Our episode today features Tracey Spicer, award winning journalist, author, and social justice advocate who begins this episode with a story from her own life: her son, after watching an episode of South Park, declared “Mum, I want a robot slave.” This declaration prompted Tracey to begin a seven-year journey exploring how society shapes the technology we surround ourselves with, and how technology in turn shapes us. Her findings are documented in her latest book, Man-Made, which was published by Simon & Schuster earlier this year. Tune in to hear more about Tracey’s latest book, her work as a journalist and social justice advocate, how technology is changing journalism, life as a working parent, and so much more.
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Credits:
Guest: Tracey Spicer
Hosts: Zena Assaad and Liz Williams
Producers: Zena Assaad, Liz Williams, and Martin Franklin (East Coast Studios)
Theme music: Coma-Media
Episode Transcript:
Liz:
Hi everyone, I’m Liz Williams.
Zena:
And I’m Zena Assaad.
Welcome to episode two of our second season of Algorithmic Futures.
Liz:
Join us as we talk to technology creators, regulators, and dreamers from around the world to learn how complex technologies may shape our environment and societies in the years to come.
Zena:
In today’s episode, we’re joined by the incredibly talented Tracey Spicer. Most of our listeners will likely know Tracey and be familiar with her work, but for those who may not know her, Tracey is a multiple Walkley Award-winning journalist, author, and social justice advocate. Tracey has anchored national programs including ABC TV and radio, Network Ten and Sky News.
Liz:
Tracey has long been an advocate for gender equality, shedding light on gender issues at a global scale through her documentaries on women and girls in Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Papua New Guinea and India. In her latest novel – ‘Man Made’ –Tracey explores the next frontier of feminism buy shedding light on the inequalities and biases in emerging technologies. We invited Tracey to speak to us about her new book and to reflect on her non-linear path to bringing this book to life.
Zena:
In our wide-ranging discussion, we explore the different barriers that women face in the workplace and unpack some of the challenges and opportunities that emerging technologies can provide for women. We also talk about some of the expectations that have been put on women for decades and how these expectations have changed and shifted with time.
Liz:
Along the way, Tracey shares insights into her decades long career in journalism and media and speaks honestly around the challenges of being a working parent, balancing differing commitments and navigating workplace inequalities. We are so honored Tracey could join us, and we hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did.
Zena:
Welcome, Tracey. Thank you so much for joining us. We’re very, very excited to have you on the podcast today.
Tracey:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled.
Zena:
So, Tracey, I first discovered you on Instagram actually, so I was going through my For You Page and a little advertisement came up around your book, Man-Made. I can see that your book really brings together two very big topics and its technology and bias. So, can you share with us how these two things came together for you and how that motivated the creation of this book?
Tracey:
Yes. I’ve been a journalist for about 35 years now. As journalists, we tend to have a very wide general knowledge but very shallow. We don’t often go right down the rabbit hole on things unless of course we’re writing a book. So, one day, probably about seven years ago when my son was 11, he said to me, “Mum, I want a robot slave,” because he’d been watching South Park. We are terrible parents.
Zena:
Fantastic show.
Tracey:
It’s a fabulous show. I love it. Cartman had been ordering around his Amazon Alexa like he was some colonial overlord. Suddenly, my life’s work came together of being a journalist and a feminist and someone who’s interested in society and humanity. I started to worry that the 1950s ideal about women and girls being servile in the home was being built into the technology that will determine and run our futures. So, that’s how the technology piece and bias came together. I did go right down the rabbit hole, took me seven years to write this book.
Zena:
Wow, that’s a long time.
Tracey:
It was a really long time. I started out from a feminist perspective looking at the sexist aspect, but then it became really intersectional. I looked at discrimination against people with disabilities, people of color, and the benefits that could be brought if people of all backgrounds were involved in the design process in a truly inclusive way.
Zena:
One of the things that I’ve experienced personally in my career, and I think not just women — I think most people experience this — is really feeling a little bit like you’re not entirely sure that you have the right skills or the right expertise for something. It’s a little bit like imposter syndrome, I guess. So, what was your experience having this journalist background and coming into writing a book and delving into the technology space for seven years? What was your experience with engaging with people in technology space, having the confidence to write in that space?
