Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Employee Experience and Plato’s Cave w/ Dr. Brennan Jacoby

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Employee Experience and Plato’s Cave w/ Dr. Brennan Jacoby · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:01
  Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGraw.
• 0:06
  Let's get into it. Tim, I am so excited, man,
• 0:11
  this is such a this is such an exciting episode. It's the return my
• 0:16
  friend of doctor Jacoby. Yeah, it's always great to talk with Brennan.
• 0:21
  I'm excited too. Let's let's not hang about if people don't If people don't
• 0:27
  know, go to Brennan. Jacoby is the is the founder of philosophy at
• 0:32
  work. He is a philosopher of the workplace. We've had him on the
• 0:37
  show before. We always get such a fresh and fascinating perspective on where work
• 0:43
  is and where work's going, and we can't wait to see him. So
• 0:46
  let's welcome him now. Welcome back, Brennan. It's great to see you
• 0:49
  again. Thanks so much Tom and Tim for having me. It's great to
• 0:52
  be here. I guess you know, not everybody's going to have heard our
• 0:57
  first celebrated episode, one of the earliest episod, so it's differ Deck Show.
• 1:00
  Actually it was like our third installment, I think. So. I
• 1:03
  guess a good place to start would be for you to make a brief introduction
• 1:07
  of yourself and of course Philosophy at Work too. Yeah, sure, so,
• 1:12
  Brendon Jacoby. I'm a philosopher and the founder of Philosophy at Work,
• 1:17
  which is a collective of people like myself that have backgrounds in philosophy and business
• 1:22
  psychology, and we work with businesses from all sorts of industries, all sorts
• 1:26
  of sectors on how they think their best. So what that really looks like
• 1:30
  is core learning and development workshops around things like critical thinking, strategic thinking,
• 1:38
  curiosity. I did my PhD on the topic of trust, and so a
• 1:42
  lot of times it's working with groups on how they create the kind of environment
• 1:47
  or culture where people feel safe enough to think their best. The other thing
• 1:52
  that's worth saying is a lot of times I have people tell me that they're
• 1:57
  sort of quietly playing in the back of the mind, trying to guess my
• 2:00
  accent, try to work it out. So for the sake of full transparency,
• 2:04
  I'm originally from the US, in Detroit specifically, but then did my
• 2:08
  PhD in Australia and I'm now speaking to you from the UK, so just
• 2:13
  north of Oxford. Nice. Nice. So, I mean it's been a
• 2:16
  couple of years since we last spoke, and when we last spoke. It
• 2:20
  was it was a timely conversation because we were right in the thick of the
• 2:23
  pandemic and all of the kind of all of those impediments to clear thinking,
• 2:30
  but the pandemic presented us with on a small and large scale, all of
• 2:32
  all of them. How blinding events and stress could be was very, very
• 2:38
  clear. So it was it was great to talk to you and to discuss
• 2:40
  the stoics. But I guess a good place to to to start just be
• 2:46
  asking how things have been for you for philosophy at work over the last couple
• 2:51
  of years and how that's evolved and with it you're thinking, yeah, thanks,
• 2:54
  um, So I mean maybe if i'd back up even just a little
• 2:58
  bit further. You know, I've been doing this work about last ten years
• 3:00
  or so, and in that period there's been a real sort of increase in
• 3:08
  I suppose awareness of the importance of how we think, right, So I
• 3:12
  think when I started doing this work there was sort of, you know,
• 3:15
  an appreciation for Yes, of course how we think matters, But you know,
• 3:19
  we've got things to do, We've sort of got work to get on
• 3:21
  with. Surely, if we talk about philosophy, it's going to just be
• 3:24
  sort of navel gazing or maybe too abstract or something. And then I think,
• 3:29
  like so many other things, the last few years have accelerated in increase
• 3:34
  in recognition of how important the way that we think is. So, you
• 3:37
  know, whether that was paying attention to our mindsets and sort of what we
• 3:40
  think and how that thinking informs what we do and how well we take care
• 3:45
  of ourselves, or even just saying Okay, we gosh, there's a lot
• 3:49
  coming at us really fast, and we need to sift through the information,
• 3:52
  or we need to sort of make sense of things and do our strategy.
