YouSaid · the spoken record

Susan Liautaud

lines on the record: 31
first: 2021-01-22
most recent: 2021-01-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It can be someone from history. So I think that's the easiest way without sort of giving too much scholarly homework. I think that's kind of the easiest way. But if I may, I just want to be really clear about something. So I don't tell people what to do in the book. And in fact, your example of principles is one very good example of that. I can't possibly know what's important to readers. I can't possibly know what it would be like to live out the consequences of the decisions that they'll make. But the one thing I can say is that I think my least favorite word in the English language is perfection. And none of this is about perfection. We all make mistakes. And one of the things I try to do in the book is to talk about ethical resilience and recovery. So I hope everyone will ditch the word perfection from the vocabulary and go out and explore and think about making our best decisions and if things don't go well which they don't always go well for me.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, well, in the book I give a lot of examples and it's collected over years of Stanford students, so there are a lot of things, and typically when people look at the list that I have in the book, some will just pop out and really resonate. But principles are really about deciding who do you want to be? They tell the world who you are and how you're going to behave, and to some extent they tell the world what you're going to expect of others. And in general, I'm quite practical. I say, think about five or six or seven, not 12 or 15. Think about do you want to be known as somebody who values truth, generosity, and the other just practical tip is try to stay away from having too many that achieve the same thing. So that you touch on a number of different areas, like, for example, truth and compassion and honesty, all sort of hit at different things. But the other thing is, who do you admire and what qualities do they exhibit? And the who do you admire can be in literature. It can be in the news.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Table come out with a big discussion about corporate purpose. We recently saw in this week's news there are a number of companies that are withdrawing from donating to certain Republican candidates who were part of the refusal to certify the vote. Lowe's did that. Jamie Diamond at JP Morgan came out. I mean, when things really got sort of beyond the pale. So I think the thing that's really important for everybody to remember is that it's no one stakeholder and it's no one action. Some of these things are going to take regulation. Some of them are going to take consumer decisions. Some of them are going to take the corporates making decisions. And indeed at Uber with my example, now there's a new CEO and he has taken the reins and he has come the first thing he said is it's about doing the right thing. Now that's easier said than done, but there's progress.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's no question that some of them are functioning on money. Now, I don't advise the companies that I'm about to mention, but for example, Uber, in the early days, Travis Kalinek, the founder, just did a brilliant job of introducing something new. And I should say I'm very pro-innovation and pro-technology when it is society beneficial and ethically deployed. But, you know, growth and profit were his principles in my framework terms. Facebook, there's no question that when your goal is to get eyeballs on screens for as long as possible, you're going to be behaving in a certain way. Part of it is the fact that sometimes the governance oversight isn't what it should be. Either founders have disproportionate power over boards or boards are afraid for one reason or another to stand up and change things. So there's definitely a governance aspect to it. Some of it is slowly starting to change. We saw the business round.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arguing in the book as well that it's time to look at these technology behemoths, it's time to look at the government decision makers, not just in sort of classic terms of monopolies, but also in terms of how much power they're scattering into whom”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The power that some of the big decision makers have. That is indeed part of what I'm arguing as well in the book, that they need to be mindful. They are the ones doing some of the scattering of power. They are the ones distributing, launching on society social media or cell phones or gene editing kits that one can buy online for 35 pounds. So they need to be mindful of the power they're scattering and to whom. And they also need to be mindful of the fact that it is their responsibility and we need to make it their responsibility to listen to our voices. It's not because they are the experts in AI that they should make the decisions about how AI is unleashed on society. So I don't need to understand how algorithms work any more than I need to understand the wiring in my hair dryer. I can still understand how and when I think things should be used and I should have a voice and that's part of what I'm doing.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question, and I would argue that both matter. So I had the privilege of interviewing Hollywood producer Norman Lear a couple of years ago, and he said to me over and over again, you know, every choice matters, every plastic water bottle to your climate change points, every vote. So we certainly saw that a very big difference, you know, very, very thin margin in recent elections and in many recent elections. So every vote matters. One of the reasons our decisions matter is that I mentioned the contagion of unethical behavior, but positive behavior can also be contagious. So to give you an example of Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel laureate in history, look how she mobilized support for girls' education around the globe. Celebrities, but not just celebrities, you know, individual young women in places with absolutely no support. So positive ethical behavior can be contagious. But to your very, very important point about”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“million people voted for President Trump and we just heard that there were 30,000 examples of falsity since he became president. Now politics aside, partisanship aside, we need to understand what was going on in the minds of those voters. They're not all extremists who were committing illegal acts to attack the capital. They're intelligent, thoughtful Americans who really thought they were doing what was best for themselves and for the country. So listening is critical to having the kind of national conversation that we need to have for healing. I also believe it's critical to having the kinds of conversations that you started out with your first question about the conversation between the hospitality industry and those of us who really want to support it as consumers and the government. So we need to be having many different conversations but starting with listening.