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Hi and welcome to the item is Quadcast. My name is Lucy he's a group plan L. I'm a
social impact scientist and anthropologist and I'm here today with David Stern, one of
the founding directors of items. Hi Lucy, so what are we discussing today?
Well again it came out of another podcast episode you've had but the tension and the relationship
between individualism we live in a very individualistic society and items is big motivation of
encouraging people to be collaborative. We have a principle collaborative by nature. Yeah it's
an interesting tension. Absolutely but another of the principles is enabling opportunity and that's
very much more at the individual level. It is not just at the individual level but it does include
the fact that we want to enable individuals to excel to grow, to individually progress and succeed.
I guess there's a sort of question here of what are the limits of individualism and how are we
defining collaboration? I think the interesting thing is that as you say many of our societies
in the UK and many European and American sort of Western societies individualism has really
risen in recent years. When I say recent I'm talking about the last 100 years or more relatively
recent in the long scale of history and in many of the other contexts we work the African cultures,
one of the things that unites many of them is the fact the collaboration and the fact that they
are much more community focused. They have much stronger communities and often that leads to sacrifices
or sacrificing elements of the individual for the coherence for the good of the community.
And that's an interesting tension but it doesn't mean that individuals are always oppressed and
cannot succeed. And this is I think important to recognise that actually strong communities
there are wonderful examples of this can support and enable the success of their members of their
community and being part of that community and contributing to the community is all tied in to
that success. Even in Europe this is traced back in many ways where communities succeed or fail
based partly on the collaboration within that community as well as success of individuals.
So there is this in Italy, cooperatives are very well known for some of the successes they've had
in a whole range of different areas where they've successfully grown and promoted themselves
and made an Italy brand became synonymous with quality but that was a very cooperative process
rather than individual process. So there's wonderful examples from within Europe as well and of
course in the US there's these instances of individual factories which are community owned or
by the workers actually outperforming individual factories which are more structured. So it is not
a fact that collaboration is always in competition with individual success. This is an interesting
certainly not a contradiction to the collaborative by nature and yet looking to enable individuals
to grow and to succeed within those structures but it is often about compromise and that's I think
one of the really interesting features which when we take a really individualistic perspective
we very rarely talk about the importance of compromise compromises seen as a bad thing.
Yes for individualism. For individualism where I was actually from a community perspective,
from a collaboration perspective compromise is a very good thing being able to know where
it is acceptable to compromise and one of the things you don't want to compromise on and being
able to have that flexibility of recognizing that in different contexts you might compromise
on different things. So I'm thinking of some of the researchers we support in West Africa
who many of them well most of them are all working with farmer organisations or with farmers and so
the ideal is that they co-create that they really collaborate in order to create a research project
and I think they're definitely there's the whole compromise situation which is necessary
and yet at the same time the researcher obviously wants to further their own career and so has
those sort of individualistic goals that they need to serve but of course the farmers or whoever
in the communities the relevant member there they also have their own perspective their own needs
and therefore you're looking for the synergies if you're taking collaborative approach you're
actually recognizing and trying to cultivate the synergies where this can be synergistic where I was
in the individual approach individualistic approach everybody should look out for their own interests
and there's times when each of these it's not as with many of our principles it's not that one
is good and the other is bad it's that they both have strengths and weaknesses and so recognizing
that tension and working within it and trying to serve both within it is a really interesting
challenge but that's at the heart of what good collaboration is yeah yeah and I think this is
something where the simplicity of thinking in an individualistic way sometimes loses that nuance
and that nuance is something which I believe in our societies at the moment in the UK
in the US in Europe more broadly there is a growing recognition of the importance of that
nuance it is something which is needed in our societies to be recognized more to be nurtured to
be built on and maybe not everybody agrees with that but it is something where there is certainly a
community within these societies that are looking to build in these contexts of nuance of
collaboration and I guess within that collaboration term yeah in order to successfully collaborate
basically you have to recognize what everyone's needs are how they are individualistic whether that's
an individual as an actual sole person or whether it's them as an individual community or
