s what’s going to be big.

Matt: Also makes me think though, which year will it be where bad data becomes the public discourse?

Because a lot of this stuff depends on the idea that your data is reasonably in a good state. How many organizations data is in a good enough state to be able to leave automation to machines and machines alone.

Chris: Well, I don’t know. I think maybe it’s that big transformational top down automation that requires data to be in a good state.

Because when you’re getting down to that lower level, that’s where the people, they’ve kind of come up with ways to manage bad data because they deal with it all the time. They get an email from somebody, they kind of go, oh no, they didn’t mean that, they didn’t mean this. Right. And they, and, and they kind of build their own process in for managing that. Because at the end of the day. We can keep saying, oh, we need our data caught to show people to wear blue in the face, but unless there’s a really good incentive for lots of people to act upon that, it’s not really going to happen. We kind of have to accept that sometimes we’re just going to have to deal with it. And that’s part of the process, is dealing with the fact that we know we’re going to have bad data.

And at least if you understand what can be bad and what’s likely to be bad, you can put systems in to mitigate it.

Matt: I suppose that the challenge will be in a world that feels increasingly like it has become binary, that something is right or wrong, left or right, red or blue, , where you have that necessity to understand that the answers might be fuzzy, or one of my favorite things at the moment is when somebody says, is it X or is it Y and pointing out that it could be both at the same time and that’s a perfectly valid answer.

I don’t know whether the constructs in which some of these technologies are going to be placed, say like making a decision about whether somebody should have asylum granted or not. Let’s automate that, stick some data into it. Bish bash bosh and we’re away. Those kind of decisions are not simple, they’re not binary and if you’re just relying on a black box that pops out an answer at the end that’s where it gets worrying for me.

Chris: Yeah, so I’ve got a plan now for my next project, which will be my best selling book, Embrace the Purple. Right, so it’s not blue and it’s not red. Embrace the Purple.

Matt: I’ve got one question that’s sort of out on its own a little bit, but I thought it was interesting to be able to ask. It’s from an anonymous listener. , How do you go about shifting a broad company culture to one where people put their cameras on by default in remote or hybrid meetings? Our little part of the company does this by default, but in the wider group, large meetings are seas of avatars.

People want to work flexibly, but then don’t show up when they do. I know there’s a neurodiversity angle to this, but is there also a neurotypical argument to be made for most of the population? Am I wrong to pursue it? Should I just let it go? What do you reckon?

Chris: I think my, , opinion on this has changed over time, and once upon a time I was beating people up to put their cameras up and say, come on, just, you know, get with it.

And, we’re all, better off if we can see each other. And actually I think I’ve probably toned that down a bit recently , because I do think that everybody’s different and people do have, you know, reasons for not Wanting to have their camera on sometimes they’re good reasons.

Sometimes they’re not, I think it is down to the individual. I had a couple of conversations with somebody quite recently. Somebody I don’t know very well. , but they were quite in depth conversations. And when we started, he said, look, do you mind if we turn our cameras off? This is because.

I’ve been doing this , , face to face and , when I do it on teams, I find it’s just too distracting to be staring at the other person all the time. , and when you’re in a, in a physical location, you don’t necessarily look at this, like gawp at the other person all the time. So we did that and we did that on two separate occasions. Actually, I thought it was really odd at first, but I could see the value in it. And as much as I was concentrating on the conversation and the words, not trying to read the expression or the innermost thoughts of the person at the other end and looking for their reaction, and, you know, I think maybe let it go. But what about you?

Matt: See, I’ve gone the other way. I would have said each to their own and all that a few years ago. Now I’d say, would you allow somebody to walk into all meetings and stick a paper bag over their head?

No, you wouldn’t. Okay? So, I think that there is something more problematic, though, if you’ve got a culture where people default to turning cameras off. And You don’t have to stare at each other all the time. The one thing I would say though, is that often when you ask people why do you not want the camera on, it’s because I don’t like looking at myself.

And I find it really interesting that the tools that we have don’t make it immediately obvious how to turn off your own camera view. It’s quite hard to find that setting. And then there’s some tools, like the one that we’re using to record this, where you can’t turn your own camera off at all. And that’s a bit odd, because in a meeting room, I don’t know if you’ve ever been into a meeting where you’ve been sitting opposite a mirror,

so in a restaurant or places where there are mirrors on walls, I cannot stand ceilings or no, no, no, no, it’s a different thing. , but I cannot stand being in a room where I can see myself in a mirror. And that’s exactly the same thing that’s going on with being, on a teams or a zoom or a meet call and seeing your own image and the camera completely get that.

