The Trust Gap

What has happened to trust in authority? And how will it change in coming generations((Zoomers, born late 90s to early 2010s, and Alphas following them))?This was what a client wanted to know on a recent consulting call. I thought it might be worth expanding on this issue here.

Trust in media

On the call with my client, I made an argument about distance. That we struggle to trust things that are distant from us, whether that is in terms of geography, class and wealth, or experience. In the last few years, we have arguably seen the distance between us in these dimensions rising. Just a few days later, I read the transcript of a debate between the journalists Matt Taibbi and Ben Bradlee Jr about the death of mainstream media. In his closing remarks, Taibbi talked about the death of local news across the US. He pointed out that the the journalists lost with local closures were much closer to their readers than the writers on the nationals. These exulted spaces are largely populated by a homogenous bunch: white, upper-class (in US terms), Ivy Leaguers.If these people share few of your experiences and values - religion, politics, culture, education - it's hard to connect with them. It is even harder to trust them. What do they know? They're likely based hundreds of miles from you. Maybe thousands. So you'll never encounter them. And they will never encounter you.

Trust in politicians

It was hard not to think about our own House of Commons when listening to Taibbi's description. Swap Oxbridge for Ivy League and you're pretty much there.The distance between government and the rest of the population can be measured in many dimensions. The first is geographic. Though we've seen moves towards devolution over the last twenty years, these have been offset by the gutting of public services at local level. The result, I would argue, is that power and spending have actually been further concentrated in London. Certainly, I think it feels that way to many.Europe may have been the target of many people's ire in the Brexit vote. But I think that was a proxy for Westminster in many cases. Easier and more appealing to believe your power has been taken away by some nebulous foreign entity than that it has been simply shifted to your own capital.And people's individual power has been taken away. Or rather the power and wealth imbalance has increased. Look at any measure of inequality in the UK and right now we are at or near 40-year highs, with the exception of the peak in the 2008/9 recession.This combination of disenfranchisement and disempowerment is one of the core theses explaining the rise of UKIP and Brexit, and Trumpism in the US, where similar phenomena are visible.

Trust in experts

If this distance in geography, power and wealth explains a lack of trust in media and politicians, what explains our lack of trust in experts? Particularly scientists. Through the pandemic I have been dismayed by the scale of conspiracy belief, anti-mask and anti-vaccination protests. I wonder if this doesn't also come down to some form of distance.This is just a theory, so take with the appropriate care. But it feels to me as if the gap between common understanding and expert knowledge has increased significantly over the last few decades. Take physics, for example. Most of the physics that powered our world until the digital revolution was Newtonian. It all operated within the bounds of things we could see and feel. If you could understand an explosion, you could grasp the basics of a combustion engine, or even a rocket ship. Now most of the physics that makes the headlines is quantum. And as Feynman said in 1965, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."((Note: this may not have been true even at the time. Lots of people understand quantum physics up to the level of our current understanding today. But it remains incredibly difficult for the layperson to grasp - and I say this from experience))Even though more of us than ever go to university - over half of the population - the gap between basic knowledge and expertise feels like it has widened. And perhaps this rise has only reinforced for some their sense of exclusion from knowledge? How must it feel to be in the minority, not going on to higher education?

Trust in each other

This education inequality is just one of many gaps opening up in the population. Culture has changed fast in the last few decades, accelerated by the low friction production and distribution of new media, services and products. Not only is there perhaps now a widening gap between the expectations of parents and their children, there is also the potential for an increasingly large gap between social tribes of any age((Note I'm not saying that either of these gaps are at all time highs. The experience gap between those who fought in the Second World War and their hippy children would have been pretty extreme, for example. But it doesn't matter: wide and widening gaps drive conflict.)). Don't agree? OK Boomer.Nonetheless, there are still things that connect us. Any despair in the state of relations can usually be undercut by a glimpse at the Public Health England data from last summer, showing how many of us cared for our neighbours in lockdown.