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think your word practice is really important. The first step is to be aware of it, and I tried to be aware of it myself. So the first step is to be aware that we're doing this as a society, we're doing it individually, we're even doing it as institutions. And then the second is to try to actually conversation by conversation, speech by speech, et cetera, even in writing to do better. And again, my hand up first. But I think listening is absolutely critically important. What we're doing a lot of is talking past each other. And either the conversation has become so violent, literally violent, and the environment has become so divisive that people don't even want to listen. They don't even want to engage in dialogue. But this combination of free speech and having a conversation, we need to learn, I'll take the example of the US, we need to learn how to have a national conversation. We need to understand what is really going on because 74 million”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So listening is a very, very important part of human interaction and it's a very important way to obtain information. And it comes up in so many different circumstances of our lives. It comes up, for example, between a doctor and a patient. But what has happened for a number of reasons is that we are more and more listening to what we want to hear or listening to what we, that's your cherry-picking, by the way. That's your inconvenient truth. Listening to what we expect to hear. So for example, one of the problems that comes up in medical ethics is young doctors in particular, they think they know what they should be seeing, and so patients are telling them something, but they think they've got the diagnosis already figured out.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Georgetown University to discover its past with slavery. It's not very convenient for many institutions to have to face that truth, but in order to heal, whether it's healing from slavery, which has been a very much topic in the US and some to some extent in the UK, or in order to heal from COVID, we need to start with the foundation of truth. Ethical resilience has to happen on a foundation of truth. And the fact that we have so many different lively debates is absolutely critical. That's why free speech is so important. Free speech is essential to truth, and including, as you say, experts bringing more to the table, debating, reinterpreting or interpreting history, etc.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So your question raises so many important points. One is part of what is different, especially in the last four years, is how much we value truth, whatever it is. So is that a principle for society? Is that a principle for us as individuals? Is that a principle for our leaders? I was just listening to a podcast Faren Zakarias GPS, and he mentioned that in the administration there was an expert who said there were 30,000 documented lies from the US president. But as we look to come together and to heal what is a very divisive time in a number of ways, politically, even in terms of how we're dealing with COVID, et cetera, that doesn't mean we all have to agree on the path forward. But we have to agree about what is a fact and what is not a fact. And to come back to the beginning of your question, you're absolutely right. There are a lot of facts that are very inconvenient.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stakeholders are. So you can't figure out the impact on you're having on different stakeholders and similarly you can't figure out the consequences if you don't have good information. So the whole thing disintegrates.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if we go back to my forward framework, absence of truth will disintegrate every single rung of the framework. So if you start with principles, most principles are truth-based. It's around honesty, integrity, transparency. But even if you take some, you know, some that are based on corporate greed, you still need to know, for example, growth and profit like Uber had. You still need to know whether you had growth or profit truthfully. And in order to be able to hold account for living by your principles, you need truth. Second, the information rung in the framework. Clearly garbage in, garbage out. So the information, if you're basing your decision on false information, it's not going to have a lot of validity. A different way of putting that is that you'll be making decisions, but they won't be grounded in reality. Third, the stakeholders, if you don't know who you don't have truthful information, you can't figure out who the stakeholders are.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think it's coming from a lot of different angles. And then finally, I would just say an example I use in the book is this concept of curation on social media. Very innocent and sometimes very positive social media engagement. We pick and choose things and the result is that what we're presenting is a cherry-picked life, and that has all kinds of implications for whether people really get to know truly us, not that we owe anyone to give us their full selves, but what people get to know and also mental health consequences and all the rest. But to be absolutely clear, there is no such thing as ethics without truth. There's no such thing as alternatively factual ethics.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Responsibility of experts in all of this, and I say this very respectfully, but experts need to explain to people from all walks of life what they need to know and why it matters to them. We don't need to know every detail about how to code something, but we need to know that if police use facial recognition technology, it could be racially biased, and it could result in terrible unfairness in the judicial system against black Americans, for example. So we need experts to play their role, and that's very, very true in the pandemic also. We need to understand what is happening, why does it matter for us, what are our choices, and what do we not know that we should know. So again, an example in the pandemic is it would be good to know how the vaccines will work and how safe they will be for under 16, for children and teens. It would be good to know whether the vaccines actually prevent.