I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair. This is Finding Respect in the Chaos on Think Tech Hawaii, and I'm so glad that you've joined us today. I'm here today with Sawyer Stream Hobbs, who is an amazing guy and has an amazing story to tell us. And Sawyer, I want to welcome you to the show. Thank you so much for being brave and courageous enough to come out and tell your story. I think it's really amazing. Thank you. I just wanted to thank everybody that was a part of this because I understand it's you and I sitting up here, but there's so much more that goes on behind everything that we've done here and the preparation. I just wanted to say thank you and show gratitude for that. That's cool. Yes. Very much so. I love you all too. All right. So, first off, I'm going to talk about the men's walk that happened yesterday. Here in Honolulu, started at the Capitol, and I think we have some pictures of it. There were a thousand people there, a thousand fifty actually, that came and did this walk. It was a men's walk trying to get men involved in the prevention stages of domestic violence. And until we get men involved in the prevention stages, we're not going to make the kind of sustainable change that needs to be made. Women can stand and bang their fists forever. And until we get men involved too, we are not really going to make the kind of changes that we need. There were a lot of policemen that showed up. Mayor Caldwell was there. I got to talk to him for a little while and there was all kinds of mucky mucks that came and showed their support for this so important issue. The police were there in force and I think the whole force was there, I'm not sure. I think every policeman that was not out driving a car on their beat was there to support women and just be there to show that they don't want any more domestic violence to happen either. That was a really powerful thing. And then we got all kinds, I think I've got some pictures of the guys walking. We get to see, oh yeah, the Department of Justice was there, victims' rights. They were there to support. There was a huge contingent from UH that was there. This was really neat that we had a guy that was there to give some chance and bring the authentic Hawaiian element to the whole proceedings. There was all kinds of signs that were all along the way. Literally a thousand fifty people were out there walking. And then there was a big rally afterwards at Eolani Palace, oh there's another shot of them walking, it was really great. There was a lot of them. Like I said a thousand fifty people were there. And then there was a big rally. This whole thing was really organized by Domestic Violence Action Center, which is DVAC. There you go and there's a picture of some of them right there. Nancy Kriegman is the founder of DVAC and they do so much amazing work. And I know that they were a big driving force behind this whole entire day. It was really special to be there. It was special to be part of it. DVAC wasn't the only people out there with the table. We had Catholic Charities was there. We had the people from children and families. They were there. These hands are for helping, not for hurting. I love the thing, their little slogan that they have. And so it was really nice to be there with all of these people that worked so hard to be part of the proceedings for the day. So if you hear about this on the news, if you have a chance to support it in any way, even though it's over now, this is October. It is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. And that's why I'm wearing this purple ribbon. And I want everyone to please come out and support victims of domestic violence.  Because like I said, until we get you guys involved, we're not going to get the kind of sustainable change that we need. You see, you can see the program. I brought the program with me back. And some of the things that they handed out while we were there, it was a really big day. We took a short time, but it makes such a difference. Okay, but enough of this, I want to start talking to the guests that I've got here today. Because Sawyer has a really important story to tell. And I thank you for waiting while I went through all that men's march stuff. Because I want to get to your story. It's an important story for people out there to hear. So, just how about if you tell me again exactly what happened to you when you were a young man. Okay, so at the age of three and a half, I was molested by my uncle. But at the time, my uncle was 15 years old. This whole occurrence took place within his bedroom, which was the closest room to the living room within my grandparents' house at the time. And everyone, the entirety of my family, or at least my immediate family, including my aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, my immediate siblings, which I have four of, and then my parents were all there. Oh my gosh, the whole family was in the living room, and this happened in the bedroom. What did he do?  Right. Didn't mean to put you on the spot, and get so specific, excuse me. I was sitting in his room, and it was basically like just a square, and in the back-left corner, the door is in the front-left corner, there's the TV, and we were watching the Simpsons. I was sitting on a chair, and he was sitting on his bed, and his bed was in the back-right corner. And I just remember him standing, watching the Simpsons, and then I shifted frames and turned to him, pulling his pants down.  