[9] Ethics, Methods and Reflections

It’s been a busy few weeks out in the big old real world for me. I sadly missed the last part-timers catch up call, though will prioritise being on it tomorrow as I missed hearing from everyone. In the meantime I’ve been busy helping host the first ever Ethical Commerce Alliance conference at the Royal Institution – as well as give a talk at it. It was incredibly inspiring to hear from people in the industry who are dedicated to thinking and improving things. My thoughts from the day that were over and above the content:

Data ethicist is now a distinct role that companies are hiring for and it is about going beyond compliance and security, which is encouraging
So many women in this space: Stephanie Hare & Kathrine Jarmul topped off the day but there were so many female voices in the room and in the crowd – it felt really empowering especially as a lot of us have emerged from technology backgrounds and it is usual for us to be lone voices in very male dominated spaces
When broaching new technological ground the philosophical questions are the ones that we much answer over anything else, is it intent over outcome? what parts of our humanity are suitable to outsource to automation? what makes us, us – is it our information, our thoughts our feelings? what is art? – somehow choosing philosophy over politics isn’t feeling so useless
Everyone and their aunty at the conference had written a book, and the process was kindly demystified for me – I certainly think that it’s achievable in the next couple of years

The talks will be published online, I’ll link them once they are up. I focused on conversational commerce as a mechanism to help retailers become more consentful when asking to store customer data – and also as an opportunity to encourage people to think about what data they really need to store. I was able to lean on a lot of learnings from this course, which I really liked. Especially from the Ethical Data Futures course.

I did also finally finish my blog about rejecting all cookies for a year after a discussion with an ECA member: THE COOKIE-LESS EXPERIENCE and have also found out that some colleagues are building a tool to check if consent managers are actually working, which is quite exciting.

We had agreed in the call before last to review methods and how this might help our project. I’ve been mulling over this a lot as I think that depending on what project I choose the methodology will be quite different.

PIP Project

For the PIP project it will be a combination of surveys / interviews with the impacted individuals as well as a literature and data review. For access to the individuals I have family members, social media connections and also a connection with a gentleman who specifically helps claimants submit PIP applications that I could reach out to. I would have to think about what is a reasonable number of people to survey / interview and if a combination of both would be good.

UPDATED THOUGHT: If I am thinking about how digitisation impacts access to services, sourcing contacts from social media might introduce a bias of people who have some digital literacy. Interviews might be better than surveys – perhaps reaching out to some local charities who support those with additional needs in the community might be helpful? Perhaps I could go down the food bank or community hub and see if people will talk to me there?

EXTRA UPDATED THOUGHT: I previously noted that I should find people who have been on PIP and used the paper form vs digital form – I think I was looking for some sort of data here to prove that their experience is negatively impacting them. However, a rejected application form doesn’t necessarily mean that the experience was lacking. This should not be a barrier to finding people to talk to.

Regarding the data – There is data published from the Department of Work and Pensions that I could take to see if it correlated with the lived experiences gathered in the interviews but there are other factors that will be impacting this data. Some resources I have recently come across:

BIG ISSUE article showing how the rate of appeals being rejected is sky rocketing. I covered the reasons for this in my inequalities essay but it has gone up even more since then
Disability News Article highlighting how some of the outsourced contracts have been renewed despite the companies being repeatedly linked to deaths of people being assessed by them and also outright lying by their assessors
Guardian Article about a suppressed study on sanctions – this is related but not core to the PIP benefit but gives some insight into the hostile environment being made for benefit claimants. The idea of sanctions might also be something I have to consider when asking questions – for example are people afraid of having to pay back what they have been awarded if a different assessor removes their claim rights at a later stage?

UBI Project

I’m still stuck on what I want to explore here. I really like how the Stanford Lab have categorised the research by topic area, this matches how I would start to do a strategic analysis – look at the big bucket topics and then start to fill in the requirements / gaps. I get more and more stuck the more I think for a project in this space. I think I might have to accept that while I’m super passionate and interested about it – I don’t have anything to contribute to the field as yet. Of course automation and the future of work is on everyone’s minds at the moment and I have a lot of opinions, but nothing completely novel and nothing really worthy of turning into a project…even if I did have something realistically it would be a meta study or literature review or something of that nature as I don’t have access to a pool of resources to go and start distributing unconditional cash 🙂

UPDATED THOUGHT: I could always see what the people think? What about a piece of research that takes the focus topics of Gender, Race, Automation etc. and ask a series of questions combining UBI as a solution for those focus areas + what their concerns about it would be. I could look at it as a study on if we were going to roll-out UBI, what would the public be interested in knowing and are there any gaps in academic research that don’t answer this yet?

I would have to have a comprehensive map of research outcomes to-date and also known gaps. I’d also have to carefully word the study so that I’m minimising bias in the answers…

I could do this using some mass online survey tools. It would mean that only people who are online would answer it, so I’d have to explore if that is an acceptable level of bias in the area of study.