Digital ecologies with Attila Márton

Welcome to the digital coffee sessions. I'm your host Prushal, and every month I will delve into topics related to technology and the emerging future. In each episode, I sit down with researchers, entrepreneurs or enthusiasts from various fields, who share their insights and experiences over a warm beverage in our virtual studios. Our conversations will start with a focus on research and innovation, and I suspectable growing span into a wide range of interests, whether you're new to these topics or looking to deepen your knowledge, join us as we take the time to develop our understanding, so grab your favorite drink and get ready to embark on an audio journey. And let's explore together. Hello. Hi. Nice to be here in person. Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. You say you're a professor at CBS, Copenhagen School of Business, and you are a digital ecologist. Oh, what do you study and what do you teach? Hi, my name is Othela Martin. It's Hungarian, so that's why the funny pronunciation, but I'm happy with any version. I'm a Transylvanian-born Hungarian who grew up in Vienna and I live in London. I'm here at the Copenhagen Business School for about 12 years. So that's sort of the teaching. The easiest question to answer. I like to teach bachelor and master students for different reasons. I like the enthusiasm of bachelor's students in the beginning. They're very curious. And then with the master's students is to go one depth and be more critical about certain subjects. But generally, I was hired at CBS to teach information management. I'm still doing that on the bachelor level at the digital management, bachelor of science program, now. So that's fun. And there I'm just trying to give a portfolio of what information management can be because most people think it's database management. And I think it's not. It's something else. And then on the master level, I'm teaching a course. It's called Advanced Strategic Information Management, but it's basically a course on how to manage information across ecosystems or how not to manage because I guess we'll get into that topic a bit later on because, you know, in the world we live in, it's very complex, especially because of digitalization. There is no one in charge. So the idea that you manage something in the sense of controlling is delusionary, from I say so. And here I'm trying to elaborate, to work with my students on how to use ecological thinking to understand the scripties, this bigger ecosystems that we talk so much about. And how to talk about the ecosystem itself and not the participants of it. So it's a lot about system theory and system thinking. That comes into play here, but I guess we'll get into that. Yeah, I mean, later on. Digital ecologist. Yes. It's a fancy schmutz in term. So yeah, it took me a while because it's, it's all about branding. What's that fast impression you want to convey when some of the stumbles across your profile. So from my academic upbringing, I am a hardcore system theorist. I love system theory, I eat and breathe and I try to live by it, although it's not always easy. And by way of a couple of colleagues, I started working with a couple of years ago. I started to learn about ecological thinking as well. And there's a huge overlap between these two. And I got interested in what can we digitalization, research and practitioner, I guess, that would be the appropriate label here, I think. What can we learn from those who have been studying complex systems for hundreds of years on those ecologists? And they came up with a lot of helpful concepts and insights. And I don't know digitization, especially computer science, has a tendency of reinventing a lot of wheels. And I was like, we don't need to reinvent wheels about how to talk, think, deal with digital ecosystems by just coming up with new ways of thinking about it. When there is already a huge tradition that did all of the legwork for us. And I'm still in the middle of that of how can we translate mostly natural ecologists, but as a media ecologist. And there's a lot of overlap. They're already because a lot of media ecologists about digital technology, my knowledge, digital communication tools, and how can we translate that into digital transformation in a sense? OK, I mean, when I heard the terms, I thought, OK, ecology, I thought, cells, humans, and it in an environment, right? And then I thought, OK, digital ecology, and then I kind of managed it, OK, maybe it's devices connected to something, connected to people, connected to oceans, forests, sending information, receiving information. And that's what I held in my mind as potentially the body of information that you're studying. Before we go into like your academic work, what captures your attention when you're not teaching or researching, and what I'm really asking you is what don't you trust students know about you? Well, I'm not sure. So let's see, a couple of things that I enjoy doing in my prior life. I like music, but I guess my students do know that because I like to play music when people come to the classroom. So with nice speakers, I'm like, why not? I do use it. So I hope it makes it a more inviting atmosphere for students to come by playing music. And I'm also taking music wishes, but most of you never followed up on that. So no DJs ever take wishes, but don't know that's the possibility. Maybe I should be more clear about that. And I also used to play in bands and stuff. I used to play guitar, but I, that atrophied unfortunately. I hardly touched the