And I don't, but none of that is recollectable. It can be primed by thinking about the situation, but all I remember is him pulling his pants down. But it goes somewhat like black and hazy, to a certain extent. And then whenever that ended, which I have no reference of time, I walk out, and there's a long hallway, which seemed like an extremely long hallway at the time, because I was so small, everything seemed so big with all the shadows and stuff.  And my grandma is on the far corner of the living room, and she's like, would you say swear?  And for my grandma, that's when her memory goes black, which all she remembers was, my dad stood up, she immediately called the police, Brian walked out of his room after me. So it's a little three-and-a-half-year-old me. And then I say it, my grandfather hears it, stands up, my uncle comes out of the room, my grandma calls the police, everything goes black. Wow. So after that, I really have no idea what had kind of happened in that situation. I don't remember the police showing up, I don't remember anything my dad said or did. I don't remember any sort of aggression, I don't remember any sort of friendliness, like it's just blank. And that was really interesting. Looking back on it now, it's so weird. Because do you have the two sides of it? You have the side of it from my grandparents, where this was their son, and to have to come to terms with the fact that this is something that your son was capable of, that he would actually carry out. And then on someone else that was in your family, though, so kind of putting yourself – But we love just as much. Exactly. So what are you supposed to do there? Yeah. Side comes in, but it's really not sides, it's not a binary side, it's a oneness of we are together. But it was looked at like sides were picked.  And then my family had a different way of going about it, where my uncle immediately became my father's arch enemy, and is still to this day his arch enemy. And then my mom kind of being stuck in the middle, where it's like, okay, my dad gets extremely angry about it, doesn't like to talk about it, or like mention anything that had happened. And then my mom, who like this is her brother too, but she has a husband, and then a family, and then a son that this had just happened to. So at that point, a lot of court callings were brought together, and I was never – I never had to stand trial, I never had to sit in front of a judge. Really, you never had to go and be on the stand or even go into the judges' chambers and tell your story or anything. It just went by what all the parents had said, and the grandparents and everybody said. Yeah, so actually this is – I had sat outside of the courtroom several times apparently, which I also don't remember, which is something that was told to me all of a few years ago, within the past year actually. So I don't even remember ever being at the courthouse to have to deal with any of this. Several people within the court case read accounts of things that happened with me afterwards. They read things of my reaction. For instance, my father had once read a note that told about how at night I would scream and cry out my dad's name in fear of the fact that my uncle was coming to get me, which to my knowledge is a lie. Really? Yes.  No, so the family dynamic really changed after that. Sure, yeah, it'll do that. I know that one actually because I'm the one who's broke the silence in my family and it just split us apart. It split everyone apart. We didn't even speak – I didn't even speak to my mother for six years afterwards and it's like, where were you? Why didn't you protect me kind of thing? But when I broke the silence and told everybody it just exploded the family completely. So that's the thing. My dad was the cause of that silence because it angered him so much that he didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to bring it to light and he kind of – it seemed like he became more of the victim than I was the victim. Even though I don't – yeah, he kind of brought it upon himself and actually ended up coming out with a story about his childhood at that point. So this – obviously there's so many different things that could have come together in order for him to have to come forward and maybe this was the moment that he needed to get so much courage. So he had to take advantage of this moment that he felt the power and was able to overcome the shame of like, okay, this is happening when I was younger. Whereas it can be looked at from the perspective of he is simply trying to take the limelight. But what if it was that he had avoided this whole idea of his abuse within his life and this was the only way that he – this was the only way that he could find an outlet. Because he was angry about his own and now he's got a son that he could be angry for. Exactly. But nothing was ever communicated. That was the biggest thing. My mom never communicated to my father. My father never communicated to my mom and nobody ever communicated to me, which – so it should have been this triangulated like conversation within all of us. But it was kind of everybody was in their own frame. Everybody had their own little portion of the story that they carried with them. But it was impossible to bring together all of the chapters because they were held so singularly. Right. It's amazing how it can affect each person so differently. I know my sister is so different from her reaction to it all and my reaction and my brother too. And so it's like each one of us has our own perception of what it is. And when it's happened a long time ago, it's hard because just