Understanding idea technology

Idea technology, a term by Barry Schwartz, is an excellent framework for thinking about the ideas that drive our thinking and decisions.

"...in addition to creating things, science creates concepts, ways of understanding the world, and our place in it, which have an enormous effect on how we think and act. If we understand birth defects as acts of God, we pray. If we understand them as acts of chance, we grit our teeth and roll the dice. If we understand them as the product of prenatal neglect, we take better care of pregnant women." - BARRY SCHWARTZ

In this excellent Ted talk, Schwartz discusses how our dominant ideas about human nature actually shape it, becoming a technology of sorts.

Here are a few examples of idea technology in action:

• If we believe people are inherently lazy, we design workplaces focused on supervision and incentives rather than empowerment and trust. This, in turn, shapes employee attitudes and behaviour, reinforcing those ideas.

• If we think children are inherently naughty, we focus on correction and punishment rather than education and support. When children behave inappropriately or reject discipline, our ideas are confirmed.

• If we believe women are inherently more nurturing than men, we design a society that allocates care labour to women and disadvantages their career progress, proving our bias right. 

Barry Schwartz argues that while bad technology disappears, bad ideas live on in the structures we build to support them and will create the kind of human nature we believe in. As leaders in our communities and workplaces, he asks all of us: What kind of human nature do you want to create?

Why our awareness of idea technology matters

Challenging our default thinking is extraordinarily powerful, and thinking through the lens of idea technology offers tremendous hope and possibility for social progress. It has also never been more important than right now. Schwartz refers at length to the Industrial Revolution and how our ideas about human nature led to work becoming soulless and demeaning for many people.

This is a pertinent conversation as we face another such revolution - what Former World Economic Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0. The acceleration of the digital information age is upon us as new technologies like AI, genomics and advanced robotics gain traction.

In this environment, the exchange, spread and commercialisation of ideas is fast and powerful. How we think has never been more important - particularly when so many ideas are disseminated silently, directly and insidiously in algorithm-driven echo chambers.

In the same way that teen bullying now follows kids home to their bedrooms, perpetrated by smartphones, ideas follow us across the internet and present themselves as ads, articles and posts that have been tailored to our preferences and consumer habits. Adults are easily sucked into divisive idea siloes that serve interests other than our own, with a never-ending loop of confirming evidence served up as information or entertainment.

More than that, the ideas we hold as a society - about human nature, values, work and life - are now being quietly encoded into powerful new artificial intelligence systems.

How AI will embed existing idea technology

Language processing models like ChatGPT aren't ideologically agnostic—they're just ideologically invisible. The ideas we inadvertently program into these technologies have the potential to drive decision-making that will reinforce them at scale. If those ideas are false or harmful, we are at risk. 

In his new book What We Owe the Future, philosopher Will Macaskill considers the risk of values lock. He argues that we are at a particularly malleable point in history, where the values we hold now could become entrenched for a very long time.

As he notes, most previous generations held values that we now consider incorrect, and it is extremely unlikely that we're the first ones to have gotten it all right.

“Few people who ever live will have as much power to positively influence the future as we do. Such rapid technological, social, and environmental change means that we have more opportunity to affect when and how the most important of these changes occur, including by managing technologies that could lock in bad values or imperil our survival.”  - WILL MACASKILL

This conversation between Will and Tim Ferriss is a great expansion of his thinking about long-termism, existential threat, and how to do good in the world.

How to use idea technology in your life

Talking about idea technology, artificial intelligence, social values, and long-termism can feel extremely overwhelming. It's high-level stuff in a life where we can barely keep track of the day-to-day.

We're in a state of constant temporal exhaustion* and it's easy - and quite forgivable - inside our everyday pressures and constraints not to notice the ideas we've unwittingly subscribed to. 

Ultimately, our first and most important job as critical-thinking individuals is to be aware of the ideas that drive our thinking, decisions and behaviour. Life on auto-pilot is tempting, but switching it off now and again offers us a chance at meaning.

These are the conversations we had in Not An MBA this week. Not An MBA students are a special bunch - self-selecting critical thinkers ready and willing to unpick some of their default programs and embrace critical thinking in their work, lives and leadership.

You can do this too, and it doesn't require enrolment in any kind of special course, just the occasional well-timed pause and open-ended question. You can be a critical thinker.

Critical thinkers contribute hugely to improvements in organisational, social, political, and economic advancements by having the curiosity, humility, and persistence to ask tricky questions, even when others don't welcome the conversation.

If you want to be part of that change, the most important thing you can do is push past the first answer or commonly accepted wisdom. 'The way things are' is not how things always have been, and certainly not how things should be.

Dig deeper. Ask better questions. Look for ways to be wrong. Challenge your own thinking. Interrogate your 'common sense' and ask things like:

• Where did this idea come from?
• If I believe this, what am I saying about people and human nature?
• Why do I parent like this?
• Why do I work like this?
• Who does this serve?
• Why am I resistant to this idea?
• How might I change my mind?

The better we get at doing that, the better our chances of shaping our lives and future in a way that we can be proud of. 

Til next week,

A

* I love this term, coined by Eloise Bedding. Her reflections on modern society: "If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future” were written in 1978, but have never felt more current.

Further reading

Check out this 4-week Wednesday Wisdom series on asking better questions:

Week 1: How to Stop AI Stealing Your Job

Week 2: Big Questions, Bold Choices

Week 3: 10 Killer Questions to Boost Your Credibility

Week 4: Save Your Relationships with Quality Questions