🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️
With all the coverage of #ChatGPT, #generativeai, the speculated demise of #AutonomousVehicles and the ever present dialogue around #robotics, #artificialintelligence, and existential threats and opportunities, the need to clearly, accurately and compellingly communicate the key concepts about these technologies has never been greater.
In this #HackingAcademia video, I summarize a stack of key tips, principles and pitfalls that I’ve learnt over hundreds of public talks and engagements over many years with a hugely diverse range of audiences, and from observing others do the same thing.
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🕒 Timestamps are as follows:
📌 (0:00) Interpreting and Communicating New Technology Concepts
📌 (0:11) The Case for Communication
📌 (0:31) Learnings from Lots of Practice!
📌 (0:58) Across a Large Range of Audiences
📌 (1:11) Common Tips, Principles and Pitfalls
📌 (1:26) Knowing, and Knowing What You Don’t Know
📌 (1:42) Some Margin of Expertise is Useful
📌 (2:02) Experts with Little Real Understanding
📌 (2:54) Minimizing Academic Snobbery
📌 (3:52) There’s Always Someone “More Expert”
📌 (4:00) The Importance of Knowing Your Audience
📌 (4:19) What’s Their Level of Prior Knowledge?
📌 (4:28) Positive or Negative Exposure?
📌 (4:34) Agile or Slow Moving Organisational Background?
📌 (4:51) Positive or Negative Previous Technology Experience?
📌 (5:13) Adjust Your Communication Accordingly
📌 (5:19) Be Aware of Your Audience’s Other Challenges
📌 (6:03) Empathize With Your Audience’s Limitations
📌 (6:56) Contextualize Long Term Predictions
📌 (7:31) Explain Key Milestones To Look Out For
📌 (8:03) Run Through Plausible Scenarios
📌 (8:24) Don’t Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater
📌 (9:12) Highlight Capability and Acceptance Thresholds
📌 (9:41) Avoid Universal Cynicism
📌 (10:17) Manage Expectations
📌 (10:24) Cautious Use of Analogies and Precedent
📌 (10:51) Explain the Variation in Technology Curves
📌 (11:22) The Myth of Endless Progress
📌 (12:02) Work on Empowering Your Audience
📌 (12:23) Emphasize The Need for Refreshers
📌 (12:50) A Valuable Learning Experience for You
Full Video Notes
- Every time a new technology comes along, there is inevitably a burst of coverage on the popular media, social media and in various sectors of society.
- Now if you’re an academic, researcher or worker in these areas, you have both an interest in and an obligation to share a measured, objective take on what the new technology is about, what its strengths, weaknesses are, and what types of potential impact it could have, both positive and negative.
- I spend a lot of time doing outreach and engagement around new technological concepts in fields like robotics, autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence. Over the years and hundreds of talks and sessions, both given by me and watching others, I’ve learnt a lot about the ins and outs of communicating information about these technologies to most parts of society – ranging from normal industry and technical audiences to retirees, young children and interest and membership groups representing just about every sector of society.
- In this video I’ll cover some key concepts about how to do this well, touch on common pitfalls to be aware of, and talk through some general guiding principles that can be applied in almost all of these situations.
- Before you start talking about something, you need to make sure you have a sufficient understanding of how the technology works, and perhaps more importantly, know where your understanding starts to hit its limits. This doesn’t mean you need to be the world’s number one expert – but you should understand at the very least the core mechanics of how the tech works and its implications, preferably at a level substantially deeper than what is communicated in the media.
- There are two important concepts to grasp relating to this. The first is that you will encounter so-called experts who very obviously have no actual understanding of how a technology works but can eloquently regurgitate nice sound bytes in a talk or interview, but will cave if asked to give more detailed explanations or go into nuances. This can be very dangerous, especially if the people listening to this person are not sufficiently equipped to filter the information being directed at them. This can be very frustrating for the actual experts to deal with, but needs to be dealt with tactfully – there often isn’t malicious intent involved, it’s just someone drifting outside their area of expertise.
- The flip side of this is academic snobbery – where someone is vilified for talking about a topic where they are not the number one expert in the world, or for making some simplifications and generalisations. Science and technology communication is an imperfect science, and while it would be nice to be able to communicate all the nuances and second, third and fourth degree considerations, the practical limitations of audiences, communication opportunities and other factors dictates that sometimes the message needs to be simplified. It’s also particularly corrosive for experts to snipe at each other, and from a practical perspective, there aren’t enough super deep technical experts to do all the outreach and engagement that is required, and some are not particularly interested in doing so anyway! It’s also worth remembering there is almost always someone more “expert” than you – it’s all a spectrum!
- Understanding your audience and their background is also critical for optimising your communication. To be clear, I’m not talking about presenting factually different information to different audiences. Rather, you need to understand a few key things about your audience. Are they a relatively well informed audience who’s already had some briefing on the topic, or are some of them hearing it for the first time? Has their exposure to the topic been primarily in a positive light, or a negative light? Are they coming from a sector that is agile and highly responsive and receptive to change, or are they part of a large slow moving organization that is slow to educate themselves on new topics, and even slower to do something about it? Have they disappointed time and time again in past years when each promised technological revolution has failed to eventuate? Have they had an amazing initial experience with adopting a technology and are thinking all their experiences will be like that? Factor in their background and tweak your communication accordingly.