because of the way the memory works, you know, kind of like we've been seeing with all these things that are on the news right now with Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford who came forward against him and has – she has memories of the incident itself but not some of the extraneous memories that go around it. This memory is such a difficult thing to really define and pin down, right? Everything that happens in the hippocampus or hippocampus, excuse me, is so – it's so hard to predict and define. But okay, well, after all this, we have so much more to talk about. So I'm hoping that everyone will stay with us. We're going to take just a little bit of a break here. I'm Cynthia Sinclair and this is Finding Respect in the Chaos. So please stay with us. We'll be right back. Aloha! I'm Wendy Lowe and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock live from Think Tech, Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha! Welcome back to Finding Respect in the Chaos. I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair and I'm here with Sawyer Stream Hobbs, who is an amazing young man and has just a remarkable outlook on how he's brought his life full circle and how all of the things that happened to him when he was younger have shaped his life and sort of shaped his family's structure at the same time. So I'm really just so grateful that you're here and I really applaud your courage for being able to come out and and talk about these things. And I know you've like told people your whole life too, going back like to seventh grade even coming out. And I think that's just really bold and it's really remarkable because that is not the norm. It's like most people just don't ever want to say anything because of shame. And there's such an important thing that happens for men as opposed that's I should say not that it's unique to men because women feel the shame too, but men seem to feel it on a different level. It's so much more intense because it makes them question their manhood, makes them question their masculinity, all those things. And then society puts this extra light on you guys about how it affects men differently and how you need to be more shamed. And I'm just I'm really struck by how amazing it is that you don't feel that, that you have risen above it and have integrated it into who you are. And I really think that's a remarkable thing. And so I'm really happy that you're here to share all that with us. I think it's really cool. I think it's interesting that you you brought up the idea a little bit on like men versus women and how like this situation is handled, whether they are the people that this occurrence happened to or they're people that are hearing of it from someone else. So I attribute a lot of the way that I handled and like communicated about it to the fact that I have five girls in my immediate family. I have two older sisters, two younger sisters and then my mother. So I've always been extremely comfortable with women. And a lot of like my best friends growing up that like I would like find some sort of like nurturing and would be women and like good people to talk to if I ever had some sort of feelings or emotions or something that I like I had to get out. So I saw it as something where I was extremely willing to tell women about that experience that I had and talk to them about like how it made me feel. But it was really strange how this kind of idea of sexual abuse comes out in the most nuanced ways in just random conversations because it is something that is just like kind of a part of the world around us that we don't see that is kind of tried to be made this underground. You shouldn't talk about this. So just come up randomly and I would just talk about it as if it was the weather with these people and it would seem as if nothing was wrong about it because to me nothing was. I had no ability to talk about it in my home because my father never wanted to talk about it and my mother tried to respect the fact that my dad never wanted to talk about it. So therefore it was never brought up in a conversation. So I took it upon myself. It's like okay like this is something we could talk about. I was like I can just like toss this around. But I never I always kept it with my family like no I don't tell people because they I felt like they took it on as a part of their identity. So I used it as like this is my identity like I'm going to use it but I'm not going to tell anybody that this is a part of me. But I can see how because it also affected my family which is really interesting. It completely tore my family apart for the for the years after in ways that I never realized that I never saw. So I never I couldn't go into my grandparents house. I had for the first because your uncle lived there. Yes I could never go in there unless it was for certain that he wasn't there which like obviously took a lot more work and effort and like the planning preparations of going to visit my grandparents that live five minutes away for me. Oh wow. And I for the first few years we had a restraining order against my uncle and family functions were never complete family functions. Everybody saw you in fractals where like I saw like this aunt and uncle and then this aunt and uncle Christmas was by ourselves at the beginning and then my grandparents would come for two hours and then I would go see my aunt my other aunt and uncle and then like Thanksgiving's were done with like a separate part of my mom's family that wasn't even connected to this part of the