The future of trust

So, where do we go from here? I confess, I am not optimistic right now. I see no political, social, or educational changes on the horizon that might increase our levels of trust in authority, or in each other. Though at the same time, there are some trends that suggest we shouldn't be too worried.Despite all the stories of corruption, the current government did very well in local elections this week. You may or may not like them, or agree with them, but trust in politicians clearly hasn't been that damaged by recent events. At least not in relative terms.Likewise, for all the vocal distrust in politicians and scientists over the vaccine, uptake so far is over 95%. Only some of those 5% will have failed to be vaccinated for ideological reasons. Distrust only stretches so far.  

A race between the four horsemen

In a recent post for for Locus Magazine, Cory Doctorow laid out his scepticism about general AI in a piece entitled 'Full Employment'. He argued that there is no sign that a general AI - one that can replicate human adaptability in tasks - is on the horizon. And that the work required to address climate change is so great that we are much more likely to see full employment than the AI-driven unemployment that many have predicted.I disagree with Doctorow's analysis of AI. Right now, I don't believe that we are close to a general AI. I am more open minded than Doctorow about the idea that current AI systems have the capability to 'evolve' into something more generally capable, but the gap remains large.My criticism is that I just don't think AI has to be very sophisticated in order to replace humans in the workplace. It's an argument that I have made many times on this blog, so I won't repeat it in too much detail here. Suffice to say that if you break any job down into its component tasks, today's machines are eminently capable of handling many of them. If you accept that machines take work - tasks, rather than jobs - then you can see that the remaining work can be redistributed among a smaller number of humans.Where I don't disagree with Doctorow is on the scale of the challenge presented by climate change. I have little doubt that large portions of humanity will be involved with the mitigation response. But the idea that this will offset any job losses due to automation brings me back to one of the most difficult parts of futurism: seeing not what, but when.

Four horsemen

Even before the pandemic, I was concerned about our prospects for the next 20-30 years. While it's not quite the apocalypse, there are four modern horsemen of disaster racing to cause us problems.

• Climate: In this period, directly or indirectly, climate change will start to affect the more moderate climates. Changes in weather patterns, disruption to agriculture, sea level rises. Until this point climate change has been something most people could ignore, should they so choose. This choice is going away in the next few decades.
• Technology: The prospect of technological disruption to employment and the economy is another major issue. Whether you want to generously call it AI, or prefer the perhaps more accurate 'machine learning and robotics', there is the potential for swathes of workers to be displaced by machines in the next three decades, from administrative, customer service, logistics and manual roles.
• Politics: We are in a rancorous period of global relations. Violence so far has been primarily inside borders rather than between them. But our international trading relationships are collapsing and our diplomatic ties being strained.  And domestic leaders in many countries seem to be incompetent, mad, corrupt, vicious, or some combination of all of these.
• Disease: The latest addition to the line-up is the global pandemic, spreading effortlessly through our international connections, strained as they are. It's unlikely to end quickly and we are likely to see more of its type.

The horsemen analogy falls down when it comes to timing. This isn't about which of these potential challenges will win a race to reach us. All four are here already. The question is the speed and scale at which their effects will be felt.

A race to the finish

Doctorow might be right. Our climate mitigation efforts might start well before we adopt robotics and ML technologies to a level that severely disrupts the labour market. Or he might not. The scale of job losses in the retail sector right now are pretty dramatic. We could attribute these to the pandemic, but really this is just the acceleration a trend towards automation and self-service that has been rolling for years. The pandemic may accelerate the adoption of automation technologies in the retail supply chain and logistics. It might also accelerate their adoption in other fields - administration, customer service, finance, law... Once people are out of the office, perhaps we will be less squeamish about replacing them with machines?Even if you ignore the technological effects, the pandemic has clearly had a terrible effect on our economy. Many are bracing themselves for  job losses in the coming months. During lockdown almost 150,000 people have been made redundant and over 9m have been furloughed. This doesn't even include the many self-employed who sit outside the support schemes or many not be counted as having lost their jobs, despite their income having collapsed. Full employment feels like a long way from here.This is especially true in the current turbulent political environment where it is hard to see coordinated efforts to restore global prosperity. Or for that matter, a coherent effort to address climate change. If we were to start that process now, I can see the creation of an enormous number of jobs that might redress the losses currently being experienced. But it feels more likely to me that these efforts won't start until the effects really start to bite. That is the nature of our politics right now: always focused on today not tomorrow.In the meantime, it is going to be a difficult few years, whichever of the horsemen is leading the race.

