Cennydd Bowles: Design and Tech Ethics for Our AI Future – Episode 36

Cennydd Bowles Like most designers who work in technology, Cennydd Bowles has reflected at times on the impact of his work and its ethical implications. After a couple of decades of information architecture and interaction design practice, Cennydd stepped back from his design work to explore philosophy and ethics in depth. His explorations have led him to extensive academic study as well as speaking gigs and writing on the subject, including a book, Future Ethics. We talked about: his transition from interaction design to tech ethics his origins in the information architecture world and his career, including a stint at Twitter how we as designers have missed predictable mistakes and patterns that ethicists have long known about how he got hooked on philosophy and ethics his 2018 book on the connections between the worlds of philosophy and design, Future Ethics the ethical issues that can arise in even a seemingly harmless practice like A/B testing his prediction that AI will in the not-too-distant future permit almost fully automated product development and the risks that that brings how the difficulties of measuring trust might exacerbate the trust issues that arise with AI the "magical" nature of AI his observation that "the problem with magic is it's intentionally deceptive" a new orchestrator role that he sees coming with AI his pessimism about the prospects for humans over the long term in the AI economy how Cory Doctorow's notion of "enshittification" manifests in the design and AI world what he sees coming: "rapidly iterating mediocrity rather than considered excellence" the power, albeit diminished recently, of employees to influence ethical decision-making within organizations three books he recommends (links below) his advice to designers to listen to and connect with philosophers and learn from their prior work on ethics Cennydd's bio Cennydd Bowles is a technology ethicist and interaction designer, author of Future Ethics, and a recent Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Elon University. Cennydd’s views on the ethics of emerging technology and design have been quoted by Forbes, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal, and he has spoken on responsible innovation at Facebook, Stanford University, and Google. Connect with Cennydd online LinkedIn Cennydd.com Tech ethics books Future Ethics, Cennydd Bowles Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher Ethical Product Development, Pavani Reddy Ethics for People who Work in Tech, Marc Steen Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/MbfK7AnPa-0 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 36. In the flurry of activity launched by AI-technology investment, ethical considerations have been left largely unexplored. Cennydd Bowles is an accomplished interaction designer who has spent the last several years studying and writing and speaking about tech ethics and responsible innovation. What he sees unfolding now concerns him, leading him to predict that the near-term future is more likely to bring "rapidly iterating mediocrity rather than considered excellence." Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 36 of the Content and AI Podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Cennydd Bowles. Cennydd is a technology ethicist and interaction designer based in the UK. Welcome, Cennydd. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Cennydd: Hey, Larry. Well, so let's see. I've just got back from America, so for the last six months, I've been in Elon University, North Carolina as a Fulbright visiting scholar. This is really a large part of my transition, essentially, from the days of UX and product design within industry, and transitioning from that into academia, and particularly philosophy, philosophy of technology, and ethics of technology. Cennydd: These days, I'm now essentially figuring out what's next. I'm finishing up a master's dissertation right now on the topic of the ethics of A/B testing, which I've got a lot of experience seeing inside companies, and think maybe I can offer something about looking at the ethics of it. After that, well, probably a lot more writing, probably a book or two. Then I think I'm probably heading down the academic path, so probably a PhD in some sort of philosophy, of technology, or computer science somewhere in that kind of space. Larry: Oh, great. I'll have to check back in. I'd love to see where... Getting into the details of this. You just mentioned, well, I guess I would love to talk just a little bit more about your transition, because you've been an interaction designer for a long time. I can't remember exactly how long, but we've talked about this and a little bit about your transition, but can you talk a little bit more about what motivated you to go from interaction design into ethics? Cennydd: Yeah, you bet. Yeah, so I started off as an IA back when that term was far more sort of current, I suppose. I read the Polar Bear Book, which some of your listeners may well know. This is Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville's book. I started, I guess, in about 2002, so it's been 20 plus years that I've been designing digital products. I don't like the idea that you can design the experiences, but interaction design, UX design, whatever you want to call it, for a range of companies, a lot of consulting, a bit of freelance. Cennydd: I also worked for Twitter for three years, where I was heading up the design team in London. It was after Twitter, actually, that I started to consider, well, maybe there's something that we're missing here as a community, and maybe there's something I can offer. It wasn't that I was sort of filled with horror and revulsion for what I'd seen inside Silicon Valley. It wasn't that I looked back on my career and said, "Wow, I've made a lot of mistakes." Cennydd: Of course, I have, and a few things I wish I could have ethically questioned at the time, but then that's common for all of us. I had an interest in the topic. Just even as a teenager, I was just interested in ethics as a concept, but I have no training in it. My undergrad was in physics, I had a masters in IT as well. I didn't really have any kind of philosophical or ethical background. When I left Twitter, I had sold, I got some shares, and I sold them, not huge amounts, it was a Silicon Valley thousandaire rather than millionaire, but I didn't have to rush into the next thing. Cennydd: I could afford to say, "Okay, what do I want to do? What's going to be the next right step for me?" I thought, well, I don't want to rush into a job immediately. I want to poke at this ethics thing. I think there's something here, and I don't understand it, and maybe there's something I can do to try and raise that, the profile of ethics within the design community and the technology community. I started reading. Cennydd: I got myself a reader's card for the British Library, and I sat there, and I tried to read philosophy. That's quite hard to do without any background in it. There's a reason why it's seen as a complex topic. It took me a while to find the right types of things, but eventually, I stumbled across some work that blew me away. I thought it was just fascinating, complex, and perceptive, some of the work that I was reading by philosophers and ethicists, and also writers, and artists, and critics. Cennydd: They'd been looking at the social impact of technology for decades. What occurred to me is that we just hadn't been listening. We'd been in this space, not really heeding their advice, not really listening to some of the warnings that they might've shared, and just convinced we were the smartest people in the room, and that we would figure it out for ourselves along the way. We're not the smartest people in the room, I'm afraid. You read some of this work, and you recognize a lot of the mistakes and the patterns that you see within the modern tech industry. Cennydd: It just put its hook in me, and eventually it got to the point where I said, "Actually, I think this is the direction I want to go. I don't think I want a regular kind of mainstream type design role anymore. I think I want to see what I can do to act as a translator, essentially, between the disciplines of design, and technology, and product, and the world of philosophy." That culminated in a book which I released in 2018, which is called Future Ethics. Cennydd: Then ever since then, I've been trying my best to make a living consulting on responsible design and technology, doing some academic work, talking, writing, speaking, all that kind of stuff, to try and influence the industry, frankly, to raise its standards, to consider ethics as more central to what it does. I think I've been partially successful in that. There's definitely been a change in how those discussions are happening since 2015, '16 when I started in that space. Cennydd: I'm not saying we're anywhere near winning that particular battle, but I think we're starting to see some slow change. I think that's going to be my continued role. Larry: Nice. We were talking before we went on the air that your current study, you're working on your master's dissertation, you said, and you're working specifically on A/B testing. I wonder, that seems like a really good, is that a good lens into tech ethics in general? Cennydd: I think it can be. I think one thing that makes it a good, almost sort of microcosm of how the tech industry thinks about ethics, or fails to think about ethics, is that A/B testing is very rarely questioned as something that's commonplace. Well, of course, we A/B test everything, and I've been in companies since 2007 when we A/B tested... Not really, there hasn't been a lot of focus on, "Well, should we A/B test,