Technoethics: An Essential Leadership Skill for the 21st Century | Dr. Jonathan Reichental

With a beard, no less. Look at that. Hello, Guatemala. Good to be back. Good to see you. Good to see you. Yes. What a wonderful place to be. What an amazing context to be able to speak about ethics at the end of a A long, tough day, but I'll make it worth your while. Hopefully it's interesting for you. So let me start by talking about a company that you're probably familiar with, Patagonia. You know these guys, right? They do the outdoor clothing. Yeah, yeah, exactly, the outdoor clothing. Believe it or not, they've been around about 50 years. It's a 50-year-old company, and they're very successful. These days they make about $1 billion a year. They're a billion-dollar business. But there's something very different about Patagonia. There's something very fundamental and core about how they go about what they do. Everything they do comes from a place of doing the right thing, primarily doing the right thing with the environment, right? Making sure that the materials that they use and the way they make materials are environmentally positive. They treat their people well, they have labor standards, right? And these days they put all the money they earn back into the business and back into the communities they serve. It's very unusual to have a company so focused on good behavior, and they get good scores for this. It's not just talk, and it's not just Marketing, right? So many companies do this just because it's good marketing. So the question is, why do they do it? Why does Patagonia choose to do these good things when so many don't? Well, in that question is the answer. Because they make a choice. They make a choice to do certain behaviors that they believe in, and that's their ethics. They make these choices to do the right thing. And we live now in an era where we have so much control over the choices in our lives as individuals. Long may that last. And also, we have a lot of control over the choices we make in our businesses. Our businesses now are all technology businesses. That should be clear to everyone, right? Our businesses are technology businesses. At the very core. Used to be the periphery, but that's all moved to the center now. So we have to make a lot of choices relative to technology. And increasingly, as they get embedded in how we deliver our services, how we make our things, how we treat our people, how we treat our customers, right? Those are some real tough technology ethics for the very first time. We call this topic, the academic name is technoethics. By the way, it's not a style of music, right? It is actually an academic topic about the study of ethics in technology. You can think of it as just the ethics in technology. Let's give me, I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. So here you see a court. I mean, American courts look a little bit like this. They probably look similar here in Guatemala, right? We're starting to think about how can we use more and more technology in a court system, right? And because AI is the flavor of the day, we're asking what role should AI play in our courts? Well, yeah, AI can be great for doing things like research or can be used for doing, you know, evidence analysis, right? And it's used for that. It's also used for doing things like choosing juries. I don't know if you're uncomfortable yet, but you're probably thinking, where is this going? Are we okay for AI to be the judge of the case in the court? Are you okay with that? Right? Somebody feels strongly about it here. We're experimenting with it. Now, you might say, I don't want a computer judging my fate. Well, let me tell you something interesting. You know, a study was done on people who go to court and they are handed down a sentence by a judge. If you're ever in court, and I hope you never are, but if you find yourself in court and you're gonna get a sentence, it's better to get sentenced in the morning than the afternoon because the sentences get longer the grumpier the judge becomes. For example, just before lunch, you're going to get a longer sentence. In the evening, you're getting— AI wouldn't make that judgment. AI would be fairer to everybody because the AI doesn't get grumpier the longer the day is, right? You agree with this? Maybe in the future, AI will get grumpy. We'll see, right? We'll see. So we have some real tough choices to make. When I asked, are you okay with AI being the judge? Some people shouted out here in the front, no! Some people in the back may be thinking, oh, I could probably think about that. Maybe I'm okay with it. There's some real judgment to be made there about what we do. What behavior are we comfortable with? We didn't have to ask these questions a few years ago. You get that, right? We didn't have to ask it. Now we have to ask it. We have to ask these questions. When do we apply technology? When don't we, right? What is the right thing to do? Now, why is this a topic of today? I'm gonna tell you guys a little secret. We have a smaller group here right now because folks have gone home for dinner, they've got tired like this gentleman right here, but you're actually listening to the most important topic of the day, right? 