family. So it's like we became this isolated orb that had to like float around from place to place to place talking and seeing these people which made it much more difficult whereas why not just gather together why can't I do that but I never saw it as like I always went on family vacations went to family dinners with just my immediate family just those seven people so that became my sphere of what the idea of family was so it made me define it much differently than kind of that holistic form which was like which is like really organic and just natural and I can go talk to any of these people but then like high school came around and I started being being able to see the gravity of what had happened instead of just using it as like this pawn piece to like okay like I'm going to tell this girl about it or I'm going to tell my best friends about it or like whoever I'm going to tell it's like okay so like I have acknowledged it outside the sphere of my family and communicating why don't we start acknowledging any in this sphere so I talked to my mom about it I remember it was like junior year of high school and I was like I've been thinking about Brian lately she's like and I have another uncle named Brian which is interesting um so I have two and so she's like okay well like like what do you mean I was like well like I haven't been able to talk to this man and I don't even know who he is he's just a concept to me like it's like this like image it's like a poster that you put on the wall but there's like something on the back side of it that leads to like a portal into like who a person actually is um so I started I started I brought it up and then it got from my mom to my grandparents my then my grandparents wanted to talk about it so I arranged a meeting with my grandparents to talk about it at their house sat there for like five hours six hours just kind of talking we were just like shooting anything like kind of just like talking the way you will like I could talk to my grandparents for days but that was a main importance was like seeing how I felt because nobody ever knew how I felt that was the thing they weren't allowed to speak yeah not necessarily it wasn't exactly allowed right yeah but you didn't because of all of the silence that had been put on there for your dad yeah so people I started following like the general flow and curve of I'm just going to go with like the status quo here um which is not even necessarily that somebody told me it was an energy that I felt that like it was hard to break out of right but like not that this opportunity came to be I was taking advantage of it I was telling people how I felt so what how was what was their reaction when you told them listen I want to talk about this that's when the lies just started unraveling just like out of their mouths out of everybody's mouths out of all of these different stories that they had gathered but nobody ever talked to me about because it's you don't talk to sorry about it because he's like psychologically has some sort of like an induced pain every single time you try to mention this when it wasn't even true it was their own perception forced on to you exactly but it wasn't even necessarily their own it was just circulated because nobody like I said nobody communicated it was nobody's fault it's just that nobody told anybody everywhere he was scared of one another well it's the silence and silence is the thing about in my mind anyway that's the thing that hurts people and more than anything is the silence and it's deafening it's very loud the silence is you know and you hear it even though it's silence all right and I know that sounds kind of backwards but but it's really true you do you kind of hear it even though it's silence I was born feet first I've been backwards ever since so base so basically what happened then is three days later I was in the same room as my uncle we were at a neutral location my great grandma's house which is about a hop a skip and a jump one street over from my grandparents house so it's a place where we can both feel comfortable we could both go walked in he's sitting down in in the chair gets up gives me a handshake my grandma's sitting there give her a hug sit down and Brian and I talk just him and I and it was really it was really incredible we didn't we obviously a lot had happened and a lot to acknowledge but we didn't see the point and the purpose of reminiscing over something that had happened that was a part of a past life we wanted to see the repercussions and consequences that came to be after the fact right so Brian told me his story for the very first time that I'd never heard he told me about everything that he had to do and he was he was in high school still he just wanted you wanted to play football so he was on probation and actually on house arrest was my grandparents had to lie every single time the probation officer came and say that he had some sort of after-school activity that he had to stay back and take a test or this that or the other just so he could play football wow and it became so excruciating for him in such a process that he had to stop playing football sure and in his counselor his counselor started telling him about how he could never have any sort of physical contact or emotional relationship with a girl because he would ruin her oh up until this point in his life he still has not which is really so it shows that yes Brian had done something at this time in his life but also a lot had to happen after the fact which were consequences for him but