guitar by now. I learned to play classic guitar. So that's why I wait for my nearest to grow on the right hand, where you can ping a plug properly, but then I'm always too lazy to actually pick up the guitar. So I don't know. Eventually I will get back to it. And I also like to do some exercise. Marshall Arts is my get to, I've got again, very lazy about it, but I really enjoy it. Marshall Arts dot Marshall Sports. And do we mean like karate? Well, yeah, so I do, I used to train a lot of, it's called Shinson Hapkido, which is a Korean style, back in Vienna, where I grew up. And here I started doing tech one door a little bit, but just for the arts, but I'm not interested in competition and stuff to also that. Yeah, but I guess what really gets me excited these days is I'm quite of a geek. So I went down the science section, rabbit hole, because I also try and miserably fail writing science fiction myself. No way. I'm trying, I'm trying. And I realized that in order to be able to write science fiction to it, there's a huge conversation going on because these people talk to each other, even the dead ones, right? There's a lot of referencing going on and inside jokes. And so you read it, it's hundreds of years of conversation going on. So I set myself the goal that I read in the beginning of science fiction, all the way through the major, major works. Okay, Bob, are you reading at the moment? Oh, I'm reading by, I'm in the 1970s. The 1970s is where science fiction went literary. So it became, we're trying to do high art. And the model was science fiction is not about art or space, but inner space. So that's the kind of, I guess, LSD influence of the 70s coming through. So right now, I'm reading a book by an African American author called Delanical Dark Green, which is a classic, but it reads like James Joyce. And I have no idea I'm struggling. I'm reading that book right now. Yeah. So 1970s and I've got to cyberpunk and then I should be present time. Okay. But if we have to talk about your academic work, right? When you sit down to write a paper coming from someone who is about to sit down to write some papers, what is your process? How do you start? Yeah. I guess a natural tendency of what flows well, tabletop my personality, but then there is also technique on some craft to it, which I had to learn. So I am more of a sit down and write kind of past. And then I just discover what I'm going to do throughout the paper writing. But that didn't get me far because you end up in this first draft loop. So in my neck of the woods, when I say first draft, it's something you write for yourself because you're trying to figure out what you want to say. When the second draft is what you write for the audience. And there's a lot of first drafts I review. And people submit some other reviewing for academic journals, of course. It's part of the job. And you can see what has somebody sent you a first draft. Even it's a wonderful written and structured. The message isn't clear yet. So the person hasn't thought about what do I want to say. That's the second draft. How do I say to my audience? Connect with it. It's a lot about connecting. It's a lot about problematizing and motivating. The big question is why should anybody read what I write? If you don't have an answer to the question, maybe you shouldn't write it. I agree. So I guess that's the starting point. And I'm not sure if you all as a talk about exam papers or just journal papers. I'm just going to talk about your selected works. Right, right. So it's about publishing papers, not like exam papers. But it's the same, I guess, the principles are the same here. So the process is basically always the same as you have an idea inside something. It's a puzzle, something interesting. That's my favorite part of the job is I like crazy ideas. That's why I like to read science fiction. So if something doesn't end up in the journal publication, maybe we can write a science fiction Sorry about that. So I like crazy ideas. I like this. You read somebody else's work and you like, whoa, I never looked at the world this way. I may not agree with what I read, but it's interesting. So I really like that. This aha moment. So the static one is always the same as, you have some idea, something you read that triggered some, some thought or some question. And then starts, more or less I guess the boring part is, did anybody already write about this? What is our status quo? So the way I explain this to my students is we need to find a group of people so we can have a conversation with them. That's the point of the paper. A way academics do a lot of this conversation through papers. We talk to each other through those papers. So imagine you have some idea, something you observed. I don't know. The stupidest example I can come up with when I talk to my students is you notice that the apples are falling from the tree in your backyard. Pretty stupid example, just to drive the point home. And then you cover to a random group of physicists. And without even introducing that, you just start telling them that your apples are falling from your trees. And that's very rude. I mean, who would do that? You don't go into a group of strangers and just start talking about what interesting stuff here that they have to say. You wouldn't do that, yeah. And it's a similar principle here as you go. You listen to the conversations. You learn what people are talking about, what's the state of the art of scientific knowledge. That's the fancy time for that. So you have to read a lot. And cluster things and make some sort