The self-preservation society

Does self-preservation and the propagation of our genes drive selfish or collective behaviour?Twice in recent days I have found myself stuck behind vehicles belching thick black smoke. The first vehicle was an ageing van in desperate need of a service. The second was a newer hatchback, tuned to extract the maximum performance from its diesel engine. The effect from both was the same, bathing every pedestrian, cyclist, and trailing vehicle in a dangerous fog.What struck me about this was the irresponsibility. The lack of empathy from the drivers for their fellow citizens.If I was being generous, I'd suggest the van was owned by a self-employed delivery driver. As this review of a role as a self-employed delivery driver on Indeed.com says:"Recommended if you are single and in shared housing as you do not earn enough to help cover family costs."Given this, maintaining the van properly may be challenging. But what about the boy racer? I can understand the desire to have a fast car. I can't understand the moral arithmetic that says my desire for a fast car is more important than the health of the people in my community.

Acting beyond self-interest

Richard Dawkins might have an explanation for this. Maybe the Boy Racer's selfish genes have the best chance of propagation if he has a fast car? Or maybe he thinks it does. It feels like a somewhat dated symbol of virility and success now. Though that isn't stopping me from spending money to polish up my own ageing sports car. Did someone whisper "mid-life crisis"?The idea of the selfish gene though doesn't rule out apparently altruistic behaviour, or contribution to the collective good. If it did, we wouldn't have the roads on which to drive in the first place. As David Sloan Wilson pointed out in a talk for the RSA about his book, "This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution", there may be no conflict between ideas of evolution focused on the individual and those focused on the survival of the collective. What we know is that over hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, our branch of the primate tree has been different because we have co-operated more than we competed.

The shrug

It is this simple evidence of the success of the world we have created through co-operation that makes me such a sceptic about more radical ideas of individualism. Like those of Ayn Rand, whom a friend told me they have been reading a lot recently.Rand's Objectivist philosophy has a few appealing parts for me. It is fundamentally materialist for a start. That doesn't mean she advocated that we all own lots of stuff, but rather that we are all just stuff. Consciousness emerges from physics and biology, not the other way around. In line with this belief, Rand also rejected faith, and her followers have campaigned against the role of organised religion in government. For Rand, reason was the most important human quality. All of that, I could be on board with.Where I start to have trouble with Rand's philosophy is her extension of this idea into the need for absolute freedom. Rand advocated a form of laissez-faire capitalism that restricted any state interference in individual or corporate behaviour. That means no child labour laws, no minimum wage, and no clean air legislation.

Carrot and stick

As my experience on the road shows, voluntary co-operation is not enough to ensure 'good' behaviour by everyone in our expanded society. Unrestricted freedom may have worked when we lived in small tribes. Those who chose to act against the best interests of the tribe could do so, and the tribe might choose to shun them. As an individual there might have been little they could do to affect the well being of the rest of the tribe, and they might not have survived for long without its support. But that was their choice.In a high tech metropolis of millions of people, this thinking doesn't work so well. One person exercising their unrestricted freedom can cause enormous harm to others. A corporation even more so. Sometimes there will be people who, for whatever reason, are willing to operate to their own benefit and at the expense of others. The price of the continuing progress of society is that we work as a collective to reign those people and organisations in. I'm willing to accept some constraints on my freedom as a price worth paying.

