A guide to responsible innovation like no other ...
A guide to responsible innovation like no other ...
How do you help people think about emerging technologies and responsible innovation when the landscape's messy, complex, and rarely black and white?
If there’s one thing you can say about the challenges of innovating responsibly, it’s surely the over-used phrase “it’s complicated”. There are rarely clear pathways between the present and the future when it comes to transformative tech.
Despite this, it’s never been more important that responsible innovation is taken seriously. The latest wave of innovation in artificial intelligence for instance is revealing just how vulnerable we are to powerful technologies that are wielded without foresight or understanding. And we’re increasingly living in a world where small missteps can have outsized and irreversible consequences.
Yet providing the means and tools for diverse stakeholders to be part of supporting socially responsible and beneficial innovation — including members of the public as well as developers, investors, and policy makers — is tough.
A major challenge here is that anyone who has influence over, or is potentially impacted by, emerging technologies, needs a nuanced and interconnected understanding of how these technologies intersect with society if they’re to be part of building a positive future. And this perspective needs to transcend disciplines, domains of expertise, educational attainments, socioeconomic status, and a whole bunch of other things, if it’s to be useful.
But how do we go about achieving this?
I’ve grappled with this question in one form or another for over twenty years now as I’ve worked at the sharp end of responsible innovation. Through much of that time I’ve experimented with a range of different communication and engagement approaches, and especially with how stories and narratives open up possibilities. But It was relatively recently that I started to play around with the idea of science fiction movies as a way of opening up nuanced thinking around complex topics.
This, through a number of twists and turns, led to the 2018 book Films from the Future which, if you hadn’t guessed it yet, is the topic of this article!
Films from the Future was, in many ways, a harsh learning experience in how not to engage and connect with a broad community of readers. By most standards the book was a failure. (That point of realization hit home when my publisher asks if I’d like to purchase excess stock of the book!)
And yet, despite this, it contains some of my most thoughtful work.
At it’s heart, Films from the Future is about using the power of story telling to open up thinking around responsible innovation in ways that are near impossible to achieve through other means. I was intrigued by how film — science fiction movies in particular — are able to create an environment where people from vastly different backgrounds and perspectives can explore novel and sometimes challenging ideas together. I was also interested in how such films can be used to foster opportunities that are neither preachy or judgmental for engaging with new ideas, and opportunities that allow people to think and learn on their own terms.
The result was a journey of discovery into emerging technologies and the challenges and opportunities they present that invites readers in to consider new ideas and novel perspectives, with sci-fi movies being the catalyst for the journey rather than its destination.
Having just finished editing recordings of myself reading the book for The Moviegoer’s Guide to the Future podcast, I’m surprised at how prescient it was when it was published five years ago As well as grappling with topics that include the emergence of AI, brain-machine interfaces, and predictive justice, it foreshadowed covid and concerns over gain of function research. And with relatively few exceptions, the topics it covers are at least as relevant now as they were in 2018.
And yet, the book was a flop. In part I suspect that this was because it doesn’t belong in any neat category. But also the title really doesn’t help here (sorry Mango Publishing!).
Films from the Future looks like it’s a book about science fiction movies — but it’s not. It reads like a book about emerging technologies and responsible innovation — but you’d never know that from the cover. And it is nuanced (and I know I’m over-using that word) in an age where certainty rather than subtlety sells.
I also discovered to my cost that, if an academic like myself stoops to writing something considered to be a popular book, we’re expected to keep quiet about it. I actually had colleagues tell me to stop talking about the book because it was professionally embarrassing and undermined my credibility … which I admittedly found a little hard as I wrote the book to be read, and yet found myself with no way of talking about it.
For all that though, Films from the Future still stands as a guide to responsible innovation that’s unlike anything else out there to my knowledge. Even when you look at books that straddle science fiction and science fact, it’s hard to find anything that uses movies as a vehicle for diving into a complex sociotechnical landscape in a way that opens up new possibilities.
Hopefully this gives it some lasting value, despite the lessons learned on my end. And this is why I persevered with posting recordings of the book here.
The Moviegoer’s Guide to the Future podcast makes the book and its ideas more accessible than ever. Added to this, Substack creates an accompanying transcript from the audio — which means that anyone who goes to the “transcript” tab on an episode gets to read it as well.
Of course, it’s one thing to make a book freely accessible, and another for people to actually find it useful. But hopefully there’s some value here as the challenges of ensuring transformative technologies lead to positive futures become ever more complex.