To date, these challenges have been addressed within the narrow realm of maximising the impact of personalised data. To offer personalised content today requires the collection and analysis of substantial amounts of data on interactions between people and systems. The current economic model incentivises the identification of classes of individuals who could be best served and therefore induced to spend. Yet this is another societal “lobster claw” pattern: the widespread exchange of services for personal data (e.g. cell phones and search engines) is a tradeoff that can have far deeper, and negative, ramifications in terms of social impact.

Classifying people into behavior models reduces them to data points that can be manipulated for corporate gain. Existing metrics for enterprise success incentivise them to build systems that are inviting and sticky, and lead to increasing distraction and isolation. This isolation leads to online echo chambers of personal beliefs that amplify isolation. Although the long-term consequences of these systems on human behavior are still being studied, early indicators are troubling.

Using data, Artificial Intelligence , and Decision Intelligence to further Trusteeship

Although, as stated above, technology has exacerbated many of the issues that trusteeship seeks to address, it is also an essential contributor to the solution. Data collection and management act, in a way, as a “seventh sense,” giving behavioral insights that were not previously possible (e.g. we have learned important new facts about health from FitBit health tracker data). And Artificial Intelligence (AI)provides insights into the meaning of this data. Then, completing the picture, Decision Intelligence (DI) helps us to understand how actions lead to outcomes. These three technologies have matured today to the point where they can now be focused towards solving “wicked” problems, such as for optimising economic and political systems.

The complexities of incorporating checks and balances against corruption while maintaining the values surrounding enlightened self-interest have, to date, been too difficult to analyse. The temptations for corruption and the opportunity for bad actors to discover and exploit gaps in a system are too great. This effect becomes even stronger in a globally interconnected world.

Data, AI, and DI are powerful weapons against such exploitation because they allow us to, respectively, 1) obtain direct and voluminous empirical evidence regarding human behavior; 2) analyse the data to understand and predict the outcomes of certain events; and 3) choose actions to initiate chains of events that simultaneously achieve desirable individual, organisational, and societal outcomes.

Technology through the lens of Trusteeship

Gandhi proposes three tenets of Trusteeship:

Purity of means: Wealth generation is talent of entrepreneurship. Through a network, enterprises work with capital and labour to produce goods or services that contribute to economic growth. Maintaining the purity of the network calls for assessing the means of value-generation at each step in the larger process. Trusteeship as conceived by Gandhi allows for no short-cuts to get rich quicker at the cost of social welfare.

Simple living and high thinking: Every person is a trustee of his/her own talent, of which wealth generation is a consequence. Accrued wealth arises out of talent when the entire network deems it necessary to distribute what has been concentrated in enterprise. The onus of keeping the wealth gap low shifts to the methods of the gifted few, who seek to redistribute wealth generated by pure means back to the society, thereby completing the cycle of generation and distribution.

People first: Every human being is endowed with unique talent. Finding a job to suit an individual’s unique capabilities is the new way of thinking about people and jobs.

Technology has, to some extent, already provided tools to achieve these goals.

First, data analysis does indeed focus on the People First tenet. Through psychographic profiling and more, microtargeting systems analyse each individual’s unique preferences. This capability has been used primarily for advertising and marketing, but it has potential to go much further. Assuming that proper protections are maintained, this has far-reaching consequences for economics, social welfare, and well-being. Nordfors and Cerf reflect this in their people-centered economy tenet, that ”we need things that make people valuable”.

Purity of purpose provides a lens on the misappropriation of personal data. Trusteeship recommends that networks of people and systems be optimised to generate two-fold impact – economic success and social well-being. For instance, by identifying unique talents that span people across all spectra – economic, social, political, talent, and capabilities, we create a unique opportunity to design jobs for people. Many more individuals can then be matched to socially and economically productive jobs through analysis of their “Coolabilities”.

Simple living and high thinking call for the tempering of wealth generation and distribution. Trusteeship redefines wealth as a combination of monetary and social indicators. While it recognises the talent of entrepreneurs to uniquely generate monetary wealth from a network of people and systems, Trusteeship also calls for entrepreneurs to willingly accept their role to generate and distribute wealth responsibly. Carbon tax, for example, is a great idea that moves the responsibility of mitigating downstream impact upstream. We need to design similar models that can incentivise inclusion and social welfare.

The time for a new ideology is clear. Adam Grant argues: “We have a Declaration of Independence, but we also need a Declaration of Interdependence: No one succeeds alone, gains freedom alone, or finds joy alone. Our lives, liberties, and happiness are intertwined.”Trusteeship grounds this ambition by illuminating socio-economic changes that are needed to sustain and expand awareness of interdependence, consistent with an incentive model for individuals who have the talent and energy to generate wealth in a deeply connected world.

Simply put: wealth is a bad proxy for happiness. As this becomes increasingly compiled into the cultural mindset, there is an increasing hunger for solutions that achieve outcomes that provide a deeper level of cultural stability and personal satisfaction.

Adam Smith, often seen as the seminal advocate for devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, also supported a philosophy that is aligned with trusteeship. According to American philosopher Daniel Callahan, Smith believed that, “…markets could not flourish without a strong underlying moral culture. Smith believed that such a culture is animated by empathy and fellow-feeling, by our ability to understand our common bond as human beings and to recognise the needs of others.“

We must finally develop an economic system that goes beyond the relatively simplistic metrics of personal and even national financial gain that have resulted in vast inequities that are now so evident. We must include in our measures of wealth and progress all of the myriad links that make up complex political/social/technical/economic systems. To get there will require equally complex tools that must also be, paradoxically, easy to use.

New AI and DI tools will augment, expand, and apply our human intelligence, just as the industrial revolution magnified muscle power. Combining the most advanced tools of the digital revolution with humans’ immense intelligence and empathy will enable “wisdom enhancement.” What is required of us is a shift in our ability and willingness to frame and address our most pressing modern issues for the benefit of all.

This shift is possible. Indeed, it is essential.

It has been shown that a small group of “relentless” individuals can affect widespread change. Fortunately, says Eisler, “a growing number of people recognise that we stand at a turning point in our human adventure on Earth. They are reexamining not only what was and is, but also what can, and must, be done. They understand that solving our unprecedented problems calls for more than just tinkering at the edges of failing systems—that we need whole systems change, and that this, in turn, requires a fundamental cultural transformation.”

The way forward is through a deep understanding of modern Trusteeship, with the assistance of data and evidence in support of sophisticated, transparent, and advanced technology models that everyone can understand.

This article was originally published on Responsible AI/DI Summit 2018 and has been republished here with permission.

V R Ferose and Lorien Pratt

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