'Cause this is gonna be the center of the action, not the questions about Can the technology work? I think we got our answer to that. If we can dream it, we can produce it. What we really have to ask is, should we produce it? Should we make it? Should we do that behavior? Right? And that's why this becomes a central leadership topic of the 21st century. Right? If you aspire to be a leader, or you are an existing leader, I hope that you'll begin to think about this. And maybe in the short time I have with you today, I'll inspire you to think about it in a different way. Well, we are in an age of technology, right? The industrial revolutions now, over the last 250 years, has made our lives more technical-based, more mechanical, more driven by innovation and the information revolution. And we are entering the fourth industrial revolution, right? A fourth industrial revolution. That tech is at the center and innovation is moving quickly, just like we see at Volcano today, reinventing how we do things. Now, I wanna tell you another story that puts this a little bit more, even further into context, right? I don't think many of you would know this newspaper. Does anybody know this newspaper, heard of it? No. So this is out of Europe, it's out of Britain actually. This is an English newspaper and it was around for a very long time. I'll get to that in just a moment. And you know, the tabloid newspaper business is extremely competitive, right? It, you know, the person who has the more salacious story on the front cover about some affair from some celebrity or rock star, that's the one that's gonna sell the newspaper. So it became, during the '80s and into the '90s, became extremely competitive. If you had the more controversial gossip-centric topic, you would sell more newspapers. So they were thinking, how could we get the better stories? Well, it was interesting because they suddenly started having some of the most interesting, salacious stories. They knew, for example, when a rock star and his or her wife was gonna get divorced before anybody else. When somebody was having an affair on the side. How did they know this? How did they know this? They knew this because they were dialing into people's voicemail machines. Now this is before we had cell phones and all that thing. But you know, some of you will remember we used to have answering machines at home. Like they would have cassettes in them. Remember this? We could divide the audience by this. You know, if you're young, you don't know that. If you're a little bit older, you know about the cassettes. Well, you could dial, you would dial home and check your voicemail messages. When your phone picked up, you had to put a password in and you pick up your voicemail messages. So what people and these journalists realized was that when you buy the answering machine and bring it home, there's a default password, and that default password is sometimes 4 zeros, or it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. And you know what's really interesting? Probably no surprise, people don't change the default password. So these journalists started calling celebrity phones when they knew they were out because you know why? They sat outside their house and when they saw them going out, they would call the voicemail and they would put 0000 and they would listen to the messages. That's how they found out about what was going on. Now when the news broke about this, it was a massive scandal. It was the News of the World scandal. It was about 2011, so not so long ago. People did not like this. I mean, I don't like it. I don't think you like it, right? They didn't like that this was happening. And over the course of perhaps just a few weeks, News of the World went out of business. Now this is notable because News of the World was one of the most popular newspapers in the United Kingdom for 168 years. 168, suddenly went out of business. What was fundamentally the issue there? They took advantage of technology and they did unethical behavior, right? It was unethical to do that. Well, the price they paid was the end of the business. So what do we do about this? I've spoken about some cases here, some obvious cases that really magnify the problem that I'm talking about, this issue of how do we make ethical choices. You know, News of the World made bad ethical choices. What we really want to do is make good ethical choices. And you are all honest, ethical people. How could you manage ethics in an era where technology is at the center of all the action? Well, it begins with asking the right questions. And the right question may be, in that meeting where you're making a decision about the deployment of a new product or a service, is this the right thing to do? You know, that's a bold thing to do when you're with your peers or with your boss. And everybody has made that decision. You're ready to go. You're ready. You're like, okay, we got our product ready. We're going to ship it out on Monday. Maybe it's software, right? And you're ready to go live. And everybody's agreeing and shaking their head. And then you kind of put your hand up and say, have we considered everything here? Is this the right thing to do? That's the brave, bold thing to do. People aren't gonna like it at the last moment, but ask the right questions even if they're complicated and uncomfortable. It will save your business. And the reason why we do it, the reason why we each behave like this is 'cause it's what we believe. It's the right thing to do. So being an academic type talk at the end, of a very long day. I'm going to give you some specific guidelines here, talk about the 4 ethical principles of digitalization. Well, the first thing I want to say is that the presentation doesn't look like this. Nice, interesting look. It's something, something has gone wrong with the