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Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rodri Davis, and this is part two of our 2024 predictions episode, in which we try to give some thoughts, possibly even guesses, about what the coming year might hold for philanthropy, civil society, and non-profits. So in part one, we talked a bit about the wider context and the economic environment, the political environment, what's going on around climate concerns, and also spent a bit of time thinking about some of the things that are happening specifically within the world of philanthropy in terms of mass market giving, kind of elite level giving, the work of foundations and some of the challenges facing nonprofit organizations. In this second part, I want to focus in on technology as a kind of overriding theme and talk a bit about some of the potential things that we will see over the coming year based on what we've been seeing this year and in previous years and the work that I've done for quite a while looking at kind of emerging technology and what it might mean for philanthropy and civil society. And I want to sort of split that into a few different areas. So the best place to start probably is just to frame it in terms of the kind of the overall context for the engagement of philanthropy and civil society in kind of tech and digital issues, which is probably to say we're at a point where I think awareness of technology and the importance of technology has grown exponentially in the last few years. I think when you look at figures here in the UK from things like the Charity Digital Skills Report and in other places through the work of organizations like TechSoup and others, I think that kind of awareness that technology increasingly does affect all of our lives and does have relevance for the work of pretty much all nonprofit organizations, whether they're large-scale foundations or funders, whether they're kind of major INGOs or whether they're small local charities. So I think that we've got past that point where people feel as though technology is something that doesn't really matter to them and that they're happy to kind of ignore or put their heads in the sand about. And I think maybe we're getting towards the point where it's also not seen as something where when an organization does engage with technology, it's it's seen as you know a matter for the IT department or you know, something for the digital team. But it that it is actually a kind of important part of the overall strategic outlook of an organization. So, you know, you have to think through what the potential opportunities that technology might present for you as an organization are. You also need to think, you know, if technology is going to evolve around you, how is it going to change the operating environment within which you're working as an organization? And you also need to think, well, how is it affecting the nature of the challenges that we're trying to address through our mission and how is it kind of affecting the people and communities that we're working with? So I think at that level it's something that the trustees and leadership of nonprofit organizations and charities increasingly need to be thinking about. That being said, I think there is still a gap, and and the evidence suggests this is the case between that awareness and that acknowledgement and organizations actually having the knowledge and the tools to know what to do about it. So I think there's a real challenge at the moment in sort of closing that gap and allowing organizations to have the knowledge and the resources that they need to actually kind of think meaningfully about what technology can do for them and what role they can play in addressing some of the kind of negative unintended consequences of technology so that it doesn't seem entirely overwhelming. And that's not just to put the onus on individual organizations either. I think this is a collective responsibility. So it's it's incredibly important that we also invest in infrastructure that allows organizations to find the knowledge and the skills that they need and also creates the time and the space for them to stop and think you know, a bit bigger picture about some of these issues around technology and what it might mean for them. I think at an organizational level, we also need to be factoring technology and digital skills into our notions of resilience. So when we talk about supporting charities and nonprofits to become more resilient, which was a real kind of you know mantra during the pandemic, traditionally that's often focused on financial elements. It's been about making sure that you have, you know, your balance sheet is healthy and you've got sufficient reserves to cover you if if times get tough. But increasingly, I think it's obvious that there are other aspects to this as well. There's, you know, there's things like individual well-being is an important element of resilience, but also the ability to harness digital tools and to kind of work with new technologies is vitally important for organizations if they're going to be resilient as we go into the future. And an important part of developing that resilience, I think, is the role that funders can play, both in funding that specifically and funding sort of the development of digital skills and knowledge so that organizations have that resilience, but also just general funders factoring it into the grants that they're already making. So thinking about some percentage of that money being allocated towards the development of these digital skills