• 3:53
  We need to be creative, we need to sort of process what's going on.
• 3:58
  And there's been a recognition that that's not just about not just about operations,
• 4:03
  that the thinking that informs that is really crucial as well. And so
• 4:08
  so there's been a lot of need, I think, for consideration of how
• 4:13
  we think and a recognition that what we think is not divided from what we
• 4:16
  do. And so especially over the last few years, we've been able to
• 4:20
  do a lot of really interesting work around how people think about work itself,
• 4:26
  something we might get into today, and how we think together, how we
• 4:30
  think alone, how we use things like curiosity to ask questions that open up
• 4:34
  conversations and draw out some of the thinking in the room. And maybe that's
• 4:39
  one other thing that's worth saying is there's been a lot of attention in the
• 4:42
  last few years, and rightly so, and it's been great to see this,
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  but attention on how we don't just sort of hire for diversity, but
• 4:50
  how we benefit from the diversity of the thought. University of thought, i
• 4:54
  should say, in the room, and one of the big places that we're
• 4:59
  working on saying, well, we can in order to benefit from that thinking,
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  we need to make space where people feel safe enough to share their views,
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  are skilled up in how we ask questions of each other that do some
• 5:11
  of that work. And so so it's a lot of that, that sort
• 5:14
  of co creative critical thinking that we're focusing on these days. Yeah. Absolutely,
• 5:19
  let's get into a subject matter that's close to Herman. We recently had
• 5:26
  Jacob Morgan on the show, Famous Jacob Morgan, and to in the instance
• 5:31
  my moderate surprise is one of the real architects of the whole space of employee
• 5:36
  experience, and what he was telling me on the show was that he really
• 5:41
  feels the pendulum has in recent years swung, if anything, too far in
• 5:46
  favor of the employee in regards to the employee employee and dynamic. What I
• 5:51
  wanted to ask you, Brennan, was, you know, look at philosophy
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  has obviously long had a lot to say on the themes of freedom and responsibility
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  and discipline and all kinds of related issues such as this. So I wonder
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  if you could start by offering some insight into that dynamic between the employer an
• 6:09
  employee and tell us what you think about where things might presently be. Yeah,
• 6:15
  Yeah, I think it's a really important question and one that I've just
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  been been navigating a lot with in very practical terms with a lot of the
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  clients that we work with, whether that's sort of in like law firms or
• 6:28
  tech firms and across the board on the sort of at the call face we
• 6:31
  could say a lot of how this is presented is in terms of um just
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  trying to get sort of people in a room together or whether that's a virtual
• 6:43
  room, a room or a physical co located room to do something that that
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  we've put on. An employer has said hey, we want to, we
• 6:51
  want to we all need to align in a certain way, and maybe pre
• 6:56
  pandemic, when I say that, I mean the COVID pandemic, it was
• 6:59
  sort of assumed that we would do that in a certain way, and now
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  it feels like everything's up for grabs, and probably you know, part of
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  what I think Jacob was touching on is that that way in which it feels
• 7:11
  like more the power has shifted over to the employee, right, so instead
• 7:16
  of where it might have just been before, like hey, we have this
• 7:19
  this this contract, and the written or unwritten expectation is that you're in the
• 7:25
  office these sorts of hours and we all sort of care about coming in to
• 7:29
  do these sorts of things. And now it feels like that's all it for
• 7:31
  grabs. And so there's there's a lot to be said about power, and
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  I think it's a great question, and where my mind goes first, I
• 7:39
  think, is to think about employment and the employer employee work relationship as a
• 7:46
  kind of social contract. So like like what the philosopher Jean Charpe we're so
• 7:51
  used to talk about, right, so saying that we can't essentially we can't
• 7:56
  do everything all ourselves, so we have to sort of contract with others to
• 7:59
  help protect us, I'll keep ourselves safe to get everything done. And I
• 8:01
  think in simplest terms, the employer employee contract is sort of, you know,
• 8:05
  we will agree to pay you X if you deliver on why right now,
• 8:11
  that's all fine, I suppose we could say, But traditionally there was
• 8:16
  a lot of unwritten expectations about that too, like not only will you just
• 8:20
  deliver the widgets and will pay you the package, but we expect that you'll
• 8:24
  do that between these hours and in this physical place. And so the way
• 8:28
  that that contract was understood was in terms of time and space and even some
• 8:33
  other things. You know. I was listening this morning on my run to