why should we both be living with this consequence now that's now actually becoming a consequence for our entire family right um wow we never got together as a whole so at the end of that conversation Brian and I gave each other a hug we took a picture together and I walked to my best friend's house Brian offered me a ride and I was just like no I just rather walk like I just like walking but it became normal a few months after that we had our very first ever family Christmas where we all came together wow the very first time that I ever can like remember that I had that wow everybody that I love great was in the same room that was amazing I love the idea of reconciliation after the fact um I know for me when my family finally came together it was just huge feeling that I still every time I remember I want more of you know because it split my brother and sister and I apart but just recently they came in May for my graduation and it was like and we just played together and had fun we didn't have to deal with the hard stuff we could just be people now and I think that's what you're talking about it's like your family could just be people now right instead of so destroyed by the events where it sounds like your uncle's life was kind of destroyed by the event well in a way rightfully so because you can't do those kinds of things without having a consequence that happens because if if there had been no consequence it's possible that he could have gone on to be somebody whom unless children it's very possible but because because of what happened and the intervention that happened it might have stopped him from going on any further wow I think it's remarkable that you have come full circle that you were able to to have such a great outlook on all of this we've only got another minute so is there a last thing you'd like to say maybe even to the people that are that are listening here today um over the summer I lived with my uncle I was the door next to my uncle's at my grandparents house um and that that is a total role reversal from never being able to go to my grandparents house to living in my grandparents house next to the man that I was taught to fear my whole life and the important part to remember about that though is that that didn't just happen we can talk about this in 28 minutes all of the things that had happened in a very consolidated manner but this took 15 full years of cycling over the same circle and finding a way to get out of it was breaking that cycle of lies miscommunication just like fear sorry it's there's so many things that go into it but the one thing that was able to bring us all back together was that one moment when communication was key when the opportunity presented itself but the thing was sometimes that opportunity isn't this golden sphere that is handed to you it is something that you have to create and generate for yourself and you have those people around you in any way shape and form you have it in the people that are walking past you on the street that all you need to do is stop and say help all you need to stop do is stop and say I need this because there's nothing wrong with saying I need help or I need something because we can't all do it on our own it is the most strong thing ever to have the will to overcome the silence in your own mouth that cat that it literally has your tongue and holds you into that life that is crippling you so basically all it takes is one conversation and everything can be made new again oh my um wow now you know why I introduced him as a remarkable man wow thank you so much for coming Sawyer thank you so much for being so amazing and and so articulate and so brave and and courageous to come out and tell your story like this because I believe it'll make a difference for other men that are that are locked in that silence who's who's still got that cat with a hold of their tongue right wow well everyone I want to say thank you so much for joining us today here on finding respect in the chaos we're out of time I wish we weren't but we are so I hope you'll come back and join us again here on think tech away I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair and I want to thank you for coming


Well, those lights are really bright. Has anybody else commented on that? My name is Dr. Aman Chaudhary. And as mentioned, I lead responsible AI at Accenture. And what I'm here to talk about is moral outsourcing and the role of humanity in the age of artificial intelligence. So these are some stats that we like to spew to clients. But they're all true. 85% of interactions online managed with AI by 2020 and industry worth over $100 billion by 2025. And most importantly, people throw around this term that the AI it will lead in the Usher and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. So we hear all these amazing things about the potential. But then we hear these headlines that look kind of like this. AI robots are sexist and racist. And this is actually my personal favorite. How to avoid racist algorithms. So as a woman, there's some sort of a maze I can spray on algorithms, and they will not be racist. That would be really great, right? But this is a very real phenomenon. I'm joking. But at the same time, we know there are some serious problems with bias in data, with design of our algorithmic systems. And not just from this one-to-one sense, but if we think about these systems that grow, scale, and perpetuate these biases, they become embedded in labyrinthine systems that are only decipherable to a few. So I'm also currently