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Standpoint The idea that somehow we could have alternative facts. Facts are facts and we need to get back to a world in which we are very clear about what a fact is and very clear about what an opinion is. And they both have an important role to play in society, but they are not the same things. So even to give a simple example that one of my students gave in class, if it is 60 degrees outside, that is a fact. I may feel cold at 60 degrees, you may feel warm at 60 degrees, your opinion may be that it's warm or cold, but sixty degrees is sixty degrees. And we've gotten to the point where this confusion of fact and opinion or utter dismissal of fact is hugely problematic. But there's another piece of this that I think we all need to face, and that is since 2016 in particular, there's been sort of a demise of expertise. And I think we need to pay very close attention to the”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have had an increasing disrespect for the truth, and there are a number of different forces. One is that social media has driven this contagion of compromised truth. So one puts some disinformation on the internet intentionally or unintentionally, and all of a sudden it goes viral or it collects in bubbles of people and it spreads much further and much faster than it would have in any other era. So the reach of it, an example is to your very good point about the US. Recent events in Washington, you put something like inciting violence and instantaneously millions of people see it and millions of people might respond to it and react to it. So there's the scope and the virality of it that's really a problem. There's also in political leadership, particularly in the US, and I'm, you know, I want to just be very clear. I mean this from a nonpartisan”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around vaccination, around how we're going to behave around the pandemic. But not everything, you know, nobody has all day, every day to be thinking about the ethics of their decisions. So sometimes we actually have all the information we need. Or to use the example I just gave of Netflix, I know the company isn't going to sell my data. They tell me that. I'm not giving them my DNA, so it's not that big a deal. It's entertainment. And I'm the first to say I press on, I agree, and I don't read a single word of the terms of reference. You know, on the other hand, 23andMe where you are giving up your DNA or choices around COVID, yeah, I would press pause and think of it.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making choices that affect human life, or at least not ones where they're just so clear in our minds that there is no issue. We wouldn't run red light. We wouldn't drive under the influence of alcohol. But all of a sudden each of us, this scattered power, you put it so well, this scattered power is just put a weight on each of us because we really can do harm and almost unknowable harm because if we pass along an illness that we may have, even though we don't have symptoms, we might pass it along to someone who's eighteen who might recover, but they might pass it along to their ninety-year-old grandmother. So we have no idea. That's my stakeholder's point. We have no idea in our decision making, say, for example, not to wear a mask, just how far the stakeholders could reach. So I think it's hugely stressful. And one of the things I tried to do in the book, there's a chapter in the book called Ethics on the Fly, is I tried to say some decisions really are very important, like the decisions”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, every ethical decision that we face, whether it's should police use facial recognition technology or should we click I agree on Netflix can be understood and navigated through the quick framework and the sort of looking for the six forces that I outlined in the book. But I think you're absolutely right. I think that we all have been facing unprecedented level of ethical choices around the pandemic. And there are a number of reasons for that. First, it's unprecedented so we don't fully understand it. And there's a lot of fear and there's a lot of pressure and there's a lot of feeling that we each have a lot of weight. And on top of that, we're doing that in conditions of isolation. We're doing that in some people, very terrible conditions of loss, illness, economic stress. So that adds to the burden. But the other thing about the pandemic is that human life is at stake. So in some of the other decisions we make, we as individuals are not responsible for”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The governments around the world have responded differently. And, you know, I think it's a lot of the burden in that particular situation is put on individuals when in fact the experts should be telling us yes or no it's safe to be in restaurants and if it's not safe then we need another route to helping those restaurants survive”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we look at the case of vaccines, the French government has recently gone overboard and said everybody for a vaccine has to have sort of a 30-minute health visit and go through this informed consent process, which is the other extreme. It's slowing things down so much that they have a dismally low vaccination record. The fifth is blurred boundaries, so I talk a lot in the book about blurred boundaries between men and machine. So where you might see that in the restaurant industry is literally robots flipping burgers or other ways that we can engage machines contactless using machines so that we're minimizing risk and maximizing opportunity. And then finally what I call compromised truth, really making sure everybody's telling the truth that we're, as I said, relying on the science. And so that when we go out and make these choices, we're making them based on fact and not based on opinion and rumor and the like. But these are very, very difficult choices.