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  Oliver Berkman's recent book four Thousand Weeks, where at one point, so it's
• 8:43
  all about that book is all about sort of time, understanding your relationship with
• 8:48
  time, really, but at this one moment I was listening to this morning,
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  he talked about the move and hit the history of work from one which
• 8:54
  was much more piecemeal to one of employment. And he said, you went
• 8:58
  from this period where it was kind of just like workers were left to sort
• 9:03
  of get on with it however they saw fit, to now giving more power
• 9:07
  to the employer to the extent where it's like, well, hey, it's
• 9:09
  not okay if you come to work drunk, it's not okay if you sort
• 9:13
  of do it on your own terms. And now I don't think we're seeing
• 9:16
  a shift back to sort of what you eat and drink about work, but
• 9:20
  there is more of that pendulum swinging to say, well, actually, I
• 9:24
  want to do it on more of my own terms. And I think that
• 9:26
  can scare employers. But I think I'm probably on the other side of the
• 9:31
  view than perhaps Jacob I would say. That's what we're seeing is not an
• 9:37
  unhealthy sort of shift of power. But what we're seeing is a reframing of
• 9:45
  the contract, so which is moving from an understanding that was based primarily on
• 9:50
  time and space to one that is being based primarily on value added. And
• 9:54
  so we have more and more employers saying, well, hey, I'm getting
• 9:58
  the job done. Well, I'm getting it done yes on time. So
• 10:01
  there is still that reference to a temporal sort of spirit, but it's it's
• 10:03
  not primarily about time. It's I'm providing the value that you're expecting of me.
• 10:09
  Why should you care about sort of when and where and how I do
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  it? I'm just delivering the value and coming up with the work, the
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  ideas and news of things. And admittedly this is being seen more in spaces
• 10:18
  that are sort of, you know, in air quotes, thought of as
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  knowledge work. It's harder to make that shift if you're working on an assembly
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  line. But but that's that's part of what's going on, and it's a
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  shift of power. But it's one that that to some extent I think was
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  always there. We were just sort of, um, I think the employers
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  are sort of held some of the reins of powered to the extent that it
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  wasn't questioned, and it's it's been questioned over the last couple years because we've
• 10:48
  seen how well people can get on with things and be effective and efficient when
• 10:52
  working you know, from home or from from wherever. So so I'm I
• 10:58
  think we're just in a moment where nothing is fully settled, and that's uncomfortable
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  because there's a lot at stake, not least of you know, payments on
• 11:11
  for real estate and expensive offices, you know, and other things as well.
• 11:16
  There's there's a lot, there's a lot going on. But I think
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  to acknowledge the voices and perspectives and preferences of teams and employees as individuals who
• 11:30
  work best in certain ways is a good thing. And so what we'll probably
• 11:35
  see shakedown and what I'm seeing shakedown a lot of business as we work with
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  is is new conversations about how do we do this relationship really well? But
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  it's in a more nuanced, location, specific, instance dependent kind of way
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  rather than a blanket one. And I think that's a good thing. And
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  given that dynamic that you just laid out, what advice, if any,
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  would you give to the employees and employees respectively. Yeah, so a quick
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  answer and then a slightly longer answer. I think the vice that I hear
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  myself often saying to people whether it's sort of so maybe for people that that
• 12:13
  didn't join us for the previous conversation, just a little bit more backstory in
• 12:16
  terms of sort of what I actually do a lot of times, what it
• 12:18
  looks like is is working with with teams. But really, to be honest,
• 12:24
  this conversation comes up where these issues come up more when we're working with
• 12:28
  senior leadership teams, right, and we're talking about how how they can sort
• 12:33
  of develop their their businesses strategy and you know, retain talent, engage talent,
• 12:41
  you know, have the best possible scenario. And the thing that I
• 12:46
  keep hearing myself say, and that keeps coming up in those conversations is we
• 12:50
  need to really use our curiosity. And what I mean by that is not
• 12:54
  some sort of vague sense of awe or something, but but exercising our curiosity
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  in the form of empathy to lead with questions, to ask, ask the
• 13:05
  team leaders that we have, to ask the team members that we have.