computer. As long as you can read the words, I think we're okay, but it doesn't look like this. We— the first principle of digitalization is, and if there's founders in here, there are many founders here, perhaps founders watching on video later on, is you bake ethics into every phase of your development lifecycle. It's called ethics by design, right? Yeah, I'll put them all up on the screen. You prioritize things that matter to people, like privacy. Still matters, still matters in a big way, right? It matters to your customers, should matter to you, right? Be accountable to that, you know, be accountable to the decisions you make and what the impact could be, right? Accountability also means that we thought about this, we decided not to do something because it would have negative effects, it wasn't the right thing to do. And then constantly reviewing your processes within your business. Like, what happened when we did this? What was the consequences of that decision? Right? Now, we couldn't talk about or do any keynote at an event if we didn't talk about AI, right? You'd be like, that guy didn't talk about AI. What's up? Does he not realize it's a thing? It's a thing, right? So I just want to mention, of course, responsible AI falls into this bigger umbrella of ethical ID, ethical, of the ethics of technology. Of course, AI falls into that. We have a thing called responsible AI, and as it sounds, you know, we for the first time as entrepreneurs and leaders and and innovators and technologists and academics, we have so much capability at our fingertips. We have so much power today. The power to do good things, but boy, do we have a lot of power to do bad things, right? And sometimes we'll do them and not realize. Sometimes you don't realize what we're getting ourselves into. That's why asking the right questions is so important. So thinking about, is this good for people? I love this question. Is it fair? Is it fair, right? Is there fairness baked in? Is it biased? Are we doing the right thing? Let me tell you another story real quick here. And this is, perhaps you might recognize this famous Dutch artist here. This is the great work of the Dutch artist Rembrandt. Amazing artist. Well, not so long ago, just within just a few years ago, there was a competition to create new artwork and using computers to create artwork. And one of the teams, they used in their model only the pictures of Rembrandt. Okay, so Rembrandt painted a lot during his life, and this particular team pulled in, ingested into their model all of the pictures, as many pictures as they could of his work. And then what they did was they used AI to produce a net new picture that looked exactly like a painting that Rembrandt would do. And they came out with a beautiful picture. In fact, they won the competition. They won the competition. Now some of you are thinking, that's cool, that's a lovely story. Some of you though are thinking, is that right? What was the creativity in that story I told, right? Perhaps there is some. Perhaps the coding, the, the software code is the creativity. Is it really the product? Of the team that were in the competition, or is it the product, by extension, of Rembrandt? Shouldn't Rembrandt get the prize? His family, 'cause Rembrandt's way dead. His family members should say, "Wow, well done to the descendants of Rembrandt." Now, I'm not here to necessarily give you an answer to this question. I'm merely raising it as perhaps one of the easier questions that we need to ask. Who are the creators and who should get credit? And giving prizes for this team, was that right? Now, I couldn't do a short presentation without talking about data because with digitalization and AI, primarily digitalization, there's data, right? Data, right? Data is at the heart of our digital economy. We're in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of data. Why is that? Well, we're in the fourth industrial revolution, everything's good, we're hyper-connected, every action we do we're generating data. Sitting here doing nothing, everybody who has two devices at least, or at least one, but I'm guessing many of you have two devices on you, even sitting here doing nothing they're generating data. Now, I wrote a book on this. I wrote a book on the value of data, and when I was asked to write the book, one of the most common expressions was, you know, data is the new oil. It's so powerful, it's the core of productivity in the 21st century. And some people even said data is the most important asset in every organization today. And I said, I thought to myself, that's a pretty wild statement. Is that true? Is data the most important asset in every organization? Well, I was asked to write the book and I heard this statement, so I had to do my homework. I had to actually validate that. It's like a good behavior, like don't just take stuff for granted, but validate them. Validate whether that's true. Anyway, I'll get to the punchline here because I did the work. Data is the most important asset in every organization today. You agree? I hope you do. Some of you are nodding. Some of you are not sure. Well, you can go and check it, right? Data will help you grow your business, will help you create the business. Data will help you innovate, innovate new products, new services, serve your customers in a better way. Data is at the heart of every business today. Okay, so I made the pitch on this. I think I've sort of said my piece on data. So the question then becomes, if data is at the core of every business and is the