of order in your head of which paper goes where. And then you problem a type. There's a certain level of conversation, certain topic going on. What is this topic missing? What are people missing? What needs more research? Some need more exploration because we hardly touched upon it. Some areas we may have studied a lot. So there you need to be a bit more precise in what you think of contributing to the conversation. That's what that's my understanding of. Making a contribution is there is a conversation going on and you want a contribution to the conversation. So first, just listen to the conversation before you do that. So if I could share, when I prepared for the podcast, what happened was I thought, digital and ecologist, those are two combinations of words that didn't expect. What else in your research? What are terms that are popular within it? So what I did was I downloaded your selected publications and I put them into an online tool called Voyante. And what that did was it allowed me to get some first hand impressions for the words that are common to your literature. Right. And what I saw was digital information, platforms, and new. Those were the four common words that-- Did you say new? New. Or can you use the word new a lot? Apparently so. Though new comes up in relation to new ecological, new features, new materialism, new methods. New materialization, new materialization, new materialization, new materialization, new materialization. And then, with the respect to platforms, labor, labor-related platform terms. So I'd like to double click on platforms specifically. But if there's any other terms, you want to maybe dissect. Let's do that. No, happy. Happy to start with platforms. And we'll jump around those terms one way or another. I suppose. So platforms, there's different ways to go about this. But I stumbled into the topic because at my department, when I started 12 years ago, platform was kind of the new thing everybody's talking about. And I wasn't that familiar with the term. I heard it, but I wasn't really looking into it. And just by osmosis, I started looking into it myself. And then I got distracted by sharing economy platforms, which I regret. And I was young and needed the money, I guess. I don't know. Because as it turns out, trying to economy says, there's nothing sharing about it. It's very corporate. It has been co-opted by these Silicon Valley platforms, like the Airbnb's and Uber, of this world, because there was a movement before that, especially in the wake of the financial crisis, where people desperately needed to share stuff to just get through the day. And they prepared the ecosystem for then the corporate and venture capital flushed business model ready, profit, plan ready, corporations to come in and kind of dominate the ecosystem, if you will. And when we talk about sharing economy, we have a tendency of talking about those platforms, rather than the original platforms. So it was a bit of a distraction going bad. But I learned a lot about platform itself. And I guess there's different ways to go about it. One is to think about platforms as product-based platforms. And I think about platforms as product architectures. That's the original understanding of it. That's more of an engineering innovation kind of understanding of platforms, which came about 1980s, something like that, cars as platforms and the computers as platforms. And there are ideas you have a core platform, and then you have modules that you can attach to it. And there's a lot of innovation by being able to configure your final product different ways. There was a 1980s flexibility. Because people were tired of getting stuck in the same old rot. So that's one that's a product architect jump. And that's, I think, the original sum of it. And then a platform also was increasingly used to refer to multi-sided marketplaces, so the Airbnb is in the universe. And there you have an online marketplace where people, and you're the mediator, the market owner, runs the market so people can transact on the market. And you just collect the fees, the transaction fees. It became that, but by now, I think platform has become just anything that runs on a computer. Everything's a platform these days. So what has become meaningless in a sense? What I still like about it is though, as the comparison, because I'm a sociologist by training. So I always go back to the basic question of sociology, which is, what society needs to be in place in order for what I observe to be not only acceptable but desirable. And that brings into question, what are the material conditions that makes this possible, even? And the ecological version of that is what ecology needs to be in place in order for something to be not only acceptable but desirable. And then you bring more into the mix than societal phenomena. So from a sociological perspective, then it's pretty clear that platform as an organizational form is changing how we are used to organizing. And I'm using the WERP here, organizing, in terms of coordination and collaboration, and how that is very different to the way we used to do that. The sociologist would be modernity, and that was run by formal organizations. So bureaucracy is the typical example people think about it. But the way society was formally organized, if you think about parties, nations, governments, clubs, companies, organizations, even the family to some degree, has been formalized into a formal organization because you can become a member, you can leave. Although you're born into it, you can kind of leave the family