• 13:09
  How how would this sort of scenario work for you? If we said,
• 13:13
  hey, let's go to a four day work week, or if we said
• 13:16
  we're going to operate in this way going forward? What does that mean to
• 13:20
  you? What does that how does that strike you as? And I know
• 13:22
  there's a lot of businesses doing listening exercises effectively, but some of them are
• 13:28
  are more authentically curious, I think than others. And when we've got a
• 13:33
  really authentically curious process, which is to say, we really don't think we
• 13:39
  already have the answer, we really want to know and want to go on
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  the journey together, that sort of co created way forward is always helpful.
• 13:50
  It's scary because especially if you think that that you know you are rightly the
• 13:54
  sort of leader of the organization and people are looking to you for an answer
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  then to say, hey, you know, I don't think there's a clear
• 14:01
  way forward and we need to work through this together. Than then that that
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  can feel like you're admitting defeat almost before you get started. Um, you're
• 14:11
  not, and it's not that's not it's not true, but it can feel
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  that way. And so I think there's a need to have a quite sort
• 14:16
  of mature approach to curiosity, where we've thought about the kinds of questions we're
• 14:20
  asking. We're not asking questions which we should know the answers to, but
• 14:24
  we're asking questions which are really generative and expansive and bringing other people into the
• 14:31
  conversation so that it's not only inclusive, but but but actually going to create
• 14:37
  something that that then people buy into more likely because they've been involved in it.
• 14:41
  You know. So I said there was one short answer in the one
• 14:45
  longer one that was my attempt at a short answer. The slightly longer one
• 14:48
  is that I, you know, I think about what Plato wrote in his
• 14:56
  sort of story of the Cave. Um, I don't know if you've come
• 14:58
  across the allegory of the cave before. But it's a it's a it's one
• 15:03
  read on the human experience, the sort of human condition, right, and
• 15:09
  I think it's helpful here, so if I just want to tell it in
• 15:11
  a nutshell, so Plato into Greek thinker arguably, well, he's been called
• 15:16
  sort of the key source in Western philosophy, which is not all of philosophy,
• 15:22
  but you know Western philosophy at least. And the story of the cave
• 15:28
  goes like this. There you have to imagine that there's a cave, and
• 15:31
  in the cave there's some people that are chained up to a wall. But
• 15:35
  it's not an external wall. This wall is a sort of short wall that
• 15:39
  is kind of in the middle of the room, right, and it only
• 15:43
  goes up maybe I don't know, four or five feet. So these people
• 15:46
  are on the far side of the wall, chained up to that wall so
• 15:50
  that they can't move, and they're being made all the time to look at
• 15:54
  the back wall of this cave. Right now, there's a fire sort of
• 15:58
  old school slide projector a sort of classical Ancients equivalent of a celebratory. There's
• 16:03
  a fire behind them that's casting shadows on the wall that they're looking at,
• 16:07
  and the shadows are being made by little sort of figurines of trees, people,
• 16:14
  horses, all the stuff in the known world, and those those little
• 16:18
  puppets, those characters, those figurings are being sort of moved along the wall
• 16:22
  that they're chained up against, so that because of the fire behind it,
• 16:26
  the shadows of those things are being cast on the wall. So hopefully you've
• 16:30
  got this sort of mental image of these people set against the wall. They're
• 16:33
  changing every way, so they have to look there. They've been changed since
• 16:36
  since sort of birth, so they've this is everything they've always known. And
• 16:38
  what Plato's wanting to to understand is that what they're seeing is what they think
• 16:45
  is real, but it's not really real. And then in the story he
• 16:48
  says philosophy is sort of personified, so he has this character that he talks
• 16:56
  about as philosophy that is sort of coming in and unchaining the people and bring
• 17:00
  them out into the daylight where they see like real trees, not just sort
• 17:03
  of shadows of puppet trees and real people and real everything. Right, And
• 17:10
  now there's a statement there about how Plato thinks about philosophy and its uses.