in pure conspiracy theory mode, because I'm reading Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. If you have not picked it up, please pick it up. Probably something not good for somebody already working in ethics and AI to read. But it is an eye-opening book, and saying this as somebody who does this for a living. It is an eye-opening book. But let's think through a little bit about these terrible things that we keep hearing about. So we see magazine covers like this of the robots and people completely out of jobs. And we see a lot of terminator imagery to the point that the people in the ethics of AI space, we jokingly keep tabs of, I call, androgynously hot robots, one of which I have in this deck, and also a terminator, because it is so far from what artificial intelligence actually is today. But it's interesting to know that this is the imagery we're being fed. And we wonder what future we're heading into. So we're building all this wonderful technology, those of us who live in Silicon Valley and actually around the rest of the world. We see it with this sort of techno-optimism, this hope, this idea that we build it and it will be used for good. And yet this is what the media gives back to us. It gives back to us images of mass joblessness. It gives back to us images of people being discriminated against. If you are following ProPublica, they do a lot of really great work. And they have data scientists on staff that look at bias and algorithms. And from last year, them investigating the compass algorithm that was developed by a company called North Point to help private prisons determine whether or not prisoners should get parole. Now the only reason, because these are opaque models built by a private company, the only reason we even know how these algorithms were in some way developed was because we actually had to have court cases that required them to release a documentation about what they've built. So we are building these things. People are building these things at scale. They are building them not being totally mindful. So again, as I mentioned, we wonder what future we're heading into and what we can do about it. So I'm going to get a little philosophical in this room.  I'm a quantitative social scientist. My PhD is in political science. And I actually have always viewed the field of data science as a quantitative social science. Why? Because we take data and we understand human behavior. The point is not the data. The point is actually the human behavior. And as we see these systems grow and perpetuate and in our eyes commit bad acts at scale, we wonder why and how we got here. So this image you may recognize by looking at the crowd. So post-World War II, there was a lot of discomfort. Would be a way to put it. Among philosophers, among human beings in general, just to think about how entire nations of individuals became complicit in genocide, literally the genocide of their neighbors. And a philosopher, Hannah Arendt, wanted to understand what was in the minds of these people.  You can read her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. And she coins this term, the banality of evil. And what her discovery was, in essence, we always want there to be a Hitler. We want there to be a bad person, a bad person who is the person in charge of all the bad things happening. But bad people or bad actions are often just simply enabled by bureaucratic indifference or by masses of people who think that I may contribute to a system, but it is not my fault because I am not the one who directly did this. So as she's watching Adolf Eichmann and also people like Adolf Eichmann being interviewed by this court, they're genuinely surprised sometimes. And their feedback is often, well, I just did my job.  I just ordered gas tanks. I just helped build fences. I just patrolled outside concentration camps. But I was not the one who killed the Jews. So all this is to say that evil requires systems of indifference. Evil requires people to, quote, just do their jobs, be another cog and machine, another step along the way. But ultimately, that enables something bad to happen downstream. So how is this related to what we're talking about? So let's revisit those headlines. It was really interesting when we look at how we have linguistically, semantically structured these headlines.  The one thing you actually don't have here is a human being being mentioned. We have linguistically erased the human being from responsibility. Somehow, we have decided that these algorithms that we've built have the properties and we modify them linguistically as if they are real and they're alive.  And in doing so, as I mentioned, we write ourselves out of the equation. And actually, that's kind of on purpose, because it's sort of beneficial to us as programmers, as developers of artificial intelligence, if we are not mentioned in this sentence and we are not culpable. We build something and then we say, well, the technology did it. I didn't do it, especially with artificial intelligence. This notion of learning from your environment and evolving and growing, et cetera. I do think we tend to over exaggerate the designer, the engineers, and the developers' role in creating objective functions for AI. But you've noticed how linguistically we've written ourselves out of the equation. So why is that, I suppose, beneficial for us? So a few years ago, predictive policing, well, even today, it's more of a discussion, but a few years ago, there was a presentation on the use of predictive, using algorithms to