behind, although legally speaking, and it has been formalized. So in a one way of putting it is that modern society is a formally organized society. Platforms kind of show a different way of getting organized because one of the criteria of formal organization is a clear membership. So you know exactly who is a member and who is not a member. And it's in that sense a very exclusive social system because it's difficult to get in, easy to get out, difficult to get in, because there are sorts of rules. If you want to get a job, you know, there's a good procedure to get in, once you get in, you have a position that you take. It's not you as a human being who becomes a member of formal organization. You bring your skillset to fulfill a position, right? That's the public, the private professional distinction. You're not hired as a human being, which was different previously. If you were a guild member, you as a whole person, a member of a guild, right? And the head of the guild was your father, father, family, as a child. That's why he was allowed to exert corporal punishment. He was allowed to beat you because he was your dad, literally. So that has changed a lot. And if you think about, and here we get into the hustling labor side of things, you think about social media platforms first and then labor platforms afterwards. But let's just take Facebook as everybody knows it. It's inclusive in the sense that everybody can join without any hustle. You just create an account and you're done. But it's not inclusive in a political sense, right? You have an account. But the amount of labor Facebook, for instance, is able to exploit. Free labor especially is amazing. And they do that without you having signed up for it or being a member of the organization. So platforms kind of flip the script a little bit where formal organizations are very exclusive and out. With platforms who usually talk about blurring boundaries, it's not very clear because they just see through technology. They see it into everyday life. Every second can now be monetized. So while you're waiting for the bus, why not share a like on Facebook, which they monetize? So you basically work for Facebook for free. That's what I remember seeing that in the classroom. It's up to you whether you want to work for Facebook for free or you want to invest in your education. So talking on Facebook, what are examples of technologies that exhibit this ecological property that you study? For me, I think immediately I can imagine the World Wide Web, the Internet, people coming together connected or connected to organizations. Or like you say social collaboration, exchange, transactional exchange, etc. Yeah. So on top of my head, I would agree that Internet is maybe the closest thing we have to a digital ecosystem. Or information ecosystem, information ecology, different versions of that. But you could just as well think about mass media as an ecology. And digital then is just a different instead of analog, it's zeros and ones, which does make a difference. But this idea that ecology has to be something sprawling. network like, but not necessarily the case. It's more like a mindset than a unit of analysis. So you can think about ecologies that would you study, or ecology as a way of studying anything. So our interaction here is an ecology because we are in a room with mics, our bodies, ecosystems, and it's also scale of gnostic, so my mouth is an ecosystem, all sorts of bacteria in there that helped me digest. So if you zoom in, there's a whole world in here, right? - Right. - So it's a mindset more than a thing that you study. And that mindset is, so the easier way is to say, everything's connected with everything. I think the better way of thinking about is, is there are no things, there are only patterns of relationships. So if you think, for instance, us sitting here in this room, there needs to be a planetary body big enough to exert gravity for us not to flow the way, right? So there's already a planetary ecology, I'm a part of. And that's one of the important ways to look at the world as an ecologist is that we don't live in a world, we are part of it, which makes quite a difference. The best example I ever heard was when you are in traffic, congestion, and you're getting angry about everybody else. - I remember this question. - And we have a tendency of saying, I'm stuck in traffic when I am the traffic. Like no, you're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic. Do you think about CO2 emissions and climate crisis? We have a tendency of thinking that that is a problem of nature that we have to fix when it's our problem, because we are part of nature, right? And that as a consequence then also means to abandon here, back to modernity, the enlightenment ideal of separating humanity from nature and the modernity that turned into humanity becoming the master of nature, so we can exploit it, which turned out very well, right? Of course, we can totally control the plant, we'll live on. So some modernity brought us into a double bind that what I did was very successful, but it's exactly that success that undermines it's continued success. So we erode our own habitat, our own environment. So here the point would be to come back to the digital is as to abandon that separation. So humanity is not on one side and nature on the other, that would also include human nature, by the way. If you think about education, human resources or as a human nature is turned into a resource, where we try to get rid of our instinct, become a rational, homoeconomical agent that