• 17:15
  But the thing that I wanted to bring up is he says, when you
• 17:17
  first unchain people, how will they how will they feel? And he says
• 17:22
  in the book that you know, he'll they'll feel really uncomfortable. They won't
• 17:26
  they'll be blinded by the actual sunlight. They won't want to do this.
• 17:29
  They'll feel they want to go back to the shadows. And I think something
• 17:33
  kind of similar is going on in the world of work and life and stuff
• 17:37
  these days. There's a lot of you know, the commute is like the
• 17:41
  classical example, right, the classic example. We just used to get up
• 17:45
  and do this thing every day. It's sort of we didn't really critique it
• 17:48
  too much, or maybe we did. We moaned about it a bit,
• 17:49
  but you know, we sort of just took it for granted. And then
• 17:52
  something happened that made it so that we all suddenly just had to work in
• 17:56
  different ways. And that was sort of I mean, I don't want to
• 17:59
  be too dramatic, but that was kind of like unchaining us from some of
• 18:02
  the assumptions about what we thought was really real. And now we're sort of
• 18:08
  in various stages of coming out into what might be the light, what might
• 18:12
  be other shadows, and it's uncomfortable. There's a lot of power shifting and
• 18:18
  there's a lot of power to be grabbed, and so I think we're what
• 18:22
  we're experiencing. M I. You know, this is why I say I
• 18:25
  probably disagree with Jacob. I wouldn't say that it's a bad thing. I
• 18:26
  just think we're in the transition period where it's uncomfortable and we've got to work
• 18:32
  out is this discomfort discomfort just because it's we're blinking into the sunlight of something
• 18:37
  that's better, or is it discomfort because actually something's going on there shouldn't be
• 18:41
  going on. And I probably lean towards the prior rather than the ladder.
• 18:47
  Yeah, I think the cave Shadows could be an entire episode on its own
• 18:52
  to explore there. That's it's a fascinating way to look at how things change.
• 18:59
  I want to go back to your earlier your short answer. You talked
• 19:03
  about and maybe transition a little bit the techie and me wants to talk about
• 19:07
  technology a bit, but you meant you talked about the human element of curiosity
• 19:14
  and empathy and the ability to create thoughtful questions. And the transition for me
• 19:22
  here is that one of the most potentially disruptive technology advancements we've seen in a
• 19:30
  while. Is this whole chat GPT phenomenon. Right, I don't know yet
• 19:36
  that it is truly disruptive, but it's it's it has the potential to be.
• 19:42
  And I it's not your area of expertise, it's certainly not mine.
• 19:47
  I actually don't know anyone who could claim to be an expert in it.
• 19:49
  But that lack of expertise kind of makes your imagination go wild. Right,
• 19:53
  what's going to happen with all of this, this this new area of tech
• 20:00
  chnology. So let's start with the philosophical side of it, the perspective on
• 20:03
  AI in general. Has the world of philosophy anticipated this emergence and what can
• 20:11
  we take from it as we enter into kind of a new technological era?
• 20:18
  Yeah, yeah, I think's a great, great question, Tim, And
• 20:21
  I think right up front to distinguish between I think I think it's helpful if
• 20:26
  we distinguish between philosophy, philosophies and philosophers. Right, So, where philosophy
• 20:33
  is the pursuit of wisdom, of a way of thinking as truth or so
• 20:41
  certain values at its heart, and is trying to think critically about you know,
• 20:45
  existence and everything right. And then philosophies are accounts of what counts as
• 20:52
  a good life or you know, wisdom, and philosophers are the people that
• 20:57
  generally have been credit up with coming up with those philosophies. So I think
• 21:02
  if we if to take your question, if we say, has philosophy sort
• 21:07
  of seen this coming? Or what does it have to what can it say
• 21:11
  that's helpful about about chet, GPT AI and everything. I think philosophy as
• 21:18
  a thing itself that first term, as I've tried to drive some wedges between
• 21:22
  them and distinguish, provides a really helpful mode of existing, not just thinking.