Tracey:
At the start, I felt completely out of my depth, because I’ve never even been one of those people who is particularly interested in technology, to be honest with you. I’m not one of those early adopters. I’m a little bit of a medium adopter, not a late adopter. I’m interested in it particularly because I’ve got teenage children now and they expose my husband and I to a lot of the new technologies, but it’s not something I’ve ever had a passion for. However, being a journalist for so long, you know that you have the ability and skills to be able to take really complex ideas, dissect them, and regurgitate them in a way that’s understandable for the general public.
When I started reading a lot of the academic papers in this area, they were quite impenetrable. But then I went back to my journalistic training of translating everything into anecdotes, metaphors, storytelling, visualisation, comparisons, things that bring it to life for people. The good aspect of the research actually was doing all the interviews I did with experts in technology and bias and ethics around the world, because that had a bit of practice at explaining these things to other people in the general public. So, they were able to help break it down for me into really simple language.
Liz:
Going back to the intersectionality aspect of it, which you brought out in your book, I’m wondering how your experience as a journalist helped you explore that with regards to this particular subject.
Tracey:
It was partly my lived experience and partly my experience as a journalist. I was really cognisant of quoting and interviewing a lot of people from diverse backgrounds, rather than just looking at the list of the top 10 commentators in this area and thinking I’ll interview them. It actually is really annoying me at the moment that the loudest voices talking about the dangers of artificial intelligence are older White men. Whenever someone like Dr. Joy Buolamwini or Timnit Gebru, some of the really great voices who are women of color are talking about it, it’s more on different websites that aren’t in the mainstream necessarily. It’s not the mainstream news services. So, that was the first step. I really wanted to interview people from different backgrounds.
Then secondly, last year with long COVID, I lived with a dynamic disability and that gave me really fascinating insight into the conversation around, “Well, yes, we need more ramps for wheelchairs.” It really comes to life when you are in a wheelchair, and you can’t get up the one step that no one told you was going to be there. So, I’ve got a couple of chapters on disability and artificial intelligence because the technology could change the lives of so many people around the world if they were involved in the get-go in the development of some of these innovations.
Zena:
A lot of the narratives around AI at the moment do have sometimes a bit of a fearmongering stance, I guess. One of the things I’ve been enjoying about your book is that it does highlight the risks, but also, there’s a level of optimism I think that underpins a lot of that narrative. Having been a journalist for so many years, what’s your experience with taking a pragmatic approach to delivering information and delivering news in the way that still captures people without having to go down that route of fearmongering?
Tracey:
Thank you for that comment. I really appreciate the feedback. When I started doing the research, I was horrified. Although I’m a glass half full kind of person, I was quite negative about the future. But I also realized as someone who’s worked in communication for a long time, that you can’t just write a whole book with no solutions. Otherwise, people will just throw the book against the wall and think, “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.” That’s pointless. You write a book for a couple of reasons. One is to educate people and another is to motivate them to do something or to think something or to reassess an aspect of society.
So, I did work hard to find some optimism towards the end and some practical, pragmatic solutions that people could do in their homes and workplaces. Really simple things like changing the voice of Siri to a male or gender-neutral voice, catching a Shebah, a female-run technology company, instead of an Uber, for example, and also those really big picture structural solutions around a universal basic income and the redistribution of wealth. Because we know that with the bias and discrimination being embedded in these technologies, we will see a widening of the gap between rich and poor and we need a broader social reassessment.
Liz:
I think one of the challenges with creating these kinds of technologies with broad input is that actually not only getting the designers to reflect the populations these technologies are going to serve, but also getting voices from that broader society into the development process. You can set out to do that and actually end up imposing some harm on the people that you’re taking input from. So, I’m wondering if as you were researching the book, you came across any ideas of how to do that well, how to actually bring diverse voices into the technology development process, but also probably the technology regulation process because that’s important too. Are there any thoughts that you might want to share in terms of how we do that well?
Tracey:
Well, we all know that there has to be inclusion as well as diversity or diversity just doesn’t work. So, what’s been happening in the tech sector over the past several decades is that a lot of programs have been put in place to diversify the workforce. But when a lot of women are going into the male dominated companies or a lot of people of colour are going into very White companies, that they’re not necessarily welcomed and there’s not procedures and policies and processes in place to make them feel comfortable in that environment and they end up leaving. So, there’s blockages in the whole process really from start to finish. There’s blockages in primary school.