most important asset, well, surely we have to be ethical around our use. What happens if we use data that isn't current? Or let me say even worse, what happens if we use data that isn't true? Right? This never happens. It happens all the time. And it's gonna happen more and more and more. Now what matters here is not so much what other people do. You can make your decision around that. What really matters here is what you do, what each of us does, right? Are we gonna make sure that our data is, the datasets are complete, are accurate, up to date, quality? Right? Are we going to try to remove stereotypes and ugliness from our datasets? Look, I think the most important question perhaps you have to ask is, what obligation do you have for this? Do you feel any obligation towards this? Maybe you think it's somebody else's problem. Well, if you're at Volcano and you're an innovator or you're interested in tech, I propose to you that this is probably the most important question you're not asking. I would propose to you that this is maybe the most important issue that you're not addressing, right? You'll have time to sleep on this later and you'll think about it, and maybe you'll agree or disagree. So here's some quick thoughts on data ethics. You know, getting permission to use it. I'm not gonna bore you with too many bullets here, so I'm gonna rush through this just to get them on the screen. Issues of transparency. Do you tell people where you got the data? Do you get permission to use it? Are you ensuring that you maintain people's privacy, right? Because your customers expect you to do, right? If you slip up on one of these things, not only may it be embarrassing to your business, it could be the end of your business. But it will reflect on you, each of us, and our ethical behavior. Communicate to the marketplace exactly what you're doing relative to data and it will benefit you. So finally, seriously, finally, what can you do? Let's make this real. I want to give you a little little tool you can use. It's my little gift to you before, before you leave this evening, and it's the PLUS approach. P-L-U-S. And when I'm with my students, I'm with my organization, with different organizations, helping them think through what can I do, we use the PLUS approach. So you remember P-L-U-S, PLUS, right? The first thing is when you make a decision relative to tech, and frankly any decision, but when you make a decision relative to tech, does it conform with the organizational policy? Is there a policy around this? The thing about this little list of 4 is that if you actually adhere to each, you'll navigate a pretty clear path to ethical behavior. Right? Because once you establish that, "No, it's completely in line with policy," well, go for it then, assuming you believe in it. Now, here's a little thing. If you are in a business where you disagree with policy, you're in the wrong business. You realize that, right? You will never succeed if you stay in a business when you don't agree with that business's policy. The second thing you can ask is, "Is this legal?" Am I gonna break the law? Is this a legal thing? Universal, does it align with the overall business vision and what we believe is as an organization? That's what we mean by universal. And finally, maybe the most important of the four is self. What do you believe? So you're going through this, you're sitting, maybe you're having an ethical dilemma at home. I mean, policy's a little bit more difficult here because not a lot of us have policy lists for our homes. Maybe we should. But if you're in your office or in your university, some entity, and you are thinking through, hmm, should I do this thing? Should I exhibit this behavior? Go through these one at a time and you will find that if it's a good decision, these are going to be really easy, right? I mean, do a little test in your own mind. Do a little sort of test of what was something I recently faced? And as you go through PLUS, you'll find that you can make that decision. Now, the better thing is, of course, when you are making a choice or it seems like there's a very difficult value-based choice to make, you don't get through this list. Well, that's a sign. That's a signal. That's a signal that you have some issue with this decision that's been posed. Okay. So interesting. I wouldn't have chosen this font if I was doing this presentation. So, as we come to the end here, we talk about technoethics. I don't know if you think differently about this or this was all obvious to you or perhaps some of this was completely net new and you thought, hmm, I didn't realize that the ethics of technology was a core responsibility of me as an innovator and as a person who is responsible for outcomes that impact my colleagues and my marketplace, right? Well, hopefully I've made a little bit of a difference, perhaps I've inspired you a tiny bit, but what I want to say is not only Not only is it the right thing to do, 'cause when you're ethical, you don't have anything to worry about. But when you are ethical within your organization, that business is more successful. You actually get better outcomes. There's more success when you are ethical. So that, you've got the two reasons right there. Do the right thing, you know, do the right thing, and also, benefit from it as well. I think that is the most important reason of all to be concerned about this. Those two are the most interesting things about this topic. Okay, so thank you very much for your attention at late— to the— you are hardcore people.