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“unethical behavior. So just like the virus spreads and even mutates, unethical behavior spreads and mutates. And their all manner of things around those choices, they can be things like people not respecting the health and safety guidelines. They can be things like people spreading false information on the internet. So the ethics underneath it all is also contagious. The fourth I call crumbling pillars. So things like informed consent and transparency, you know, in a world on the edge, in a pandemic world that we've never seen before that is unprecedented. It's very tricky because we don't really know what we're consenting to. We don't really fully understand all of it. Even the best experts with the greatest level of transparency are sometimes struggling to tell us what we need to know and what matters for us. So these choices we're making, we're sort of feeling like we're not quite fully consenting.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's terribly difficult and it's terribly disproportionately unfair. But beyond that, economists, and I'm not an economist, but economists tell us that if we don't get the pandemic under control in addition to the human consequences, there will be further economic consequences. So we need to balance, and there's a point at which the risks, we need to manage the health risks. And I should say at the outset that in a pandemic, the place to look for how to do that is the scientists and the medical experts. We must be following the guidelines of the scientists and the medical experts. So the second is what I mentioned earlier, the scattered power. We each have a lot of power in how we do things. We can walk into a Starbucks with a mask, we can respect the distance, or we can do neither and potentially put other people at risk. We can wash our hands, use gel, etc., or not. So that's pretty simple. The third force is what I call contagion of”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps I'll start by using this example to illustrate the six forces that we see in all these decisions. The first force I say is that we have an epidemic of binary thinking right now. You know, Brexit is an example in or out Trump's wall, one side or the other. Yes or no, do it or don't do it. But in all of these decisions, including the one that you just outlined, we really are kind of mucking around in the gray. And the question is, how do we seize opportunity and mitigate risks? So that's the first force is kind of banishing binary thinking. So, you know, hopefully there would be a way to do some eating out safely, for example, in San Francisco. My original hometown, restaurants were outside, tables were spaced, there were mask rules, there were various rules around how food was handled, etc. And I should say my heart goes out to all in the restaurant, in the hospitality industry.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stakeholders in this edgy world that I describe is that some of the stakeholders for our decisions we may never meet. Some may actually be in subsequent generations. So an example of that would be a store you and others may have seen in the news with a Chinese scientist Hu Jin Kui who gene edited the embryos of twin babies. That affects the human germ line if he's done what he says he does and I'm understanding scientists properly. That could affect subsequent generations. So we have to really think far and wide about the stakeholders. Similarly on social media we never know sometimes where our postings may end up and who they may affect and how. And then finally the consequences over time and the message there is that we need to be thinking short, medium and long term all at the same time. We can't sort of do our short-term thinking and then move on an hour from now do more short-term thinking.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We live in a world in which there's so much information and at the same time we very often lack the information that we need to make the decisions. And so what I'm trying to say is we shouldn't be on a wild goose chase for every last piece of information. We should quickly assess either we're in a situation where we have the information we need or we're seeing that there's a very big gap and we just need to be mindful of the fact that we're making decisions without that information. So for example, if you're going to purchase a 23andme home genetic testing kit, you really don't know whether your data could end up at your insurance company or what happens to your data if that company is sold. So you're taking a bit of a bet, but the main thing is just to be aware that there's this gap in the information. The third is stakeholders, and I define stakeholders as anybody or anything that can affect your decision or that your decision will influence. And the key thing about”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, well, one of the reasons that I develop these four questions, and they're actually four words so that they're very easily recallable and they become a habit, is that I felt that ethical decision making seemed overwhelming for a lot of people. And one of my missions in the book is to democratize ethics, to make ethical decision-making accessible, even enjoyable, just part of our everyday way we see the world and make choices, big choices and small choices. So the four parts are the following. The first is principles, and we each have our own principles, and I quickly define principles as the guides to your decision making. So not rules, not everyone must wear a mask or the speed limit is 35 kilometers an hour, but rather things like compassion or integrity or truth, and everyone chooses their own principles. I wouldn't presume to choose principles for you or for anyone else. The second is information.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I started looking at all kinds of stories that show up on our lives in different ways, whether it's when we're younger and studying in school or whether it's in the news or in our personal lives, I realized that the law is less and less able to guide us, less and less able to prevent harm. And so what I refer to as the edge is that gap between where the law is functional as guidelines and as prevention and the reality that we live in. So much of it is technological, but some of it isn't. And so in that space in between, and I should say that that space is increasing because technology is developing faster and faster and the law isn't keeping pace. So in that increasing space, where do we look for guidance? And that's where ethics is taking on more and more responsibility.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we have a six PM curfew, we have mandatory masks, which actually has been quite effective, and for most of the rest of the day, we can be out and about a little bit, but there isn't much open other than basic stores.”
2021-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Ethics, with Susan Liautaud and Josh Lowe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source