By the time girls get to the end of primary school and start of high school, they just don’t see a lot of STEM professions as something that’s for them. They still see it in this day and age as something for the boys. Then there’s the university factor where there’s a lot of harassment of girls who are in courses that are male dominated, and then they go into the workforce. If there’s not proper inclusion, then they’re forced out. So, there’s problems every step of the way. With regards to regulation, we just need to get started on it. I mean, the European Union is putting in place some suggested guidelines. They’re not quite there yet. They’re still working on them, but most countries are so far behind the eight ball because of the pandemic predominantly.
Governments were looking at how to mitigate COVID-19. While that was happening, artificial intelligence developed exponentially because a lot of these organizations thought, “Oh, well, no one’s looking. We can just keep pushing the boundaries.” I really feel like we’re living at a time in history that is similar to that period where the car had been built, but seat belts hadn’t been created yet. So, it is a really unsafe and dangerous time. Things will improve. We know with every industrial revolution, technology forges forward well before regulation and legislation, but we need to be looking at the inclusion piece and regulation now.
Zena:
I think that’s probably a really good segue into the next question. You were talking a bit about women’s place, I guess, in different careers and industries. By the time they finished high school, they feel there’s not a place for them in STEM. When I was doing my little deep dive on you, I came across your TED Talk, The Lady Stripped Bare, which is fantastic. It’s a talk about the societal expectations on women and the message that women are often more valued for their looks than what’s in their head or in their heart. I think that that message still resonates incredibly well today. So, how did you grapple with this inequity when you were working in the media, which we know can be a very appearance driven industry?
Tracey:
When I started working in the media, it was the late 1980s and we were surrounded by a wallpaper of misogyny. It was so prevalent, the sexual harassment, discrimination, pregnancy and maternity discrimination, sexual assault. It really was shocking. It was the Wild West. But because it was so common, it became normalised and a lot of us from that era internalised the misogyny and started to feel that we only deserved to be valued for the way that we looked and started to question our own intellect and whether we deserve to be in any kind of leadership positions or whether this industry was even right for us. It was very, very hard to keep bagging your head against that glass ceiling.
That appearance benefit and deficit as you get older, which Naomi Wolf, the feminist, called the ‘beauty myth’, is also prevalent in technology, particularly those apps, the image generation apps like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. If you put in that you want an image of a woman, usually it will come up with a White woman, a very attractive White woman with very clear skin and a smaller waist. When we were designing the cover for my book, I wanted a strong robot woman looking to the future with concern but hope. That was the idea that I wanted for the cover. When we put in words around that, the first image that came up was a robot woman with a tiny waist, enormous breasts, and huge biceps, these guns, right?
Because the only way the algorithm read strong woman was as a woman who had built up her biceps. There was just no idea of a strong woman being a leader. So, that’s where I draw the connection between my time in the media all those years ago and what’s happening in technology now, because both the media and technology reflect and shape society, and the way they’re shaping it is for women to continue to be valued for their appearance and for men to be valued as leaders and for their intellect.
Liz:
So, I’d like to go to social media and maybe some of the changes that you’ve seen with the introduction of social media. What differences have you noticed in how women exist in society today in the environment in which social media is ever present versus what you maybe saw about 20 years ago?
Tracey:
When social media exploded 15 to 20 years ago, there was such hope actually within the feminist community that it would connect a lot of grassroots voices and voices that were unheard in the mainstream media, that it would tear down the gatekeeping that silenced marginalised voices and amplified the voices of those who own the media organizations. That certainly did happen. I mean, there’ve been incredible movements like the Arab Spring that have been supported by people connecting on social media. But the problem now, well, the problems are multifaceted. There’s huge bullying and harassment and assault of women online. It is relentless.
A friend of mine, Ginger Gorman, wrote an incredible book five years ago called Troll Hunting, where she proved through her global research that women and people in marginalised communities are the ones who are harassed more on social media like they are in real life. Now that social media has become real life, we’re all facing the same problems that we faced years ago, but we are facing it on two fronts, face-to-face and online. Then there’s also this Instagram phenomenon with the filters that Instagram rewards beautiful faces with its algorithm.
That’s incredibly damaging, of course, to girls and young women in the same way as those glossy magazines with the airbrushing were damaging to girls and young women 20 to 25 years ago. That’s why I say an awful lot that we’ve come a long way, but we’ve got a long way to go.
