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Our guest today is Dr Nat Kendall-Taylor. Nat received his PhD in Anthropology at UCLA and in 2008 he joined the FrameWorks Institute, a non-profit research organisation in Washington, D.C., where he is now the CEO.
FrameWorks uses rigorous social science methods to study how people understand complex social issues such as climate change, justice reform, and the impact of poverty on early childhood development. It develops evidence-based techniques that help researchers, advocates, and practitioners explain them more effectively.
Nat explains what drew him from pre-med to anthropology. He did his PhD at UCLA because of the Anthropology department's "unapologetic focus on applied anthropology". His fieldwork in Kenya on children with seizure disorders explored the question of why so few sought biomedical treatment. His experience there, working with public health officials and others, demonstrated the value of understanding culture, the importance of multi-modal transdisciplinary perspectives, and the often "counterintuitive and frequently frustrating nature of communications when you're trying to do this kind of cross-cultural work".
For the past 18 months, FrameWorks has worked on how to frame and communicate the social impacts of artificial intelligence. The project came to FrameWorks through their long-term collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation when it became clear that some of their Grantees "had been having a lot of difficulty advancing their ideas" about algorithmic justice to the general public. The project has explored "the cultural models, the deep patterns of reasoning that either make it hard for people to appreciate the social implications" of AI as well as how to allow people to "engage with the issue in helpful and meaningful ways". The report will be publicly available on the FrameWorks website.
As Nat explains, if the public "doesn't understand what the thing is [artificial intelligence] that you are claiming has pernicious negative impacts on certain groups of people, then it becomes very hard to have a meaningful conversation about what those are, who is affected". This is compounded when "people don't really have a sense what structural or systemic racism means outside of a few issues, how that might work and what the outcomes of that might be."
Nat says their work "suggests that it is a responsibility, it's an obligation, for those who understand how these things work to bring the public along, and to deepen people's understanding of how [for example] using algorithms to make resourcing decisions...can be seriously problematic".
Nat recommends three books (Metaphors We Live By, Finding Culture in Talk, and Cultural Models in Language and Thought) and ends with a call for more anthropologists to work outside the academy where they can also do impactful work.
Read an edited excerpt [PDF] of this interview.
You can follow Nat on Twitter at @natkendallt and connect with him on LinkedIn. FrameWorks are on Twitter @FrameWorksInst.
Update: FrameWorks published “Communicating About the Social Implications of AI: A FrameWorks Strategic B