• 21:30
  Because whether it's the printing press or television or chat GPT, whatever the
• 21:37
  new technological technological advancement is, it's brought some of the same questions about,
• 21:44
  Okay, well, now we have created something that is unknown to some extent.
• 21:52
  It's capacity is unknown, and what it means for it to be done
• 21:56
  ethically is unknown, and the implication of it raise some questions. All these
• 22:00
  different sorts of things that people have thought of, and the way forward is
• 22:06
  going to require not just um quantitative sort of knowledge, but qualitative critically reflective
• 22:15
  sort of knowledge, and that is the process of philosophy. So I think
• 22:18
  philosophical thinking gives us some tools that are really useful anytime we have something that's
• 22:26
  new, whether that's navigating a pandemic to some of the stuff we've already been
• 22:30
  talking about or thinking about how we how we use something like chat GBT really
• 22:37
  well. But then to get more sort of specific to you to your question,
• 22:41
  philosophers certainly have said some things about about AI and you know, even
• 22:48
  if a lot of it goes right back again, I'm sort of dealing mostly
• 22:52
  today in Western thought, but in a lot of it goes back to Aristotle
• 22:57
  in ancient Greece, who distinguished what it meant to be a human from other
• 23:03
  animals as being a rational animal. Right, So part of that is saying
• 23:07
  what makes us beings like us is our ability to think in a certain way.
• 23:12
  And then if you fast forward throughout, you know, we get to
• 23:15
  things like the Turing test and to be able to say, well, a
• 23:21
  machine qualifies as having intelligence if it can produce the kind of content that is
• 23:29
  so good we wouldn't be able to tell if it's produced by the machine or
• 23:32
  by another human, right, And touring has talked a lot about by philosophers,
• 23:37
  but is not sort of filed under philosophy usually but descartes the French.
• 23:41
  French philosopher sixteen hundreds devised a similar set of principles where he was saying,
• 23:49
  you know this is this is in um in his book when he when he
• 23:52
  makes his famous I think therefore I am claim. And so he's he's thinking
• 23:56
  about what it means to have intelligence, and how doubt works, and what
• 24:00
  ideas and formation and consciousness is, and along that track says, if a
• 24:06
  machine we're able to respond across all the sort of universal ways that humans respond,
• 24:11
  then we would have to say that it's that it has intelligence. He
• 24:15
  thought that wouldn't be possible, because he said that machines have our only responsive
• 24:22
  based on what we would call today the algorithms that they're given. Now,
• 24:26
  the extent to which this is where we kind of get out of my bounds,
• 24:30
  I think, for aim, the extent to which artificial intelligence can go
• 24:33
  beyond the script they're given, right, I think, challenges some of some
• 24:40
  of that. So traditionally philosophers have said, well, hey, what makes
• 24:44
  what makes human cognition significant? And not just something that we as physical beings
• 24:51
  due but as members of the moral community do is we have choice, we
• 24:53
  can go beyond the script, and that seems to be a space where in
• 25:00
  moral philosophy that's the kind of remaining outpost is like, you're a person,
• 25:06
  not just a machine or not just an animal if you have choice. And
• 25:12
  this is where you know, there might be some of your listeners out there
• 25:15
  that go, yes, there's AI that has choice. I'm not sure.
• 25:18
  So I think that's if if we can So what philosophy, philosophers and philosophies
• 25:23
  have said is that if to the extent that we can create a machine that
• 25:29
  can generate choice, and that's not just sort of selection between options, but
• 25:36
  being able to come up with effectively a why right, like a reason for
• 25:40
  existing, and then from that reason, having intentions and motives and choosing based
• 25:45
  on that, then we've got something that looks like a member of the moral
• 25:48
  community, and that we could you know, critique and imprison for having,
• 25:55
  you know, for having used their will in certain ways. So I think
• 26:00
  there's there's that, Um, I think there's you know, hopefully that's that's
• 26:07
  helpful food for thought. I wonder if I don't know that there's there's some
• 26:11
  things running the background that that this this always makes me think of. But
• 26:15
  I'm conscious I've been sort of going on a little bit already, So um,
• 26:19
  you want to come back to me first before. Yeah, I'm curious.