Zena:
I agree with everything as far as the physical appearance, but I think there’s also something about the way we’re expected to be as women. So, there’s this toxic positivity sometimes I see. You get the women who are like, “Oh, my 5:00 AM morning routine.” She’ll wake up and make herself this beautifully aesthetic coffee and she looks beautiful and then she goes to the gym and then she fixes her bed. I’m just like, “How? If I was to wake up at 5:00 in the morning, I’d need 20 minutes just to remember where I was.” But it’s just this expectation of women can do it all. It’s not that I don’t believe that women can’t do it all. It’s that I just don’t think the expectation that we should have to do it all should exist, especially when you see mothers on social media.
You see these mothers who work full-time, and their kids are always perfectly dressed, and their house looks immaculate, and their clothes look immaculate and no one spat up on it. I’m just like, “In what universe is this reality? This isn’t real.” So, I think there is the physical appearance and then there’s also just the way that we are supposed to be and these enormously unrealistic expectations that get put on us through these really short videos. They go for 30 seconds, and they have a huge impact.
Tracey:
You’re so wise because it’s a combination of three things, the 1950s idealised image of the perfect housewife, doing all that and having the scotch ready for her husband when he comes home. The house is perfect, the children are well-behaved, she’s got a full face of makeup on, all that terrible stuff. Then there’s a 1970s ideal of the superwoman who could work. Yes, you’re allowed to work, but you’re still expected to do everything and that’s lingered for a very long time. Then there’s also the 1990s phenomenon of the yummy mummy that sure, you can have children, but you’ve still got to bounce back to a size eight and look perfect.
So, all of these terribly restrictive and misogynistic ideals for women in society, you are right, they’re now being amplified by social media and the people who pretend to live that lifestyle because nobody actually lives that lifestyle are being rewarded by the algorithm and rewarded in a capitalist society that values and venerates that, because it sells more products. When they seem to have this perfect life, they can say, “What helps me have this perfect life, ding, is this fantastic thing that you can buy right now, link in bio.” It’s just crazy.
Liz:
Sorry. You’re getting me angry about society in general. No, that was one of the things when I became a parent, it took me a long time to actually realise that even though my mother claimed she said she was a feminist — I was raised in a household where both my parents worked, et cetera. I actually realised as I was trying to figure out how to parent my own children, how many of those traditional values that I still thought I needed to uphold for whatever reason. It wasn’t just that I was making a conscious choice there. It was that I had seen all of these examples of this is what you’re supposed to do, this is how you’re supposed to act as a parent or a mother in particular. I saw that.
Then at same time, I see my husband who was primary carer for a long time, and he couldn’t even go to parent groups because he’d be the only male there and nobody would talk to him. All of these things that we are reinforcing through these algorithmic systems, we don’t even know how they impact us unless we spend the time to dissect our own behavior when we are in the midst of it.
Tracey:
Oh, definitely. You’ve hit the nail on the head. That is what is happening with these algorithms. The way I describe it in the book is in very simple language that the data, all the images and words and videos is historical by its very nature. So, more often than not, a doctor is a he and a nurse is a she. Then if the data isn’t cleaned, this dirty data, which doesn’t represent the way we want the world to be, goes into the algorithm. Then of course, the programmer has their own unconscious bias. We all have unconscious biases. That’s fed in. Then the third step is machine learning, which is the most dangerous step, because that deepens those biases and discrimination that come in from the data and the programmers.
I describe machine learning as a White supremacist going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory websites because it just makes the bias and discrimination worse and worse and worse. With little human oversight, there’s nothing that’s going to stop that. That is what is most terrifying. To your point about the parenting situation, you’re right and this is unconscious bias again. For example, I’m in a household where it’s 50/50 with my husband. To be fair to him, he probably does much more of the child-rearing and housework than I do because I’m away a lot traveling for work.
But whenever I’m at home, I have to really fight this desire to be the perfect 1950s mother and to make sure the kids have a healthy meal because they’re studying years 11 and 12 at the moment, even though I’m exhausted after traveling and working, because I feel like I should be doing that to give them some kind of semblance of a family unit. I feel that guilt more than I know that my husband does. So, that’s the unconscious bias and the wallpaper of misogyny that we’ve been surrounded by.