Propagating Self-Preservation

Where this falls down is when large parts of society work against their own self-interest, and that of their children. One of the aspects of the Brexit debate that I struggled most with, is the propensity for people to vote to leave the European Union when it is so nakedly against the interests of their children. I know that many people may not agree with or accept this argument, and that's their prerogative. But I know of cases where people, having been told by their adult children just how negatively Brexit will affect them, and been well-informed enough to see the argument, went on to vote for it anyway.Likewise, some of the reactions to the COVID-19 lockdown. Some people's outright refusal to accept the advice to the detriment of themselves and their children is hard to comprehend. It baffles me because it goes against everything I understand about evolved human behaviour. The only explanation I can find is one of disconnection.Many of us seem to feel like we have given up too much freedom and control. This is why the Brexit message to 'take back control' was so powerful. Never mind that the Brexiteers were trying to reclaim power from the wrong people and the wrong institutions.

Hyper-centralisation

The UK is famously hyper-centralised, with vast amounts of power wielded from London. This power has often been expressed through a range of universal standards, be it for education, or healthcare. The effect is to try to make everyone in the UK part of the same tribe. The EU by contrast is inherently a tribe of tribes: the recognition of difference is built into its constitution. That reality has only been evidenced by the individual approaches taken by each country to respond to the coronavirus, including shutting their own borders.I don't think you can build a single tribe of 70m people. I think there are things that will bring us all together. There are shared beliefs, rules and needs that connect us. But I also think there is a lot of difference, and some of that difference is geographical. Try to collect us into a single tribe with its centre in London and we naturally feel disconnected. We are more likely to strain against laws and powers that are distant and faceless, be that by voting for disruptive choices, driving vehicles that poison the air, or ignoring guidelines to protect ourselves, our families, and our communities from infection.If we bring the size of our groups down, connect those powers back to communities, people might feel a little more responsible for conforming to and indeed, reinforcing them. 

Halfway between a stranger and a friend

Insularity is one of the biggest risk factors. The more we isolate ourselves from the views and expertise of others, the more we are blind to the challenges that might affect us. Worse, we begin to blame those who disturb our comfortable world view for the realities they proffer. It’s all too easy to shoot the messenger bearing bad news.It’s why I’m always so delighted to find organisations and individuals who seek to challenge their own perspectives. At a strategy day for a large company this week, I found myself one of a few external contributors, giving the board a range of perspectives.One of the other contributors was Maff Potts, founder of the Association of Camerados. Camerados is an organisation devoted to creating the space for people to communicate and support each other in times of hardship, not as professionals but as peers. It’s about a sense of solidarity. Potts describes the relationships between Camerados using a phrase coined by one of its users: ‘halfway between a stranger and a friend’.This phrase came back to me when speaking at a dinner later in the week. Around the table were the legal counsels of a range of large organisations. As I talked to them about the future, I scared a few (as usual). The inevitable questions arose: ‘what should we be teaching our kids?’, and ‘what will people do in the future?’I gave my stock answers about the three Cs, and the resurgent value of craft. But I was also thinking about what Potts said: part of the answer must be that we will be supporting each other.No-one can have missed the demographic shift facing our country. In some parts, the ratio between those receiving pensions and those of working age will be approaching 1:1 within 25 years. There’s no sign of dramatic service increases and investment in these areas to support the challenges that presents. We face a crumbling infrastructure and over-stretched services. So what do we do?Increasing engagement in our communities is not an answer. We probably need a radical rethink of our beliefs about what drives national success and growth – if growth, in the traditional sense, is even a valid objective anymore. A new approach to tax, spending and welfare should ultimately emerge*. But this will take a very long time.Between now and then we may have to grow our sense of solidarity and appetite for co-operation and mutual support. In a wider sense, maybe we all need to be camerados.*Before anyone thinks I am calling for some form of communist revolution here, let me point you to this post. In short, if you think markets can solve everything, you’re an idiot. But if you think states can solve everything, you’re just as much of an idiot.