only makes rational choices based on an algorithm or whatever, totally transparent. That is another version of the same thing of trying to purify us humans from our animal instincts, which again turned out very well, right? What went wrong? So an ecological thinking is an explicit critique and movement against that notion that we have to accept our impurities, it's part of human nature. And to finally get to the point I want to get to, is ecological thinking is like under connections you can make in one thought. So to bring this to an end is to say, humanity is not separate from nature. It's a part of nature. We don't live in nature, we are part of nature. Which by extension, it also means that our thoughts and ideas, institutions and other technologies are natural. And so is our pollution. It's all natural because we are part of nature and therefore what we do is also, it has to be natural otherwise it wouldn't be able to exist in the natural world. We are part of nature, therefore what we do is also natural. It may not be helpful, it may be self-destructive, but the planet will be fine, it's us, we need to worry about. So that's the conclusion that the laptop you work on right now is just as natural as a tree. - In that it's made of natural ingredients. - And I don't agree with you. - I agree with you. - Yeah, it's human-made. Of course it's an artifact we created, but yeah. - But if you split it apart, everything comes from. - Yeah, the only way we can say it's not natural is if we would assume that we humans are not part of nature. And that's the problem is then we think we can do with nature whatever we want, exploit it and burn it down and cut it and split it and nuclear bombs or what have you know, because we think we can master that which we are not. - So what is there for us to learn from ecological thinking then in terms of some guiding principles? - Yeah. - From either a business perspective, a startup perspective or just an individual level. What are the things that we need to be aware of? - Right. There's a lot. - And the reason why there's a lot is because in a sense we have to kind of get rid of hundreds and hundreds of years of modernism and industrial brainwashing. One of which is that we are in charge or we are in control. In the sense of we can determine what is happening and what will live in. But if you think about it that we are a part of a bigger world, the part and never control the whole. It's just impossible, right? So the first kind of conclusion to draw from that is humility. I think that would be an important one that we are a part of a bigger world. And what we're doing of course has an impact, not saying that we don't matter. Of course we matter, but we can't control how that world reacts. And you consider the climate crisis is the way of the planet adapting to our CO2 emissions. So the planet will be fine. We may not be fine, but it's just the planet adapting, right? It's obvious and foreseeable as anything else. So humility, especially for managers and digital innovation campaigns. Unfortunately we have a renaissance of the hero innovator. - The Elon Musk's of this world will save us, please. Save us. And it's the way forward. It's just fleeing forward that, well, it's not this technology, but the next technology will save us. And I'm happy to talk about AI, but it's the same thing right. Oh, we have recount, so our own issues. So let's create a digital God who can tell us what to do because we can't. And it's a solution is that we confuse the symptoms with the root causes. And it's another ecological systems theory approach is to be, to make sure you are not just quick fixing symptoms, but you understand the root cause. Not to understand root cause you have to understand the system dynamics of the system is structured. Because otherwise you just repeat the system. You have the system keep its momentum going. So technology unfortunately has a tendency of being a good quick fix to deal with symptoms and then they just create more problems down the line. And then those problems are usually also bigger. So if you think about platform, for instance, Airbnb was a solution to get some side hustle for hosts. And you could just travel and live like a local. But then it created all sorts of problems for the locals themselves. And now you have protests in Barcelona who are booing a tourist for good reasons. The solution just becomes the next problem. And that's a very, it's called solutionism that you are quick fix the symptoms which actually exacerbate the underlying problem. How do ecological systems self control and prevent this runaway effect? And then what could we learn there that we could then apply to these systems that we're deploying? Yeah. So the starting point here is to think in terms of resilience, ecological resilience. So there you would worry about how-- And just to be clear, when I say ecosystem, it's a very fuzzy term. Because ecosystems themselves have no boundaries. It's something that we have to then draw upon. There is no such thing as ecosystem, external ecosystem. Because there are no boundaries between them. But still, just for the sake of talking about this, starting point would be to worry about the ecological resilience of an ecosystem. So what do I mean by that? When we think about resilience, we usually think about robustness. So sometimes it's called engineering resilience. And that's the idea that something that is robust resists change. This is bouncing back. Something happens, a shock happens. Can the system bounce back to the way it was before the