Zena:
I think that’s something that makes me nervous. So, my husband and I don’t have children and we don’t know if we want them. I’ve spoken to Liz about this in great lengths, but it makes me nervous. Well, first of all, I don’t know if I want to be a parent, but second of all, I’m very career driven, and I like my job. It makes me very nervous to think about the things that I would have to give up if I were to have a child. I have a great husband and I know that we would be equal contributors.
But even still in my mind, when I think about what it would be like to be a parent, I think a lot about the things I would have to lose or have to give up. Isn’t it interesting that I think bringing a child into the world should be a very joyous thing and a very happy thing and in my mind when I think about it, I do get quite stressed because I think, “Oh, I’m going to have to give up a lot of my body, my time, my sleep”? Those are the things that I think of and it loses, I guess, that romantic element to it, which is a bit sad sometimes.
Tracey:
It’s understandable that you’re stressed about it because society is not set up to support people having children, particularly women. I know that sounds strange because we rely upon the propagation of the species to continue humanity, but it’s so poorly set up. It’s cobbled together with sticky tape and a staple gun. I mean, the only advice I can give is my husband and I worked full-time through the raising of our children. We had help in the home. We had external help. We used external and internal childcare. So, we are fortunate to be able to afford to be able to do that, but one thing we did do was we taught the kids to be incredibly independent from when they were very young.
I put a big knife in my five-year-old’s hand when Taj was that age and said, “Right, you’re chopping up the vegetables tonight.” Because if you don’t get your kids to help out, then there’s no way you can continue to have thriving careers.
Liz:
You’ve been involved in a number of documentary series highlighting women and girls. What’s your experience with the impact of raising awareness through the medium of television?
Tracey:
Oh, look, it cannot be overstated. We learn through storytelling and our empathy grows through learning about other people’s lives. There’s no doubt about that. When I did a documentary in Uganda on domestic violence, which at that point in time back in 2012, had a rate of prevalence of 80%. If you’re a man and you did not beat your wife, in some parts of Uganda you were considered to be less of a man. So, we went, and we talked to some of the village leaders who were trying to change the culture in those areas. I also met this incredible woman who changed the course of the country’s history. Her name was Jennifer, and she experienced the worst case of domestic violence I’ve ever heard in my life.
She went up to the local women’s refuge and told Action Aid, a not-for-profit agency, about her situation. The women from Action Aid stormed into the Ugandan parliament and told the female legislators. They stormed out of parliament and said, “We’re not passing any more laws in this country until you blokes agree to passing legislation against domestic violence.” The law passed. So, this one woman in rural Uganda, three hours out of the capitol, changed the course of her country’s history by telling her story. Her story became huge. It was covered by the BBC. She was set up in a new house with her surviving children and a home business, a sewing machine to start a dress making business to build her future.
That taught me that one story can change the course of history. When that story is amplified, whether it’s on television or social media, that inspires other victim survivors and advocates around the world to join together and to create a new course of history for their country and their culture. That is what connects us all as humans. So, that has honestly been the greatest joy of my career. I did a documentary on gendercide in India and women and girls’ education in Bangladesh. That was a very interesting one actually, because I learned that after every natural disaster – and of course Bangladesh has the flooding every year – gender roles become more rigid because people historically feel more comfortable with stereotyping.
So, for example, the girls whose homes are washed away in the rural areas go into the sex trade in the cities and the women in the cities who were in the workforce are forced back to their homes. That’s what actually happened during the global pandemic. More women were at home doing the child-rearing and the housework, while the men often took over the spare room in the house and did their paid work from there and disconnected from the family and became more engaged in employment and working for an income. Whereas the women did the unpaid care work. So, I guess what I’m saying here is that we have different cultures in the world, but we’re all connected in the same way by these stories of our humanity.
Zena:
When you were in Uganda and you met this woman, Jennifer, and heard her story, I think what I’m hearing with the story that you’ve told is the outrage that was received from all of the women. But in my experience with different cultural backgrounds, sometimes it doesn’t always pan out that way. Sometimes there are both men and women who believe in what would be deemed more traditional gender stereotypes and gender norms. So, did you have any experiences when you were there with women in particular who were more supportive of things not changing and things remaining in that more traditional sense?