• 26:22
  You know, as you talk through all of that, the concept of
• 26:26
  boiling it down and some may agree, some may disagree, but boiling it
• 26:30
  down to that the fact that maybe AI is automating human response, right,
• 26:36
  you ask it a logical question and you try to automate U some level of
• 26:41
  human style response. But one issue that that that it raises is around human
• 26:49
  redundancy. Right, What what do you feel philosophy tells us or philosophers tell
• 26:56
  us about restraining ourselves technology in order to protect that human status quo or does
• 27:03
  self limitation go against our very nature? Yeah, that's a great question,
• 27:11
  and this kind of this does get to that other thing that was on my
• 27:15
  mind. I think it's um I always think of whenever I hear questions about
• 27:19
  AI and humanity, and it's a great point about human redundancy. There's always
• 27:27
  been this question I couldn't quite put my finger on. I think it's something
• 27:30
  like, what are you know, what are we afraid of? What's the
• 27:33
  what's at risk? If we were to become redundant, right, and there's
• 27:41
  on the face of it, we could say, Okay, there's technology already
• 27:45
  that that has made workers redundant in various ways. But actually, I even
• 27:52
  think that's too bold acclaim there's technology that has made certain tasks that those workers
• 27:57
  did redundant. But if we say, if we say there's technology that has
• 28:02
  made a worker that is a person who has a history and a first name
• 28:10
  and a life in a specific town someplace in the world, who gets up
• 28:14
  and goes to work, if we say that there's technology that makes all of
• 28:18
  that redundant, it somehow feels really insulting and I and this I think is
• 28:25
  really illuminating because we have technology that is doing the task of that worker,
• 28:32
  maybe even faster and better. But there's things that the person is bringing that
• 28:40
  is more than just the writing they do or the widgets they make or whatever
• 28:45
  it might be. Right, And so if we think about, you know,
• 28:49
  the human redundancy thing, philosophy doesn't really care about maintaining the status quote
• 28:55
  because on the face of it, everything is up for grabs with the philosophy,
• 28:56
  it's always in the game, is all about critiquing everything and trying to
• 29:00
  move forward. So you know, I don't think philosophy or philosophers would would
• 29:06
  say, no, we've just got to protect how we've always worked. But
• 29:10
  one thing that that I think philosophers and philosophy doesn't really care a lot about
• 29:15
  is the truth, right, and that there's something I think part of what
• 29:18
  we see coming up whenever you study like the philosophy of personhood and humanity and
• 29:23
  stuff, is that we are more than just that which we create or produce.
• 29:32
  There's there's something about the spirit, the human spirit in which we do
• 29:36
  it or the creativity of it, or the ability to do otherwise, which
• 29:41
  goes back to that matter of moral choice. And so even if we have
• 29:45
  something like chat GBT that you know can write a better blog about philosophy than
• 29:51
  me, I don't, does that make my blog writing redundant. Certainly not,
• 30:00
  at least in one way. And that's in the meaning that when I
• 30:03
  when I sit down and write a blog, it's it adds meaning to my
• 30:06
  life, right, and that it's it's it's not transactional. There's something about
• 30:15
  processing the thinking and getting it out there and engaging with the audience and other
• 30:19
  people responding and sharing their thoughts and us sort of co creating understanding where if
• 30:26
  we said, hey, some tech could create a better like sort of better
• 30:32
  researched piece than Brennan could. Um, that's quite cool and kind of that.
• 30:37
  You know, that's that's got its place, But that's not all the
• 30:40
  meaning that's created by the work that we're doing. It's a really good point
• 30:42
  because you know, for ages people have asked themselves, what's the meaning of
• 30:47
  life? AI for me right now that that kind of imagination gone wild,
• 30:53
  it's not just replacing my tasks at work, it's replacing my thought at work.