Turn your camera, self view off. But no, I, think that there’s, there’s something going wrong in a culture of people predominantly don’t have their cameras on.

Chris: That’s very interesting. I mean, some would say, I personally, it’s a bit of a bonus for me to see myself whilst I’m talking

Matt: to other people. But, um, I

Chris: could understand that maybe some other people would think

Matt: Think not, faces already.

Interestingly, we did try a tool to record this for a while some years ago, which didn’t have camera view. But we found it very difficult to be able to do this without being able to see each other.

And particularly when we’ve got a guest, we’re able, I think, to be able to signal to each other without making big gesticulations when it’s somebody else’s turn to ask a question or any of that. And I don’t think we can do this recording unless we’ve got video.

Chris: Let’s quickly move on to our next one. We’ve got a question from Steve Parks, our favorite marketing agency guru. And he’s talking about the fact that it’s election year in the US and the UK, and asks what part would the changed and changing landscape play in shaping the campaign’s coverage and results this time?

Some previous campaigns have seen a new generation of civic tech and entrepreneurs. And what might we see come back to tech from the campaigns this year?

Matt: So, it’s going to be interesting having election campaigns without a meaningful Twitter. , It’s certainly for me for the last, I, I, I’ve started using Twitter I think in 2009, so 2010 election it was very nascent, 2015 it was very much part of it, 2019 it went a bit batshit, , and I, I, I look at Twitter a few times a day now but I’m not posting on there at all now and to not have The political discourse on there is going to be interesting.

I don’t really look at Facebook very much anymore. It’s going to be interesting to see because quite a lot of my, social media uses now migrated into LinkedIn. It’s going to be interesting to see whether there is politics on LinkedIn for the elections. Politics generally. is reasonably frowned upon still, I think, on LinkedIn.

But when there’s a general election at play, it will be interesting to see how that one pans out. Politicians do use it, and you do get occasionally incredibly misjudged, , pieces of social media stuff going out on LinkedIn by politicians. , there is then the emergence of video. So for the last few years, video has been the big growth area.

I think politicians have got a fantastic opportunity to make enormous arses of themselves with TikTok in particular and no doubt many of them will.

And the other thing that I is going to be really interesting is the way in which so much So the social network stuff has gone more private and it’s gone private in groups in WhatsApp in groups in signal and so on and those are not penetrable by , traditional advertising mechanisms, political parties, and so will they find ways to be able to kind of socially engineer their messages into private groups, because I think those are going to be important places of influence in some instances, although they might just be, , groups of people who all have the same sorts of views.

I’m thinking of things like, you know, WhatsApp street groups and that kind of stuff. I think it’s going to be interesting because of the way in which particularly Shifter video and the collapse of Twitter and how that will play out for electioneering.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s now a part of the political game, isn’t it?

And are people out there who track the spend by political parties in social media. There are people like WhoTargetsMe, so that’s sort of an extension you can put on your browser, your Chrome browser, that will then, it basically looks to understand who’s targeting your feed on Facebook from political parties, and they sort of generate, they gather lots of data about that.

, When we had the by election here in Tamworth, , a few weeks back. I mean, I don’t use YouTube a lot, but every time I went on it, I seemed to get an advert from the Labour, , candidate. So I think YouTube and those sort of channels, Instagram, are being used, and will be used. I think Facebook is actually quite an interesting one at the moment, just because of the demographic.

It’s not really a channel that kids use very much, you know, I think if you’re under Probably Facebook isn’t a thing that you use. It’s used by quite a lot of people who are older and even older than you and I Matt. And that’s your voting demographic. So I reckon Facebook in terms of advertising and trying to target is still important.

But I do think that we’ve got over that kind of madness of the Cambridge Analytica and the idea that you can. micro target people and, and, you know, really, really make a difference in elections. I think, I think, going back to that data quality thing, I just don’t think we’ve got the information as much as we pretend we have.

I don’t think we’ve got the information or the tooling to say to make that much of a difference. I think the Cambridge Analytica thing personally was a bit of a beat up. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the next thing that will come along will be, will prove me wrong.

Matt: Yeah, it’s an interesting question, isn’t it?

Because, , being able to target micro demographics is definitely what the online advertisers or the online advertising platforms will claim to be able to give you. The question is, can you identify the right demographic to which you need to push your messages? The other interesting thing for me, I don’t get very much election literature through the door because we’re in a safe Lib Dem seat, the Tories don’t bother and Labour definitely don’t bother.

, will I actually see anything at all? Will I even notice there is an election on from the advertising that’s pushed in front of me? That would be a good indication about whether targeting is working or not.

Chris: Oh yeah. I do think that if you look at, like, that psychological view, , that the swing seats, you know, the, real kind of crunch seats are going to probably attract a great deal more.

