Congrats to the Air Canada Components of CUPE who secured a contract between Air Canada and their flight attendants. This was a wild moment in Canadian labour relations. A ten year agreement expired, the union demanded pay for unpaid work and achieved a 99% strike vote. Air Canada preemptively locked out the workers last weekend and began cancelling flights. The federal government ordered the groups to binding arbitration and then ordered the flight attendants back to work. They refused and began an illegal strike. The public largely stayed onside becasue NO ONE LIKES DOING WORK FOR FREE. Then yesterday, the announcement came that the dispute was settled.
This whirlwind week was an important moment for labour in Canada. At the same time as the new agreement was announced, CBC reported last night on the increasing prices of things, especially food, and how the affordability crisis is going. We have heard all kinds of news about price inflation over the past few years, but hardly anyone has talked about wage stagnation. In the past, price would rise, and so would wages. But in the last 20 years, and the last ten years specifically, this difference has become truly unhinged. Nobody in politics with any power, least of all the federal Liberals and Conservatives, have discussed wage increases, but everyone seems to have solutions for inflation, which has largely returned to its “normal” levels.
We need to talk about wages. All the time. You are not getting paid enough. People need to be paid more. And if you are worried about prices increasing perhaps we shouldn’t be because very little of what we are paying in higher prices is going to the people that make things and provide us with the services we need. For things like food, living wages for workers are not the issue. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together, but we’re still living the neoliberal dream, so at the very least, the lateral thinking needed to do it is wanting.
Chris Mowles has a lovely post on the perils of an unquestioned commitment to directionality in complexity. Our work is never starting from scratch, and what does “going forward” even mean in a non-linear context?
…maybe there is more to uncover about complex experience than talking as if there is only one tense which is important, the future, and only the individual’s rationality and will to map it out. The future is important, and we are oriented towards it, but this shouldn’t prevent us from thinking about how we have become who we are, and what matters to us. What remains of the embers of the past from which we can still derive succour and find resource?
Rosa Zubazarreta has long been a curious “pracademic” – as she calls herself – about facilitation and deliberation. We have met a few times in the past, but I consider her a close colleague in the work of constantly trying to learn about how to host conversations and design group spaces in which dialogue and listening is maximized. She recently had a peer-reviewed article published called “Listening Across Differences” about deliberative “mini-publics” which are small democratic fora hosted in Austria. Her most recent blog post explores the role of AI in group facilitation, a topic about which she is deeply passionate, and about which I am very curious.
It’s happening and I’m certainly willing to explore it more in deliberative contexts. I have run a couple of small experiments using AI to summarize vast amounts of narrative information and advice submitted by citizens to create high level summaries of advice, high level articulations of dissenting opinions and so on. This becomes material for further deliberation. I have been toying with a design where members of a group all spend time feeding information to different GPTs, querying the data in different ways and bringing their insights to a conversation. It’s about how to make vast amounts of opinion accessible, and generate a learning conversation that everyone can participate in.
This is becoming an interesting field and I notice the twin poles of curiosity and resistance in myself. My friend Jeff Aitken sent along a link to Metarelational.ai which feels like a true TRIP to explore. There are several varieties of trained chatbot there. I have seen and explored some of these, each one cultivated like a garden, each one designed to do something a bit different. Honestly, after a hour or so in a session with these tools, it’s hard to know what terms like “relational” mean. I am firmly in the world of knowing and working with human-to-human relationality. The work at Metarelational seems to at times to evokes a kind of eschatology of human relationships stemming from our own design, and a sort of surrender to AI and machine intelligence that feels religious. It uses religious and spiritual terms and language like “agape” and “right relationship” and “interbeing.” I joked with Jeff the other day about when a new religion might sprout up around an AI chatbot. It’s a joke, but given the proclivity for human beings to seek a higher intelligence that has all the answers, and to be led in a course of action “forward” at any costs, I think there is a serious question here.
I’m not sure that this shows up in the training set
About 8 years ago I remember Dave Snowden coming to Vancouver directly from a conference of security experts where they were discussing the top existential threats to humanity. In ascending order, at that time, they were: nuclear war, climate change and AI. At the time I remember thinking that how strange that seemed given that climate change is an absolute certainty and at least with nuclear war, we could actively try to prevent it. I had no idea what AI could really look like.
Nevertheless this particularly dystopian view of things had me on alert as I watched for signs that this might be happening. I am no AI expert, and the only AI I regularly and consciously interact with is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is now the best search engine out there, as everything else has become ruined by algorithms. It works, but it is also highly flawed and there is a simple reason for that: It acts like a human being.