something yeah because if you don't recognize this then it's very difficult to get these synergistic
relationships which means you often get sort of relationships which exploit or which extract and
that's something we're seeing more and more particularly recognition around the technologies
which are created which are extractive and are creating these exploitative relationships
yep a historic way if you go back in these more developed environments there is this
continual tension between you know your unions which is sort of representing a collective and
your employers if you want to represent in the individual interests and that's tension which is
well known which is framed in European and American history in different ways it's also an
oversimplification of the broader I guess the broader societal structures around collaboration versus
competition and the advantage of not seeing it in black and white one is good the other is bad
maybe one of the last things that I think would be interesting for us to discuss on this is we
came into this discussion partly from a general perspective and looking at it within the context
where we work but I think that there's a very interesting perspective related to the technologies
and the roles that technologies play within supporting individual or collaboration and how we see
technology interacting with this yeah okay tell me more well one of the discussions which happens
a lot is what jobs would be lost because of let's say the new AI technologies large language
models being able to do things which otherwise were the tasks of maybe junior employees
there's this sort of step work that actually a lot of companies who employing a lot less junior
employees because they're using AI for those tasks yeah and if we look at that and we think about
technology replacing individuals then you're sort of actually setting up this competition between
the technology and the individuals for the work and there are a lot of what I hear in the news
is framed in that sense whereas if you frame the technology and the human effort as a collaborative
process each individual can achieve more because of the advances in technology yeah it should be
an enabler rather than a competitor or something exactly and that means that the work that can be
done could be more so we as a society could be more ambitious in our goals in what we're trying to
achieve in how we're trying to achieve it then we could have been without technology enablers but
that requires us to think about how we're creating technologies and using technologies maybe
differently and what role they play in society and where do we see ourselves actually you know where
do we see funding going in in which ways I'd give a very simple example of this but it comes up
with a lot education if we think about school education there's a huge expense at the moment to
have all the teachers what do we see five ten fifteen twenty fifty years down the line do we see
that expense going up going down staying constant as a society what do we want these are really
interesting questions for us to think about we certainly I don't believe anyone would like to
just bury their head in the sand and say the technology should not be impacting education no
so the question is are we looking at technology to say oh we can make education more cost efficient
and reduce that education burden to society because of technology and there are people who talk
like that and that's not what I hope what I hope is that at least we see the education the human
element as being a constant and where we're then enhancing the quality of the education where
we're enabling ourselves to do more with that investment and in the ideal well what if there
are other areas of society where we could say when we as society at a societal level could be
actually putting more into education because it's actually a really foundational piece of a successful
society and so maybe it's something where you know despite the fact that the technology is
enhancing the education if we as society also invested more human effort into that that could
really be symbiotic with the advancing technology and actually enable us to achieve much better
outcomes which then serve society in other ways so these are the big picture discussions which do
relate to as societies deciding of course each teacher is an individual who may lose their job
who may have their job change and so on but that thinking about the collective what can we
decide as a society related to how we frame the use of technology I think it's really related to
this broader discussion on individualism versus collaboration and just to give you a completely
different example of this and because I work in agro college I'm allowed to I was thinking also
in terms of personhood and I know in some countries they've legalized what legally defined as
persons sort of rivers and things like that and that's exactly the same sort of idea of how can it be
how can we think through the use of the river or something differently so that it can be more
a collaborative thing rather than just an extractive well this person's going to take that
this is the thing that is a really really powerful other way of thinking about this because
the recognitions of our natural resources and how these relate to society and ownership you know
these really interesting and difficult questions do you own the river because it's on your land
these are really wonderful questions and if you own the river that's on your land and someone
diverts the water to go across different piece of land what does that mean are these are so
interesting it is yeah interesting conversations and interesting thoughts so thank you very much David
no thank you it's a really interesting topic and I mean a nice discussion
you