determine where to deploy police officers. So in a nutshell, why predictive policing is problematic. Our measurement of crime is not a true measurement of crime. It is a measurement of the crime that has been picked up in a neighborhood, which in the US and in other parts of the world is not often a function of, it's not randomly distributed. There is pattern to it and that pattern is racist. So when we create algorithms to determine where police officers should be deployed, guess what we do? We take that racist and incomplete data and send police officers to places where they will guess what, do their jobs, and arrest other people. Therefore, increasing community harassment in other places while still systematically ignoring the places in which there may be an equivalent amount of crime, but they just don't bother to go. So all this is to say, at one of the conferences a few years ago, we had an engineer, we had some folks on stage presenting a predictive policing algorithm and then somebody asked, well, aren't you worried about how this tool would be used? And the scientist who was presenting said, well, I don't know, I don't know how it would be used. I am just an engineer. So at Accenture, it's interesting because we face this problem all the time. And as a tech consulting company, we are actually in the unique position to not just design the technology, but also to start executing control over how it is deployed and used. And I think that's the part of the equation that we as technologists have not quite figured out yet. We can create an algorithm, or we can put data and create a model for a particular use, but then the problem is once it is out there in the world, once it is open source, we cannot always control how it is used. So moral outsourcing. So again, when we use terms like racist algorithm, we erase human responsibility in our language, and we purposely anthropomorphize the AI. We give it a face, we give it a body, even though most artificial intelligence doesn't look anything like that. We do that in order to shift the negative consequences of the blame from the humans to the algorithm. And here's the kicker. The problem with moral outsourcing, it actually ends up feeding our human paranoia. So like if we walk through the narrative, we have decided artificial intelligence is anthropomorphic, like it takes action on its own, it has some sort of free will. We have effectively written ourselves out of the language when we refer to them, so racist and sexist algorithms, and oh, by the way, the only time we refer to them this way is when they do bad things. So when AlphaGo defeated Lisa Adele, we always make sure to mention it was DeepMind's AlphaGo, right? So we give the positive benefit to the creators linguistically when it does a good thing, or it's a win for humanity. When it is sexist and racist, we all linguistically step away. And paradoxically, that creates our fear. This is what leads to our terminator imagery. This is what leads to us thinking that a physical robot will actually take our physical jobs and stand in a store in stock shelves or whatever, right? As ridiculous as this may sound. So what can we do? And here's where I talk a little bit about governance, which I know is an interest of a lot of the community in this room. So you may have heard a few weeks ago about open AI creating a language generation algorithm that they felt was so potentially harmful they did not release it.  Right, because good governance has not come from hiding. Good governance has not come from unilaterally deciding that you are the person who is the arbiter of what should and should not be released. And that was, you know, and with all respect to open AI, I know their intention was good, but the response in the community was I don't think that was the best thing for you to do.  And this is a struggle that the ethics in AI community largely is having, which is why political scientists, beneficial, right?  Because often it is viewed as being this top down methodology where we'll have the leaders at the top who will create rules and said rules will get enforced. But actually, for people who have studied democratic systems, that is not actually how democratic countries work. We operate by a rule of law, and a rule of law is a social contract. So this is kind of the equivalent of when you're going up an escalator, why do people stand on the right and walk up the left? This is just an implicit rule. You will not get fined if you don't do it, like people will give you dirty looks and someone will probably tell you to move over, right? It is socially enforced, it is actually not regulated, so why do we do it? Because we as a community, as a society, have actually agreed that this is the best way to do things to make society run more efficiently. So let's take this notion and put it into our world, right? So how do we create good governance of AI systems? Well, one, telling the world you built a terrible thing and hiding it, probably not the best way to do it, right? So, there you go. There you go. So what can we do? One is community-led governance, which I appreciate is much, much, much easier said than done. So we are actually the next few weeks releasing a governance toolkit. And again, as I mentioned, I think there's a naive way that people are looking at these things to think that the powers that be will create a tone from the top and then it will kind of filter down, like trickle down ethics. And what we have added in our toolkit is something I called constructive dissent, right? We're