- In advising an organisation about the potential of a new technology, you also need to be aware of the current major challenges and limitations they face. If you are for example talking about the potential for a new computer-delivered technology, but they or the people they represent live in remote areas with almost no access to computer technology and the internet, then they have more immediate challenges to address. You can still tell them about it, but you need to be especially sensitive to the fact that their pathway to accessing and utilizing this technology is longer than some of other groups in society or industry you engage with.
- As a technical expert, it’s also easy to criticise seemingly short sighted or coarse decisions made by sectors of society, like a short term ban on a new technology. Again, you need to understand the challenges and limitations of their role – they often don’t have the luxury of a finely nuanced discussion with their stakeholders, and only have so-called blunt instruments with which to influence the uptake and adoption of a new technology whilst protecting their stakeholders. Often theirs is the “least-bad” or “least-risky” decision, even though it’s not great in an absolute sense. We should hold parts of society like government up to a high standard, but recognize their realities as well.
- When painting a vision to your audience of how the technology could unfold, there’s a fine line to tread between making a raft of very specific long term predictions, and saying nothing of any substance at all. It can be irresponsible to make long term specific predictions because your chances of being even close to correct is often zero; if you want to go down this route, you should consider contextualizing them to your audience as the provocations that they are rather than precise predictions.
- Likewise, your audience can get frustrated and disengage if you refuse to make any predictions whatsoever. A suitable middle ground is to explain some of the key milestones that must be reached, both technical and societal, before certain landmarks in a promising new technology would be reached. This equips your audience with a deeper understanding of how the tech could unfold and some of the key things they should look for along that journey. You can also talk about a small number of key, but different, scenarios in which a particular technology story could play out. Part of your role here isn’t to make the correct prediction, but to get your audience aware of and thinking about the broader possibilities, some of which may not have occurred to them.
- You also need to be conscious of a common phenomenon where a new technology comes along, is hurriedly branded as the solution to “X”, ends up not being a viable solution to “X”, and all other potential value of the technology is then disregarded in the popular narrative. A common example in my field is when a new artificial intelligence-related technology comes along and is branded as the road to what we call Artificial General Intelligence, ends up being shown to be unsuitable for that purpose, which is correct, but then also all the other potentially transformative impacts of that tech are “thrown out” as well, which is not a good outcome.
- In talking about how a technology can roll out, you can also illustrate the various levels of technological capability and societal acceptance that are required for it to get real traction. Some technologies can be rolled out commercially when they are still not perfect – voice recognition being an example, whilst others – fully autonomous vehicles for example – probably need to be very polished before being widely unleashed on the world.
- In making predictions, it’s very easy to be cynical about all new technology, because, at least relative to media hype, most new technologies fail to deliver in terms of the timeline and the impact that is initially hyped up. If you are universally cynical about all new technologies, then you might get the satisfaction of being right most of the time. But there is some courage in identifying those situations where you think, based on all available evidence, the technology has a real chance of making a big difference. You can explain your reasoning, and acknowledge that you are going to be wrong, frequently, in making these predictions.
- Analogies and precedent are useful, but only up to an extent. They serve a purpose in rapidly getting your audience up to a rudimentary level of understanding through comparison with something they are already familiar with. But you also need to explain the limitations of the analogy you are choosing to use, so that they aren’t relied on beyond their useful components.
- Many people use schematics like the Gartner hype cycle to illustrate the initial excitement about a tech, the resulting disappointment, and then the eventual maturing and useful uptake of the tech. These can be useful, but it pays to point out the limitations – for example, one being that not all technologies eventually make it to a productive period, some simply just never get anywhere, regardless of how much is invested in them.
- On the topic of rates of progress, it’s also vital to push back a little against a common assumption that technologies will inevitably continue to improve. Beyond being specific to the technological innovation being discussed, there’s a tricky line to walk here. You don’t want to give people a false sense of their information having a long use-by date in a fast moving field, but at the same time, you don’t want people to automatically assume that a technology will continue to improve for the indefinite future, and that these improvements will overcome all the tech’s current limitations.
- Finally, regardless of the specific technology you’re talking about, you can work on empowering your audience to become less reliant on experts like yourself. It’s always worthwhile spending time talking about how to interpret and filter the bombardment of hype and news stories about any new big news technology. Many technologies are or have the potential to rapidly evolve, and so you should make sure your audience realizes that the time they’ve taken to listen to you talk is not a once-and-done type deal – they need to keep track of the tech as it changes. You don’t want them making strategic decisions 18 months later without having updated their information on the topic!
- Educating and informing a diverse range of audiences about new technologies is a fulfilling and very valuable service you can perform. All the quotes about teaching being a way to really deeply understand something are especially true here, and doing this engagement and outreach will both make you a better communicator and give you valuable and often surprising insights into the topic you’re talking about, and what others think about it.