Tracey:
Yes and no. I’ll tell you a very interesting story that happened on the outskirts of Jaipur in India. We visited a village that was known as the prostitutes’ village where it was on a main truck route. So, the women would stand along there and that’s how they would make their income through the sex trade. We spoke to a lot of women and their daughters. They were telling me that when the girls turn 12, the age of 12, they have a choice. They must get married, or they enter the sex trade and they’re simply the two choices.
I was over there with World Vision, and I said to them, “Do you hope that with the support of World Vision, the future for your girls will be brighter, that your girls might be able to go to school at some stage when they turned 12 instead of these two choices?” The women roared with laughter. They thought it was the most hilarious question anyone had ever asked them. They just shook their heads and said, “This will never change nothing. Nothing will change. This is the way it’s been for centuries, and it will continue to be this way for centuries.”
Zena:
A dark tunnel.
Tracey:
A very dark tunnel. I don’t think it was necessarily that they didn’t want things to change. They simply couldn’t see any way ahead. They had to a degree accepted that this was their lot for themselves and their daughters. A couple of them said to me, “I hope for my daughter that she’s married at 12 instead of having to stand by the side of the road and work in prostitution.” So yes, there is a lot of clinging to the way things have been, but I think it’s more from a standpoint of resignation rather than wanting things to continue to be that way.
Zena:
A belief that things can’t change.
Tracey:
Exactly.
Zena:
Yeah, it’s quite sad, isn’t it?
Tracey:
Oh, yeah. It was utterly devastating actually visiting that village. The future does seem incredibly bleak.
Liz:
It is making me think about any time you want to make a change, the persistence that you need to overcome these kinds of culturally entrenched norms is immense. I think it can often be very disheartening to be doing the kind of work where you are trying to change these things and maybe you’re not seeing that change that you envision when you’re starting out.
For those who are working to change these things, so for example, going back to your book, those who are working to change how machine learning, artificial intelligence are shaping our societies, how can we think about this act of trying to change the norms as something that you do have to be persistent with, but that there are opportunities at each moment to actually generate those kinds of changes? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Tracey:
Change takes an awfully long time. I mean, you only have to look at a country like Australia, how long it took us to have paid maternity leave. I think we’re one of the last countries in the Western world to have that. So, this glacial pace of change happens in every country and every culture to varying degrees. I had a conversation when she had her book out a couple of years ago with Anne Summers, the great feminist who now lives in the States and she’s significantly older than me. I said to her, “How have you managed to work in this sector for such a long time? It seems as if at times, we’re going backwards. At times, we’re inching forward and it’s utterly exhausting. How do you keep your work and your energy and your optimism up?”
She gave me some really good advice. She said, “You’ve got to look at the big picture. You’ve got to look at the long arc of history, at the suffragettes getting the vote for women around the turn of the 1800s and the 1900s. You’ve got to look at the advances, maybe between the 1950s and the 1970s. You’ve really got to look at the big picture to see how far we’ve come. Because if you look at it day by day, week by week, and month by month, you’ll just spend your whole time tearing your hair out.” I’m reminded of that great quote by Martin Luther King Jr. that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. The other thing I’m reminded of is that we need to remember the collective action of the 1960s and 1970s.
We live in the cult of the individual at the moment, and we forget the wonderful consciousness raising groups that happened at the time to talk about what everyone could do to join together to rattle a cage and tear down the barriers holding people back. We need to remember that there’s strength in numbers. As frustrating as it is for us individually to try to change things, if we join together, that’s where we can move forward. So, my book Man-Made is really a call to action for a collective movement around this. There are wonderful people, groups of women in STEM, the Algorithmic Justice League of the United States. There are incredible organisations that are working together to tear down these barriers and create long-term structural change. That’s why I’m ultimately optimistic.
Zena:
What resonated with me was when you said the cult of the individual, and working in academia, Liz and I experienced this quite a lot. Academia can be a very siloed and individual experience in that you are essentially the product. You are the person who contributes to the research. You are the person who drives research. You are the person who provides education. What’s resonating with me is this collective message, but I think going back to our conversation about social media, I think that has also pushed this idea of individualism and being your own brand and being your own identity, I guess.
I want to know what your experience has been because you’ve got a journalist background and I imagine that there was an element of that as well throughout your career with some of the people that you work with as very individual perspective and persona. So, what’s been your experience with how that has progressed or changed over time, if it has at all?