If you’ve used ChatGPT you will be familiar with its major flaws which include approval seeking, hallucinations and, an overinflated sense of its own abilities. It will often say it can do things – like a harmonic analysis of a jazz tune – that it cannot actually do. And when it does the work and confidently provides the user with absolute garbage, my instinct is, that if it was an employee, I’d fire it. The inability to say “that is beyond my current limitations” is maddening. I was asking for this musical analysis the other day and after it couldn’t provide it, I discussed the fact that there is a price to this misplaced confidence. ChatGPT uses a tremendous amount of energy and water, and when it does so to just waste my time, I explained, there is an ethical issue here. It acknowledged that issue but it didn’t really seemed bothered by it.
That shouldn’t be a surprise because it was trained on the documented behaviours of certain classes of humans, for whom performative ethics is the norm. We do almost everything here in the global north with a detached knowledge that our ways of life are unsustainable and deeply and negatively impactful on our environment and other people but we don’t seem particularly bothered by that, nor to we display any real urgency to do anything about it.
This training is why Yuval Noah Harari is so worried in this video. AI is unlike any other tool that humans have invented in that it has agency to act and create on its own. As Harari says, printing presses cannot write their own books. But AI can, and it can choose what to write about and what not to, and it can print them and distribute them too.
The issue, and we have seen this recently with Grok, is that AI has been trained on the detritus that humans have left scattered around on the Internet. It has been raised on all the ways that we show up online. And although it has also been trained on great works of literature and the best of human thought, even though most of that material appears to have been stolen, Harari also points out that the quantity of information in the world means that only a very, very tiny proportion of it is true.
When I watched the video and then reflected on the post I wrote yesterday about difficult conversations, I had the insight that AI will know all about the stupid online conversation I started, but will know nothing about the face-to-face conversation that I later had. Harari points out, very importantly, that AI doesn’t understand trust. The reason for that, he says, is that we haven’t figured out the trust and cooperation problem in human society. That’s the one we should be solving first.
AI has no way of knowing that when there are crises in a community, human beings often behave in very beautiful ways. Folks that are at each other’s throats online will be in each other’s lives in a deeply meaningful way, raising money, rebuilding things, looking after important details. There is no way that AI can witness these acts of human kindness or care at the scale with which it also processes the information record we have left online. It sees the way we treat each other in social media settings and can only surmise that human life is about that. It has no other information that proves otherwise.*
For me, this is why face-to-face work is critically important. Meetings are just not the same over zoom. We cannot generate the levels of trust on zoom that we can by spending a significant amount of time in physical proximity to one another. Face-to-face encounters develop contexts of meaning – what I have called dialogic containers – and it is in those spaces and times that we develop community, trust, friendship, sustainable commitment and, dare I say, peace. The qualities of living that we ascribe to the highest aspirations for human community are only generated in their fullness in person. They require us to work through the messiness of shared life-spaces, the conflict of values and ideas and paths forward, the disagreements and confusions, by creating multiple ways in which we encounter and relate to one another. Sustainable community life requires us to see one another in multiple identities so that we discover that there are multiple possibilities for our relationships, multiple ways we can work around blockages and unresolvable conflict.
We are fast losing this capability as human beings. When people ask me to work with their groups there is always the lingering question of whether we can do the work of three days in two, and the work of two days in one. The answer is no. We can do different work in limited times and spaces. Narrowing the constraints on the act of making meaning together creates more transactional relationships based on incresingly incomplete and inaccurate information. This is world we are showing to AI agents. The actual human world is also relational, multi-faceted, subtle and soaked with meaning. As we feed our robots a particular picture of ourselves it’s possible that we are also becoming that very picture. Depth of relationship and meaning becomes replaced with a smeared, shallow breadth of connections and transactions.
There is no better way – no faster way, even – to develop trust than to be together. I think this is so true that it certainly is axiomatic to my practice and how I live my life. And if trust is the critical “resource” we need as human beings, to not only live well but to also address the existential threats that we face – which are all entirely created from our own lack of trust – then being together face-to-face working, playing, singing, struggling, discussing, and figuring stuff out is the most radical act of hope and generosity we can make, to ourselves and to our descendants.
I suppose there will always be a top three list of threats to human existence, but it would be nice if those top three were things like “sun goes supernova” or “super volcano blankets the earth in decades of darkness” and not actions for which we are entirely responsible.
* It also occurs to me that alien cultures who are able to pick up and understand the electronic signals we have been radiating towards every planet within 100 light years of ours will also get a very particular picture of who we are as a civilization. Never mind what was on the Voyageur record. Monday’s TV news has already overtaken it.
Peter Levine shared a video today of a panel he was on back in June, discussing practical ways to have difficult conversations. We could all do with a little more practice in this these days. I know I certainly could.