shock? And in certain areas, it's really what we want. Right? I'm sitting on a couch. I hope to robust. And resists my weight. I'm really stressed as the couch right here now. So bridges and stuff like that, yeah, they should be robust. But if we take a bigger picture and a tsunami comes along, then it doesn't matter how robust the bridge is. We can't build the bridge robust enough to withstand a tsunami, for instance. Not a bigger question is, how can we have less tsunamis? Not more robust bridges. And then now we're talking about root causes. Same with wildfires, right? No, better example for the audience. Student stress, right? Now, what is a quick fix that all of you who went to-- I like it. Right? --to your university to ask for help with student stress, mental health issues. You may have depression and that sort of stuff. You get a stress ball or meditate a little bit, or do some exercise, or read a banana, whatever you're not. Which is well-membed, but the question should be, why are students stressed out that we're getting with? But how do we fix the stress itself? But that's-- and now we have to ask, OK, why do-- why are students stressed out? Why, for instance, students, AI are the same question, right? How do we prevent-- so discussion at universities typically-- I don't want to over-genreize, but as far as I understand-- when-- you know, this is found out about the chat GPT and large language modes. The knee-jug reaction was, of course, how do we prevent students from cheating? Yeah, I remember. Right. The better question, the root question would be, why do students prefer cheating over their learning? Because you know, you learn something with GGPT, but you don't learn what you were supposed to learn with this critical thinking. At university, so why do students do that? Because then we would have to talk about grades and money and getting students through the system as quickly as possible so they can start paying taxes. Because that's the real problem here, right? That's the root cause. So be quick fix things. You allow to use that to bring you a huge stress ball, you know, take a migraine pill. These are quick fixes, right? So that's why it's sometimes very uncomfortable to think ecologically because it forces you to dig deeper and ask why is this happening? What ecology needs to be in place, you know, for this not to be unacceptable, but desirable? Because if you give people stress balls, you just keep them stressed. You don't have them with the stress. So the, the, what we are aiming for is resilience of the system itself. Not off, let's say an organization in the system because that's part of the system. So you can have a resilient, suppose a resilient organization, but in an environment that is not resilient. So that would undermine the idea. So why is that important? So we have the notion of robustness that is resisting change is bouncing back from shock. And we talk about ecological resilience. It we refer to the capacity of an ecosystem to adapt to change. It's actually the exact opposite robustness. So it learns from a shock, a crisis, a major change and learns how to better deal should something similar come along the way. So resilience versus robustness is important in this context. And then there are certain principles of resilience. Before we go to the next one, so do you want to give like an example of how in nature, naturally, we would see a self control mechanism. Right. So I wouldn't call it self control. It's more like a self regulating self regulating system. A very good example is when we think about nature, we usually think about balance and harmony and everything's in equilibrium. And then we humans come along and ruin everything. And that's of course not true, but for instance, there is this ancient old practice in Australia of the Aboriginal people there. Lighting fires in the forest, which is causing harm, of course, because you burn down wood, but the longer implication of that is that there is less dry wood for the hot season for wildfires to catastrophe to come. So that's for instance a way to understand you as being part of nature. So you rather than fighting wildfires, you prevent wildfires from happening to begin with. And how would that emerge in a technological situation? That's a very good question. And maybe we don't have to explore it because I'm trying to draw the thread, right? Like so how would it be? Yes. Yes. So that's a very good question. And I don't have a good answer for it yet. That's kind of we can explore it a little bit. So there are a couple of of principles we know from ecologists studying the management of natural ecosystems. And let's just draw on a few ones. So one is for instance, variety and redundancy. So you have to manage the right and redundancy. Too much variety is bad because then you deal with individuals. Everybody's their own little niche. Too little variety is bad because then the ecosystem lacks diversity. In terms of something new happens and there is only one way the ecosystem can react to that. So if you take, for instance, ideas of how everything needs to be run according to market mechanisms competition. If something happens and the system only knows one way to react, which is through competition, take for instance, Airbnb, right? Something happens like, for instance, a pandemic. And the only way we think we can, the only way we know how to deal with the global pandemic. Is from market mechanism competitions. You would have had a very hard time dealing with the global pandemic. If it was supply demand price mechanisms. Of