one of the biggest problems we're seeing in tech companies. And there are many reasons we have employee whistleblowers, walkouts, et cetera. But one of those I strongly believe is that we actually don't have good channels of dissent within organizations. We do not incentivize people to take the right actions and do the right things structurally. We also don't have the right kinds of channels for people to speak up and to feel safe speaking up. So in the media in general, there's an inordinate amount of weight placed on the power of a data scientist. And having been a entry-level data scientist myself, we don't have a lot of power. We have deadlines to meet. We have data sets to clean. Yes, we do make some sorts of decisions, but we are not gods. We are answerable to other people. So what we actually need to do is create governance from the bottom up and then cultural norms of dissent. And this is a really important thing. And this is why I raised the whole concept of the escalator and sort of standing on the right and walking up the left, right? We actually do need norms in our own community. So what are the other communities we can look at? Well, we can look at the bioethics community, right? In the 90s, when all of this talk of genetic testing was going on and there were decisions being made about not doing testing on human embryos, et cetera, which I suppose has been broken. But it was fascinating to see that globally, the sort of agreement come to, an agreement on this cultural norm of what we should or should not do, right? And we don't actually have that culture among data scientists. And to be fair, it is actually quite different from a more centralized barrier to entry type community like biology or physics. And it is with data science because what we struggle with here is this desire and this need to democratize this education, this skill, so which is very, very valuable, right? So we do wanna make tools open to us. We do wanna make algorithms open source. At the same time, how do we take the responsibility for potential misuse? Who is responsible for it? And how do we not then recreate this HANA aren't type world or our fears from World War II where we have all inadvertently actually led to a very bad outcome? And that's really the concern and really governance is the best answer for it. And again, community-led governance from the bottom up and most importantly, creating cultural norms of dissent and cultural norms of compliance. I think it's quite important in our own world, in our own community to really ask people to do the right thing and to reward doing the right thing. And again, like in rank and file private organization data science, we don't actually have those norms yet. And while we may love this idea of the data science as a bit of like a Wild West kind of crazy person on the fringes out there kind of job, there is something to be said about standards, something to be said about creating auditability and traceability of algorithms of decision-making because ultimately somebody has to be held accountable. There is just significant issues with bias, significant issues with algorithms and artificial intelligence being put out there today. So my ask of you, the open source community is how do we start creating these norms? How do we start cultivating this community? And there's plenty of people in this room that have been working on this kind of thing that have been working on this kind of thing. I personally would actually really love to engage with you as we try to build out these norms in corporations and at the enterprise level because it is sorely needed, not just in technology companies. The companies that are actually the most interested in this are the non-technology companies, retail organizations, public sector banks, as they use more and more artificial intelligence, they're actually kind of scared of our world because we don't have norms and they tend to. We don't tend to follow rules. So how do we create this culture? How do we create an ethical culture that can then actually be permeated beyond technologists into other parts of industry and really achieve the artificial intelligence world that we're all trying to build? So with that, my time is up. If you have some time, follow me on Twitter or you can check out my website. Thank you. Thank you. You know, it's funny, in the open source community for a long time, one of the community norms that is important to coders is the idea of complying with licenses. So licenses are like a big part of the open source community. There's copy-left license, there's permissive licenses. Particularly in Linux, which I was involved in early on, people would kind of float the license, right? Particularly companies who would use it, maybe through ignorance, sometimes intentionally. And the way we helped create that norm around the license was explaining the value of complying with it in a business sense. Like here's the business value. That's how we kind of started changing it, but it's been like a huge experiment. We keep working on it. And there actually is an initiative to create a responsible AI license. Interesting. I think it's like some folks at IBM and some other, it's sort of in the work. So I think that we actually are kind of headed in that direction. If we can help in any way, please let us know. Sure, cool. Thank you. Thank you.


You think all can donation is important, but? Absolutely, without my little girl, without her, I don't know where I'd be as a mum It saved her and our family's life as a whole as well.