Tracey:
Oh, that’s changed hugely, I have to say, because when I started in journalism, it was very much a team effort. I loved that about television in particular. It took a lot of people to bring a story together and get it to air and it was great to work together, as well as working with the people who you interviewed, the newsmakers. Whereas now as a journalist, you are expected to create your own brand. There’s almost like a star system around journalism now that you need to buy into to succeed. That was never there years ago, the expectation of inserting your personality and your opinion into it. I’m accustomed to that now because I wrote many opinion pieces about social justice over about a 10-year period.
But it did take me a long time to switch my thinking from that team effort, the objective ideal of journalism to what’s expected now. However, it does worry me for the future given the proliferation of fake news, the siloing of people’s opinions, which is only going to deepen with machine learning, the denigration and desecration of democracy. When the role of the journalist is so undercut and eroded, people don’t know what to believe. A lot of people I interviewed for Man-Made fear they will see a future with more wars and greater social dislocation because of this deficit of well-researched information. I mean, we’ve never needed academics or journalists more than at this time in history.
Zena:
I think so. I don’t necessarily know if I agree that there will be more wars, but I think what I do foresee is that the way in which wars happen will change.
Tracey:
I’ve written a whole chapter on warfare in my book, and you are right. Opinion is split on this. No doubt we will see more cyber warfare down the track and the experts are split on whether that will actually mean a greater death toll or a lesser death toll. For a couple of reasons, one of them to do with bias and discrimination. I interviewed Dr. Catriona Wallace, who’s a fabulous AI expert in this country, and she said, “If women and people in marginalised communities are valued less as humans, then the drones in warfare will hunt them down and kill them, because that’s how they’ve been programmed and how the machine learning will work in that particular situation.
In search and rescue missions in warfare using drones, if they can’t identify women and girls who have face coverings, then they will be left behind. They will not be rescued because they’re not identified as human. So there’s a whole bunch of complexity around the bias and discrimination that’s built into the artificial intelligence that already is being used in warfare. It’s being used in Turkey and Libya and Ukraine.
Zena:
I think there’s also a salient point here around with the way that war is changing, it’s not just going to be about death tolls. I think the infliction of harm is going to look a little bit different, and I think the impact is still going to be as great. So, just something to think about there as well. We look now at the impacts of war through death tolls, but I think as war advances, the concept of harm to people and to societies is really going to expand.
Tracey:
Well, we only have to look at the troll farms in Russia and how they’re targeting Russia’s enemies to try to foment dissent within the community. That’s warfare and that’s happening around us every day.
Liz:
So, in this world where there’s fake news and deep fakes and all these kinds of technological tools that are being used to influence societies, how do you see the role of journalists as evolving in the face of this?
Tracey:
I see it going two ways actually, with things like ChatGPT, which can write from a mathematical perspective a very effective news story because very straight news stories are formulaic. So, I can see the rudimentary work in newsrooms being done by AI bots and huge job losses there, of course. However, the way that news organisations will differentiate themselves is by keeping their investigative journalists and their opinion writers and their top editors because those three areas at this stage can’t be replicated by bots. Again, I’m a glass half full kind of person. I hope we’re entering a golden age of critical thinking because we will need that to be able to survive as the human race.
Liz:
So, I should admit that back when I was in university, I was at the student newspaper and was a writer and editor. One of the ways that we trained, we figured out how to write good stories, was we started out on the formulaic stuff, where you’d go to a talk, and you’d write up the talk for the newspaper or you’d go and cover some sports events or whatever. If we’re going to stick to the investigative journalism and these key areas, how’s the training going to look?
Tracey:
Well, there’s going to have to be some training. Honestly, in my entire time working in journalism, I’ve hardly been trained in anything except for the university degree that I did. There’s just not the money in the mainstream media to train people properly these days, except in a very small way, places like the ABC and public broadcasters around the world, because they still do value that training and know that because they’re publicly funded, they have to have people who understand the ethics of the profession. I mean, I was reading something the other day about ChatGPT being used in schools that instead of banning it, we should teach kids how to work with it. I would say the same about journalism.