Matt: You are not gonna be able to move for the stuff. ’cause although there’s a big minority, you know, that’s very much a swing seat that you are in.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. It will be. I mean, the, the, the conservatives will be ex hoping to win this back at the general election. , labor will wanna hang onto it, so there’ll be a few seats that get a lot more focus.

, it will be left down to the, , individual conservative associations or constituent labor parties or whatever the Libs call themselves. in the areas to do that. They’re, they’re individual. And it’ll just be down to how much money they’ve got locally. So, yeah, again, another, another interesting evolution of our politics.

Matt: And to the second part of Steve’s question, do you think there’s going to be anything that will come back from these election campaigns back into technology or into the, to the broader business world?

Chris: I think that’s a really difficult question. , I think what we’ve seen quite a lot of what Steve calls Civic Tech.

In previous election campaigns in the UK, but I cannot honestly say I’ve seen anything come out of it that’s, kind of entrepreneurial or made a, made a big difference. I might be wrong, but I might be missing something, but, but that’s not something on my horizon.

Matt: So, the last question of this, the last AskWB40 of 2023.

And, , from, , one of our recent ish guests, Jarnel Chudge. , There are many challenges and wicked problems that the world is facing, and more and more people raising questions about the ability of the current and prevailing, and or prevailing models and systems of commerce to respond to them, regardless of the belief by the tech bros in their domination of the technology landscape.

So, the question to you. Matt and Chris is, what do you think that each person could do that would make a difference from anywhere and everywhere in the world?

Chris: Well, difficult question. , short answer is, you know, we’ve got a massive problem in as much as there’s going to be mass migration on the planet in the next 10, 20 years. Lots of it driven by climate change. , we’ve got to do something about that. And it’s a big problem, but we can do something about it. In our own way, we can push for the things that we use, the things that, the services we use, the companies we work with to manage their impact on the environment.

So for example, We’re building in, , the green, , software foundation,, principles into our software development, , process, , low carbon cloud, things like that, where you run your loads at what time at which data centers around the world, it can make a difference. So I think.

You know what, we’ve all got our little things that we can do in our, um, in our roles and in our lives. And it is just about trying to find the thing that you can do.

Matt: Know what you’ve got some ability to be able to influence in whatever small sort of way you can and take that opportunity to do it.

, which, , I think you and I both try to be able to do our bit for what we can when we can. And, so stay tuned for a bit more on that for what we’ll be doing in 2024. There’s, , something afoot, but not until next year.

Chris: So there we are, Matt. We’ve made yet another rod for our backs for next year. Let’s see how that goes. but let’s think maybe a little nearer to now. What’s your next week like?

Matt: Uh, apart from the, the worky stuff as we start to close out the calendar year, , I will be attending, , Vicarage Road. to watch Watford play football for the first time this season.

I know I’m a total fair weather these days, but there we go. I’m taking both of my children to the, to the match, , assuming that they both,, hold true to their promise. And, um, so what’s been a very successful run over the last couple of months is almost certainly going to come to an end. Which would be fun.

Apart from that, we have, , we have a meeting, just picking up on the last point from the last question, we have a meeting Monday, a week today, which will be to explore some of these ideas we’ve got for the show in the new year. And, other than that, I have a relatively kind of calm week as we taxi, inevitably, into the Christmas break.

How about you?

Chris: Yeah, I’m not going very far this week. I’ve got a little few little things to do. , it’s going to be, it’s going to be another busy week with work. I’ve got still got to finish off some decorating. ,

Matt: And, but is it the actual fourth bridge you’re decorating? Is it?

Chris: Oh, listen, believe me, if I could do any quicker, I would.

I’m not an expert at decorating. , it does take me a while. And. , this week, there’s quite a lot going on, but it’s kind of head down, ass up kind of thing, so I think it’s going to be one of those weeks that goes by fairly quickly and then it’ll be on to the weekend again, so I don’t, I have a very boring answer for this one, this

Matt: time.

That’s fair enough, you know. , Well, we’ll be back for the last show of 2023, , next. Monday, , when we’re going to be all to plan, going to be meeting with Lewis Crawford to talk about virtualized software development teams in the world of AI, which should be fascinating if not slightly scary, , until then, thank you for joining us and we will be back next week.

Chris: Thank you for listening to WB40. You can find us on always on the internet at WB40podcast. com. , And on all good podcasting platforms as ever. Tell your friends about us. We’ll go to your local park. Scroll WB40 on passing dogs. Anything you can do to increase our listenership will be well rewarded.

Not rewarded now, of course, but maybe spiritually one day.

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