course, that played a role, but it was also government-limendated companies did not try to make as much money but cover their costs. And it was politically decided who gets how much not from market mechanisms. Masks the same way, right? If we would have had only market mechanism running, nobody would have been able to afford a mask. Because demand was quite high in supply very low in the beginning. So a lot more people would have died. So this is, you know, so if the system only knows one way to react, it is very brittle. Something needs to happen. It's not prepared for. And then the whole thing breaks down, right? And that's unfortunately with the pandemic. There was a debate whether we actually learn to change the system. Or do we bounce back to the way we used to do things before anyway? Unfortunately, we bounce back. So, you know, the next pandemic is just run the corner because we just keep on doing the same thing. More, more of the same. So diversity and redundancy is one principle. So how can we translate that into something? More related to digitalization. So if you think about your business school, digital business school upbringing and your education, I would assume that, you know, the main theme in terms of examples are the winners, the so-called winners of digital economy. So here are a lot about the made us and the Googles and the open AI and and everybody else are the losers who did not make not all that money and user numbers and did not get scale. I would assume, right? At least in the business school environment, I would assume it's the winners. And especially in digital economy, it's typically a winner take all the winner take most market. And then we're like, oh, this is what we can learn from these superstars. Silicon Valley, typical Silicon Valley superstars. They had the winners and also didn't make it other losers. It's like, you know, doggy dog survive of the fittest and they earned out their market share because they were the best of the best. Apart from the fact that I wouldn't like to live in a world like that, if you take an ecological perspective, you would say, wait, hang on a second. And actually I did some research about that with some some great colleagues about platforms who did not succeed. Quorum quote. So, Quorum quote. You can see it if you're listening to some of the podcast. But they're still around. They don't have billions of users and they don't make millions and don't have a market cap of our knowledge. So from a logically perspective, the conclusion would be, well, they do play an important role in the ecosystem because they cover a smaller niche, which is just as important as the big honchos, dominating everything. Why is that? And here comes the idea of a writing to into into play because they figured out how to survive or how to run their business in ways other than the Googles in the Facebooks of this world are doing. So should something come along a major shock, we can actually learn from the smaller players of how to solve issues that the bigger ones were not able to do. But it's an ecology of ideas, a different ideas of how to deal with things. And if you minimize that to just one way of dealing with things, then we will only be able to react one way to new things, to new challenges coming along. So to bring us to a conclusion that means the so-called losers are actually winners in ecological terms, because it's not a matter of size or income or market cap. Small and issues are just as important as a reservoir for ideas than the big ones. Let's talk about it. Right. It's the same thing with I. It will solve everything for anybody everywhere all the time. So what are your thoughts around AI from an ecological person? Right. So let's start from ecological perspective. The question would be what kind of society needs to be in place in order for something like AI, not only to be acceptable, but desirable. Let's start there rather than how can we make more money, replace, label, I don't know, make things more efficient, help, you know, discover new drugs. That's all good and well. But what kind of society needs to be in place? What are the conditions, the environment, the societal environment? What needs to be in place for this not only to be acceptable, desirable? Why do we want to have machines to do our creative work so that we can wash the plates ourselves? Right? Because we supposed to be that way around. Right? One great colleague of mine said, you know, I want I want a robot to wash my plates so that I can write poetry. But the other way around. So why do we do that? Why do we do that? And I have no clear answer to the question. I think that's the root question, not the symptoms. How do we make LLM so they, I don't know, lie less? The call of hallucination is a very kind with the lie. The lie. And yeah, there's I guess it's worth looking into that. So we don't end up in a, in a world where, where we don't know anything, where I had done separating stacked from fiction. But the root question, difficult question is to ask, what kind of humanity are we that we want this? What does this say about us? And here, for instance, science fiction is a nice, you know, give some inspiration that, for instance, ecological is speaking, because ecology is always about interaction to what communication you never live by yourself in isolation, you're always part of, which means you're always interacting. But whatever I do needs to happen in an understanding of what I think you understand, and vice versa, that there's always an interaction going on. Nothing ever lives by