We can’t say, “Woe is me. This will be the end of our profession.” Because everyone seemed to think that when typewriters went out the window and computers came in. It’s like when the wireless radio started in the 1920s, everyone said, “Well, that’s it. That’ll be the end of family time. No one will talk to each other anymore.” I’m really not someone who catastrophises about these kinds of things. As journalists and as people in civil society, we need to work with the technology and learn how to master it before it masters us.
Liz:
So, what role does understanding the technology have in achieving that?
Tracey:
Oh, it’s a huge role. We all need to play with the technology and understand it. This is something that’s been annoying me lately, to be honest with you. Someone from Microsoft said to me a couple of weeks ago, “Oh, yes, machine learning is flawed, but we’re talking about machine teaching now.” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Well, we have to teach the machines to be better, to not be so biased and to reduce their discrimination.” I said to him, “When you say that we have to, does that mean you’re going to be putting the resources behind it or you’re expecting all of us to use our unpaid labor to teach the robots to be better?”
He said, “Oh, yes, we all have a role to play.” So that’s their latest thing. Yes, we’re putting these imperfect pieces of technology into society and now it’s your job to fix it unpaid, which really, really annoys me. But having said that, we do need to learn to reduce the bias in it and to work with it. So, we have to open our minds. Particularly, I turned 56 yesterday – people over 50…
Zena:
Happy birthday.
Liz:
Yes, happy birthday,
Tracey:
Thank you. Thank you. That’s lovely. We have to keep forcing ourselves to engage with technology and to learn its benefits and flaws, because if our likes, dislikes, interests and personas are not being put into these machines, then the next generation of them will not take us into account. The innovations being developed for us as we age in ageing tech will not work for us. So, we are stuck in quite a conundrum.
Zena:
I think there’s also a degree of separation between humans and machines when we talk about them as though they are their own being. So, the story you just described with this Microsoft person saying, “Oh, they and they.” This is not a sentient being. It doesn’t have intent, it doesn’t have reasoning, it wasn’t created on its own. This was built by people. It will be operated by people. It will be maintained by people. They speak about it with this complete detachment as though there is a moment when humans completely have no control over it, no influence over it, and it is so far removed from the truth.
But I have this theory that the reason that the narrative is like that is because it provides a degree of separation when it comes to responsibility and liability. So, it’s a strategic way to be able to talk about advanced technology in a way that detaches potential liability.
Tracey:
I agree with you 100%. It’s utterly deliberate. Along those same lines, this narrative at the moment about ‘AI could end humanity’ that all the tech giants are talking about is trying to distract us and saying, “Look at this future. This might happen in the future, and we should all be very scared of it.” Instead, we should be focusing on the very real world dangers that are happening now that are caused by this bias and discrimination. So, they’re saying, “Look over there.” Whereas we should be looking right here. With my long COVID last year, I wore this pulse oximeter on my finger that measured my blood oxygen.
For 15 years, that hospital-in-the-home device, which is lifesaving, if it gets below a certain number, you’ve got to get to hospital immediately or you will die. That didn’t measure correctly the blood oxygen level for people of colour. They had to be much sicker to be admitted to hospital and given life-saving ventilation. So, these problems are not something in a distant future. They have been happening for the last couple of decades and they’re happening exponentially now. This is where we need to focus.
Liz:
Some of our listeners are actively involved in developing or regulating technology or training to do this work in the future. So, I was wondering if you want to leave them with any words of advice to carry forward as they do this work?
Tracey:
Well, first of all, thank you very much for your work, because I do think you’re doing the most important work for this time in history during the fourth industrial revolution. This will affect all of us, so thank you. Secondly, I’d like to say really focus on inclusive design, because not only is it good for humanity and the planet, it’s actually good for your innovations. If you have that inclusivity from the start, you’ll sell more products because they will work well for people. It’s win-win. It’s good for the bottom line, and it’s good for all of us. With regards to regulation, it is inevitable. So, get ahead of the curve, self-regulate as much as you can, and then you are fit for purpose for when regulation inevitably comes in, which it will.
I guess my only other piece of advice is if you do get the opportunity to listen to my book or read my book, there’s a whole section at the end of Man-Made with about 100 different solutions for everyone, from members of the board about what you need to know about artificial intelligence when it comes to strategic thinking about where your company’s going, to people in their homes, to people in the workplace. There’s something that everyone can do to change the future, and you just need those tools and that knowledge. Then the power is in your hand to push back and say, “Enough.”