Teaching technology isn't about the economy, it’s about democracy

I recently spent some time at Raspberry Jamboree, a day of education and sharing, based around the credit-card sized low-cost computer, the Raspberry Pi. The demographic here is wonderful. Yes, there are the middle-aged men with beards you may have expected. But there are also plenty of women and children — boys and girls. The atmosphere is inquisitive, open and discursive. Everyone is learning. People point to the various components on sale to accessorise their little computers and ask strangers: “What does that do?”I had a great time.Two weeks later I got a phone call from the BBC. Will I come on and talk about Theresa May’s plans for the internet following the London and Manchester attacks.Here we go again, I thought.Theresa May, like many politicians, likes to talk about ensuring that terrorists can’t communicate beyond the surveillance of the state. It sounds pretty reasonable to the uneducated — which is most people when it comes to the inner workings of the internet. Why would Google, Facebook and Apple want to allow terrorists to communicate? Surely they can allow GCHQ a little peek into people’s messages if it will prevent a tragedy?Of course, it isn't that simple. There are all sorts of reasons why it just isn't practical — or desirable — to give the security services a key to our secured communications. Cory Doctorow sums them up best.To put it even more succinctly, interfering with encryption would collapse many of the services on which our modern lives are increasingly dependent, while leaving terrorists free to access a separate range of entirely secure technologies.The problem is, most people don’t understand this. They’re ill-equipped for the technical argument, let alone the moral one.This is why events like Raspberry Jamboree and the wider initiative to educate people about technology is so important. Yes, digital skills are crucial to the economy, but they are also crucial to all other aspects of modern life.Participation isn't just about the skills you need to access services, it’s about a reasonable proportion of the population being able to make informed choices about the controls placed on those services.

What happens when technology changes but society doesn’t?

The Expanse is a wonderful piece of hard sci-fi that presents us all with a warning: without societal change, technology will amplify inequalities.The SyFy/Netflix series is based on the novels of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, writing together under the name James S.A. Corey. Set 200 years in the future, they tell of a solar system divided. Mars is independent, wealthy and ambitious. A neglected working class toils in the asteroid fields at the edge of the system, mining and shipping minerals under the control of Earth, technologically advanced but socially stagnant under the global control of the UN.The gap between rich and poor in this system-wide society is financially and geographically vast: perhaps this is the expanse the authors refer to. ‘The Belters’ have barely any control of their lives, bound as they are into service, and limited in their opportunities to travel by the effect of zero gravity on their bones and musculature.In my professional work I don’t try to look 200 years out. But I see a microcosm of this expanse building in the next 20.I’ve written a lot about automation and its likely effects. In short, it is hard to see how we create jobs of a volume to replace those that are likely to be destroyed by robots of various forms. But this is only part of the story.

Short engagements

In parallel with this, we are likely to see the remaining jobs for humans change. Firstly, it seems likely that engagements between employer and employee will continue to shorten. Not because people are bouncing between roles to get a pay boost. But because the increasingly cyclical nature of success will define periods in which some skills are needed and others in which they are not. Will you need all of the marketing, finance, legal, HR skills all year round? Or will you acquire them as needed — perhaps adding and dropping the same person to and from the workforce multiple times. Not freelancing exactly but multiple shorter duration stints.

BYOD

Secondly, we are moving towards a situation where a person is only as effective as the technology they bring with them. The ‘Bring Your Own Device’ trend seems innocuous and even fun at first: the reversal of companies and consumers having the best tech. But really it makes a lot of sense for the companies involved: lower capital outlay, and workers equipped with technology on which they are already trained.We are so close to our devices now that they are an extension of ourselves — again as I have written and spoken about extensively. At what point does the technology we bring with us become part of the recruitment process? Would a company (legitimately) want to select a candidate whose purely human characteristics are poorer than another’s, because their technological enhancements take them way beyond? Probably.

The haves and the have-nots

What does this do to the divide between the haves and have nots? It’s not positive. Legislation may try to prevent such discrimination based so closely on wealth. But I’m not sure what success it would have. Those who manage to get onto the bottom rung early will advance, others will not, as the gap widens over time.Technology is often painted as the villain in this piece. But technology has no agency. It simply presents a lens to the issues we have today and amplifies them. Long-range futurism and science-fiction is a wonderful way of demonstrating what might happen if we don’t address these issues today.