itself in isolation and then steps into relation to something else. Relationship is there first. So having said that, sorry for the little diversion here, imagine we create robots. Super cheap, everybody has their own robot and we can send them off to Mars and into the factories and do all the dangerous work. Now, that will be very close to a sliver society, right? Now, I'm not saying that robots would then have human rights and their slaves, like humans, used to be instilled as some enslaved, because they're robots, right? And we can program them so that they don't have feelings. So we don't have to go into that scenario. What does this do? Who does this as humans if we have, in a machine slave race that we created ourselves? So what happens to us? We don't know, right? Because it's about, yeah, but they don't have feelings. Like, yeah, I understand they don't have feelings, but what does this do to us? If we can just come on, you know, I don't know, do we get a sense of superiority? You don't know what it knows, right? So again, right, to go back, the question is, why, why do we do this? And I only have a suspicion. I was a little research I did with reading up on that looking into that. And I have a great colleague at Essek University, Lauren Martin-Berchell, who studied AI and predictive policing. So I learned a lot from her. And we also wrote a little book chapter where we kind of try to figure out because a gesture or a speculation of what we think. And in a sense, you could say it's we're trying to create a machine God, so we don't have to decide on ourselves. And just, yeah, because the machine says so. And on top of that, what I find doubly dangerous, and I hear you and Harari's also now start talking about about how we are creating a new bureaucracy state with AI. Because agri-gents and bureaucracy are very close together. So I'm happy to hear that it also gets recognition and the wider public awareness, because people listen to him, right? So when we think about AI, the first association is mimicking human cognition, human intelligence. Apart from the fact that we don't know what intelligence is. Do we not know what intelligence is? Do we not know what consciousness is? I guess both. But, you know, I mean, if you dig deep enough, the definition of intelligence is what humans do. - Problem solved. - Yeah. What animals can do? So, yeah, so it's a slippery slope. So I'm not quite sure we know what intelligence is. - Let them know not the visual intelligence. - But the initial connection is we're trying to recreate human cognition, human capability skills. But in fact, we're very bad at doing that. We created a different kind of intelligence that's statistically based mass data. That can do things differently than we do. And that's in itself not that bad. But the question to bring up is, "Okay, what is this non-human kind of artificial intelligence that's developing?" And here, unfortunately, the discussion tends to get here. The sociological background comes into play because we sociologists then say, "Wait, hang on, we do have a lot of experience with human created but non-human intelligence." And that's a corporation and a bureaucracy. So we do have a lot of experience. And how bureaucracists can go wrong, you know, from Kafka to Hanna-Arren's banality of evil. Now, bureaucracy can do very well things very efficiently. We find bad consciousness. We just think about Holocaust and how. But the bureaucracist was an industrial machine of evil. So we do have a lot of experience with non-human, human created but non-human intelligence. So my worry is that these large language models or what have you not, that they are not created in the image of humanity or have humans created in the image of corporations. And that gets me worried. And the image of Microsoft and OpenAI and X and these are intelligence, right? These are social systems who can learn and decide. And we have a lot of experience with that. So that gets me actually more worried than can it mimic human language? Because it can or cannot, we will live and learn with that. That actually gets me. It's more worried. And, you know, on top of that, and here's where implicating this comes with that ecology also dross to our attention that we are part of this, right? And here, for instance, I personally don't want to exclude myself from being implicated because I'm in part of a business school. But we're teaching things such as AI will make everything more efficient. And there's a lot of hype that comes along with that. Where we are and we did the same thing with platforms. Platforms is the new best, you know, best things since French rise. And it will revolutionize everything. And before it does, your piece systems and our blockchain will change everything. And it's more about keeping a hype for more than substance. Before we say goodbye, what is the one thing in your field of research that you would like us to know about? I think if it's really one thing, I think humility, we are passengers on this planet and we are not in charge. No, what is in charge? So there's a lot of people who benefit from the conditions we have now, but no, what is in charge? - Thank you for joining me. - No, thank you for having me. That was a super fun. - All right, thank you for joining me. Let's catch up in two weeks. And thank you so much to my podcast guest for this week and sharing their thoughts and their ideas on the future. The digital coffee sessions is produced by Prasad Raguyo and Preniel Pelle. Bye for now. 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