• 30:59
  My thinking at work what and that's my very existence and what I bring
• 31:03
  to my employer is me as an individual and how I think. And if
• 31:08
  that starts to become redundant, I need to reassess the value that I bring
• 31:12
  to my employer and to my work. So how do what do you think
• 31:17
  the the end game is there for employees? How should employees start to think
• 31:22
  about the meaning of work and what they bring to the table? I mean,
• 31:26
  that's a huge question. It's definitely the right one that we need yeah,
• 31:33
  thinking about the meaning of work. If I just take a step back
• 31:36
  and think about what you mentioned there of you know, just that very live
• 31:40
  case right of okay, doing some knowledge work and the value I take myself
• 31:48
  to be adding is my thinking on this project. Well, now there's there's
• 31:52
  a I that maybe comes up with better thinking around that I think to at
• 32:00
  this point in human history, there's still, if I'm not mistaken, a
• 32:04
  need for the sort of driver of that AI, right, the sort of
• 32:08
  human guide to sort of shepherd it right to sort of say, okay,
• 32:14
  we we want the algorithm to to look in this way rather than that one.
• 32:19
  And it almost moves the human value add to a higher level, a
• 32:25
  more sort of meta move. So rather than coming up with and and you
• 32:31
  know, we've seen this before and previous chapters of human history work and stuff,
• 32:37
  where it used to be we need a human to to draft a contract
• 32:42
  or to crunch some numbers and come up with a statistic. Well, now
• 32:46
  we have AI to write the contract and come with statistics. And we we
• 32:50
  saw that down the move was Okay, the human needs to come up with
• 32:53
  the right questions to put into the machine to come up with the stats or
• 32:58
  needs to decide what are relevant for the contract. So if we've got an
• 33:02
  AI that's now doing that work, it I think it just pushes us one
• 33:06
  higher level to go what projects are ethically important or what are the ethical concerns
• 33:13
  around this? So in one sense, I think it, um, you
• 33:16
  know, technology, when it's done well should should enable us to do higher
• 33:22
  value work, right, Um, But there's a lot of question about what
• 33:25
  counts is higher value? You know. So you could say, well,
• 33:28
  that's that's less manual labor, it's more sort of thought based, but not
• 33:31
  necessarily you know, there's there's um, there's nothing like the satisfaction of chopping
• 33:37
  wood, you know, or or different things. Right, so so we
• 33:40
  could we could spend all day talking about what counts is different values of work
• 33:44
  and stuff. But I you know, for this this case, UM,
• 33:45
  you could say, well, it's pushing us higher to a to a to
• 33:50
  a higher level of saying okay, well, what's what are the what sort
• 33:53
  of questions should we be asking? What are the broader implications of this?
• 33:58
  Um? And I think that one of the things that maybe we need to
• 34:00
  be thinking about is well, what are the skills that help us do that
• 34:05
  kind of work because now we've got to be thinking on a different, a
• 34:07
  different level. But I yeah, I think I think there's still there's still
• 34:14
  is and I would suggest always value for that kind of human creative work.
• 34:20
  Yeah. Very well said Brennan, and very well said throughout it. It
• 34:23
  was wonderful hearing you, hearing your perspectives once again after a couple of years.
• 34:30
  I think I think a lot of people are going to want to know
• 34:34
  where they can find more of those perspectives and more of your work. So
• 34:37
  please tell them where they can find you in philosophy or work to follow and
• 34:40
  find that more. Yeah. So this is the usual places I'm on LinkedIn
• 34:46
  at doctor Brennan Jacobi Instagram as well at Philosophy at Work and our website is
• 34:54
  www dot Philosophy at work u dot co dot uk and the apt in the
• 35:01
  middle is spelled out it's not Matt signed. So Philosophy Atwork dot co dot
• 35:06
  UK is the website and all the contacts and all this stuff is on there
• 35:10
  as well. Wonderful Brandan, thanks so much for coming back on the Deck
• 35:14
  show. It's a pleasure. Thank you both so much for having me.
• 35:17
  I've really enjoyed it, and yeah, it's always nice to have a space
• 35:22
  where we can sort of get into things that you know, really deep and
• 35:27
  really meaningful and important to be discussing. So thank you, so much,
• 35:30
  so thanks. To make sure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to
• 35:36
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• 35:39
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• 35:44
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• 35:47
  to learn more about how next think can help me improve your digital employee experience,
• 35:52
  head over to nextthink dot com. Thank you so much for listening.
• 35:54
  Until next time,