How are we in week 5 already? Been really enjoying this term and this course if anything is certainly broadening my horizons – though I wish I had an extra week in between each week to read everything!

I’ve been bringing up what I’m reading and learning in my team meetings at work and also with friends, which has led to some interesting debates. What keeps coming up, which also came up in the Inclusive Society intensive when we spoke about wealth distribution, is how many people believe that there is a wealthy elite that will be against any sort of radical reshaping of our economy. The general feel is that these individuals will not want to relinquish wealth and power. I’m know there is a large cohort of people that are highly individualistic and self motivated but something about me struggles to believe that all wealthy people and business owners will be against change. The rise of things like impact investments and activist investors and the billionaire pledge to give all their money away that suggest to me not all privileged people are against betterment.  The individualism of capitalism is also a learnt behaviour – one that we don’t have to bring our children up with.

I have been quite taken aback by the pessimism of ‘oh but it will never change’ viewpoints and it has sent me wondering if I have too much of a romantic world view. After some serious consideration I have decided that while there might be a faction that resist change, radical change to our economic and social structure is possible in my lifetime. Our younger generations are growing up more aware of the challenges that face them and are looking for alternatives. People are burnt out, suffering physically and mentally due to wealth inequality. We are burning up our planet and our social fabric is tearing at the seams. It quite literally cannot continue. But change is possible, I’m not the only one who believes in it, otherwise why are we all here on these EFI courses? And what gives me comfort is that so many things we take for granted now were once radical ideas, championed by communities and people who believed enough in them to bring them to life. I certainly am not a dreamer enough to think that one day the world all the rich people will just hand over their wealth, but I certainly believe that enough of us can come together to create a framework that creates a fairer distribution of wealth so that we can all live a life to our fullest potential.

• Inclusive Society –  loved this intensive. Such a nice format and lovely to get together with the whole DIS group again, really wish I had been able to do it in person. Slightly worried about the alternative format for the assignment but we have a group idea now so I can focus on a format this week.
• Ethical Data Futures – This course has made me realise how uncomfortable I am with parts of my job and I’m actually lobbying my director to let me focus more on business intelligence rather than customer data. Excellent content so far – really enjoying the format and very impressed with the team that has been put together for this course. So much food for thought in not just my commercial life but also more of a belief that a lot of the algorithm/big data challenges are certainly a symptom of our current economic structure
• Building Near Futures – when I read the initial content for this course I panicked hard because I do not view myself as a creative person, but a few weeks in and I am loving it. It’s such a nice group to work with and the processes we are learning about designing for a near future really have helped me see that it is just problem solving. I can solve problems – I do it everyday. What problem are we solving has funny enough been the area of most debate within our group, but we have had some very productive conversations. It’s nice to be working with a team that has a diverse set of experiences and are mostly online – while we’ve struggled to find some time to get together it’s certainly made it easier to communicate during the class.

I said I would commit to picking an idea by the end of February and if I’m honest I have not spent that much time reading about UBI outside of the Inclusive Society intensive. I have been reading a lot about algorithms and privacy issues. I went for a long weekend of hiking to clear my head and have come to the conclusion that the PIP project is a ‘safe bet’ to a degree. I know the literature quite well on disability rights and am covering enough in the taught components to talk about the risk of opaque automated decision making. To make the project substantial I will need to a) verify this is what the government is doing and b) talk to people it has impacted. Part a is going to be the sticking point – I might only be able to prove that the ‘digital by default’ approach is negatively impacting people, not get clarity on if this digital by default approach comes with some automated decision making. As such, I am going to submit a FOI to try and find out. If I get some sort of indication that there is an algorithm at play then I will probably look at doing an investigative journalist-style deep dive piece, maybe as a series of podcasts to uncover the story.

In the interim I will continue to research UBI and think about how I would do a project on this while I wait for the FOI reply. I will then make a call as to if I can make the PIP story substantial or not.

[6] Radical Reshaping Required / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0