Dr Nick Waggett

Discussion of the potential benefits and harms of artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere currently following the ‘AI Safety Summit’ hosted by the UK government.  But what of the human side of the relationship? How might this be affected as the power and reach of AI develops?  Drawing on my research and consultancy experience, I offer some brief thoughts on how our thinking about AI might be lost and gained in future. Is AI awful? In the episode of the Netflix series Black Mirror called ‘ Joan is Awful ’ the main character Joan (played by Annie Murphy) discovers that a global streaming platform has launched a TV drama adaptation of her life - in which she is portrayed by Hollywood A-lister Salma Hayek. Joan discovers that she has signed away the rights to her identity by ticking the T&Cs box which ‘nobody reads’ and can therefore do nothing about it. She teams up with the real Salma ‘f***ing’ Hayek who, we learn, has also lost the rights to her actor identity and t...

  Like, what colour is a conversation with a colleague? All those bits that might not be reflected in the calendar. The research I undertook for my Professional Doctorate (completed in 2017) explored how technology alters organizational processes and structures. The above quote relates to the use of the Outlook calendar to manage workload in a health clinic. Some of the findings anticipated the transformation of work that was accelerated by the pandemic and enabled by technology.  For example, I showed how technology transports work across an organization’s usual boundaries of time (9-5) and place (the office). The affordances of technology (i.e. what it enables) have many positive aspects, such as maintaining delivery of critical services during a global pandemic. Society’s capacity to deliver its core functions was many times greater in 2020 that it was 10 or 50 years earlier. Some impacts were unexpected – such as accelerating the decline in physical newspaper sales beca...