Kicking Technology in the Electrodes. Institute’s Keynote at Leicester Innovation Festival
Steve Barradell and Guy Boyle from Loughborough based Institute kicked off #LIF25 at the National Space Centre with a run down of some of the key ideas from the world of emergent technology.
In a world of instant information gratification, we have easy access to opinions, rationalisations, and superficial descriptions. It's much harder to find the foundational knowledge that informs a principled understanding of the place that technology occupies within our world. This was a chance for Institute to bridge some of that gap.
A Brand Safe Conversation?
The members of institute are an experienced and passionate collection of individuals. We are often irreverent and sometimes productively contrarian. Our conversations often tackle topics that we feel compelled to cover precisely because we find it baffling that no one else is. It is essential when beginning any investigation of a topic to look at the largest picture possible to find context.
Whenever we get the chance to talk to a group of people we will do our very best to present important, foundational ideas. If we don’t take this approach it is quite conceivable that those people might never be exposed to the kinds of ideas that actually built the world that we now inhabit. We should be empowering people to be better than us and that starts with giving them as much generational and historic context as we can muster. This includes facts, information, perspectives and methodologies. If we can do that then we can naturally, safely and conscientiously cover discreet topics. This is how we move forward with meaningful and productive progress in society and it’s associated industries across time.
Never Talk about Politics, Religion or Money
This was a careful but slightly irreverent presentation where we gently pocked at the boundaries of what could be perceived to be acceptable in this context. The first step was to break the golden rule: never talk about politics, religion or money. This included asking questions about democracy and technology in the context of the extreme US political shift, highlighting a Marxist criticism of surveillance culture and proposing that early bibles might have encoded material in Latin for less than noble agendas.
Premature Lock-In
The phrase lock-in is often used with the world of technology to describe the way people can become immersed within one software ecosystem. This term has also been used to describe the way that we can assess the potential of a technology too quickly and define limited uses and prescribe set behaviours. Approaching the nature of technology and its relationship to culture is a potential safeguard against these kinds of limitations. If we can define choices and one of those choices provides more human agency, it might be worth examining it further.
Understanding Technology
If we are interested in understanding the nature of an emergent technology, we could probably start by uncovering its core characteristics, its impact, and how it fundamentally changes or influences human behaviour and society. What are the societal, cultural, and ethical implications of integrating it?
It’s about moving from seeing it as a hardware or software artefact to understanding it as a force that interacts with and alters our daily behaviour. If we define culture as the norms and values of society and we acknowledge that emergent technology alters these factors, then we might expect it to impact the many aspects of business that interact with culture.
It Seems that the Medium is Still the Message
We highlighted some of the key ideas of Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. McLuhan argued that each new wave of media technology alters the way that we communicate, that the medium itself could be seen as the message. Although we may communicate on different subjects, those communications have an underlying characteristic and that is defined by the technology in use.
We tested this idea, moving through time from illuminated books, the printing press, mass media and up to the current day with social media and generative AI use. McLuhans premise does seem to still hold true. The ways that we communicate online, on different platforms differs from the way that we communicate in person. We tend to start believing that the way we behave with an awareness of algorithms is the new normal. We have only been using this technology for a few decades, have we left any old wisdom behind? Are we communicating in a way that really suits us or are we behaving strangely as a consequence of the technology? What affect does this have on business conversations? Are they fit-for-purpose or compromised?
Everything is a Brand and that Includes your Kids
Considering this talk was expected to highlight technology, productivity and efficiency in industry if was worth pointing out the size of the social media industry and how effectively some young people are capitalising on this by taking their clothes off in service of lucrative OnlyFans subscriptions. If we ignore context, define innovation as productivity and say that content is the solution, look no further for the future of business.
Our technology provides platforms that encourage people to see themselves as a brand from an early age. This in itself can be problematic and these young people will soon be employed and one day, they will lead industry. What have we learnt from life offline? What patterns can we see from history that might help us predict where the future might go? How can we help them to take full advatage of emergent technology but still develop the skills required to use the technology well considering that they will not spend as much time developing core skills as the technology will do so much for them?
If AI is creating text for you and you don’t have experience writing as an activity then how do you know that the text is any good? How do you know if a generated illustration is fit-for-pupose if you haven’t learnt to draw? How do you know if any suggestion from AI is valid if you haven’t experienced project development and understood the reasons why some projects fail? How can you understand the introduction of digital business process if you haven’t seen and tested analogue processes?
Building the Future Together
As technology drives forward, many previous concerns or paradigms become increasingly irrelevant. We just need to think about foundational values so that we know when we should hold up a hand and ask questions. What (value) hills should we be willing to die on?
We have to develop processes and related conversation, not only across time as we move forward into the future, but across generational and cultural boundaries.
It is unclear how well understood across the business world the fact is that there are huge industries online run by young people who employ older people with more established skills to support them. This is fairly new, its already huge and its going to get bigger. This is the development of the media and entertainment industry. The appetite for it is voracious and it will increasingly become a major source of employment.
We are having to be much more conscious about changes culture, communications and technology and what this means across all aspects of education and business. We are increasingly responsible for our ideas and the information that we transfer.
We are nurturing machine children that are starting to educate a new generation of real children. This used to be science fiction. We need to take this seriously.
Institute provides a host of services for Industry including bespoke keynotes covering culture, media and emergent technologies. Are there any subjects covered here that you’d like to discuss further?