I found the audio hard to hear, but Peter’s post helpfully summarizes what each presenter practices, and I have gathered these principles here in a list for future reference. Each person is working in a different context, but the gathering was about teaching civics in schools in the United States. I think there is some useful transferrance of these principles, so I’m going to slightly rephrase them to be more general.
- Ground discussions in shared principles, such as living well together or a desire to find common ground
- Explore tensions (such as between equality and liberty(
- Use historical rather than current examples.
- Let the other lead.
- Set norms for addressing identities
- Allow a person to opt-out of “representing” a group
- Take responsibility for imbalances in credibility
- Give full attention to the other
- Practice receptivity, curiosity and open-heartedness
- Allow long pauses to allow quieter voices to emerge
- Make the conversation multi-centred, in other words allow it to become a real conversation rather than a mediated exchange of ideas through one person with power in the situation.
- Ask “What are you concerned about?” to uncover core values
- Legitimate concerns without needing to agree with them.
- Ground the discussion in a shared moral foundation
- Understanding your own philosophical, moral or ethical principles can help you generate good questions.
- Listen for understanding, not debate or attack.
Peter Levine (my summary , because he doesn’t cover his own talk in his post!)
- Name your own biases and make them visible
- Find a share ground of values
- Ask questions that are neither too abstract but also not settled.
- Explore unresolvable tensions
I recently found myself in a difficult conversation and I handled it really badly. It stemmed from a poor comment I made on a social media post during an election campaign where I accused my interlocutor of posting a hoax becasue a meme he shared did not reflect the data that was contained in the report it referenced. I know this person in real life, and the conversation did not go well online. When I saw him in real life, I apologized. A few days later we found ourselves together in the community and we started discussing the point of the post he made. It became a dogfight. I was triggered and upset, feeling some shame and guilt that I had kicked this whole thing off with what he perceived as a personal attack online. For his part, he is a lawyer, so the conversation became a debate, both of us convinced we were right. I was without any kind of skillfulness in creating a good curiosity based conversation. It wasn’t a proud moment.
Practicing these kinds of conversations is incredibly hard. None of us are saints. Principles like the ones above are just basic good sense for anyone hosting or participating in a difficult conversation, but they are incredibly difficult to remember and practice when we are in an emotional state and when the conversations we are having may ultimately have existential implications for the folks in the discussion.
I think at the end of the day one of the key principles that is my own personal responsibility to take is “I want this to go well, for me and the person I’m talking too.” I don’t mean that we should avoid conflict and just be civil to each other, or that we should deny any part of our emotional response to a situation. What I mean is that we should embrace a relationship, even if only for a few minutes, that can hold different experiences, different points of view and different aspiration side by side. For that we need a practice ground and before we step out onto that mat, we need some principles to guide us.
Here are some. What are yours?
From my friend Kavana Tree Bressen comes this story of 120 Indigenous youth who kayaked down the Klamath River. It sounds impressive on its own merits, but it is amazing becasue these were the first people ever to do so. Until whitewater kayaks were invented, the river wasn’t suited to long journeys. And those boats weren’t invented until after that river had been blocked, initially in 1903, with four hydro-electric dams that destroyed salmon runs and radically disrupted the lives of the Nations who depended upon them. This is an amazing story.
Rick Scott has died. Scott was a legendary BC folk music and children’s music performer and provided the soundtrack to my kids lives when they were young. The Wild Bunnies of Kitsilano was on repeat in our house. His work with Pied Pumpkin was legendary.
A scathing critique of a neo-liberal criticism of a classically liberal university, the European University Institute at Crooked Timber. Far from just a spat between two political points of view in the stratosphere of reason, I think this particular conversation captures where we are right now in democratic states. These two paragraphs in particular stood out to me because in the absence of true conversations and commitments to social welfare and democracy, this is where the state of play is in the world in terms of the practice of state-level justice, equality and social services:
Liberalism involves a bundle of commitments: to individual freedom, minority rights, toleration, rule of law, private property, civil liberties, academic freedom, constitutionalism, human equality and the promotion of opportunity. Liberals tend to view these commitments as mutually reinforcing rather than dimensions on which tradeoffs are possible.
Neoliberals, like The Economist, tend to put the economic freedom bits first and assume that the other dimensions will take care of themselves. Populists are opposed to pretty much everything in that list other than those economic dimensions. As the latter rise in power, the former seem more and more willing to let their social and political commitments fade into the background.
If this is where the conversation is right now, I feel it’s important to join that movement on liberalism while it is still backed by institutions – troublesome as they may be – because they still have the ability to influence policy and keep space open for participation against the rise of populism, fascism and the rapacious demand of the market privatizing everything. Join it and push it to a place of leveraging state and institutional resources to alleviate poverty, and meet basic human needs in a spectacular and generational fashion. I’d be interested on your thoughts on this one.