so that organizations can start to do some of this stuff. And you know, I think that is a narrative that we will see develop more over this this coming year as people kind of increasingly become aware of quite how fast things are moving in the world of technology at the moment. And then I guess the the other overarching point here before we dig into some particular uh kind of themes and specific technologies is to say that underpinning pretty much everything that is happening in in terms of emerging tech at the moment is data as a raw material. So one of the things that has really driven the sort of explosion of development in artificial intelligence over the last few years is that all of a sudden, because of the fact that you know we're living our lives online and just generating this constant stream of data about our behavior and sort of video and audio data and written data through social media and other things, there's this huge pool of data suddenly on which you can do things like train machine learning algorithms and you can kind of harness big data tools to make more effective predictions and sort of find uh ways of recognizing patterns that maybe haven't been spotted before. And that can be put to good use. And unfortunately, as we know, it can be put to nefarious use as well. But from the point of view of the nonprofit world and philanthropy, the key point is to get to the starting line with a lot of this stuff, you need to have the data available. And so there's a huge job to be done before we get into all the glamorous stuff about algorithms and deep learning, just to kind of get the non-profit world's house in order around data, and that will require quite a lot of work and investment. So let's dig into a few sort of more specific areas. Um, I'll get into some of the more kind of emerging tech stuff, and we will talk quite a bit about AI in a minute, because I think obviously this has been the year of generative AI, so I think there's a lot to say there. But before I do that, I guess one area that that's worth flagging up, and we probably could have talked about it in the previous part of this podcast, just talking about kind of everyday giving, is social media. I think it's been it's a really interesting time for social media in that the the marketplace is changing significantly, but also I think in a way that is raising some quite sort of fundamental questions about what social media is, what role it performs, our relationship with it, and how we want to use it as a tool. And I think this has been uh sparked largely by the kind of ongoing decline and potentially eventual demise of Twitter or X as we're now supposed to call it. And certainly one of the predictions we had in last year's podcast already after Elon Musk took over was that you know we would see lots of people leaving the platform as a result. At that point, I think I predicted that it would be lots of non-profits leaving f largely for sort of ethical reasons. And we we'd started to see at that point, at this time last year, I think, people experimenting with other platforms such as Mastodon at that point, precisely for those reasons. And you know, lots of people have done that. They've taken a sort of principled stand and and left X or Twitter for pastors new. But I think what I maybe hadn't appreciated was that the the real tipping point that I think has come this year is is just it's become unusable as a platform. I mean, the experience on Twitter or X now and for anyone who you who still kind of hangs about in the dying embers of it, is is terrible. My timeline personally is just sort of filled with crypto spam bots and people trying to sell me airdrops for various sort of rubbish tokens, and then lots of clearly kind of bot-driven accounts wanting to to follow me. And if I put out any content on there, which I I still occasionally put out tweets about you know episodes of this podcast or other things in a slightly half-hearted way, the level of engagement is very low compared to what it would have been a few years ago. And and I don't think that's just because I'm getting worse at it. If anything, my follower numbers on there are higher than they they were, you know, at that peak. And you know, on a personal level, I find that a bit sad. I Twitter was very much the platform of choice for me, and I enjoyed using it. I liked the light tone of it and the the sort of pace of it, and and it really showed its value when you know situations emerged that were very fast moving. It was a place that, you know, as long as you were careful, you could find genuinely useful information and insight. And and now it's the exact opposite, I think we've seen certainly during a situation like what's going on in Israel and Palestine at the moment, where the last place you would want to get any information is is X. And in fact, all you're gonna get is sort of horribly divisive and extremely unpleasant viewpoints that are highly polarised on either side. Um so I think you know, that to me, in the coming year, if I had to make a prediction, it's that maybe X will limp on kind of into 2025 and beyond, but I would think it it's gonna be, you know, even more of a kind of shell of its former self by that point, unless something extremely dramatic happens, and that will probably involve Elon Musk no longer being in charge of it. I guess the big question, and it was one we were already asking last year, is where does everybody who used Twitter particularly go from there? Because increasingly, you know, everybody need well not everybody, but but lots of people, me included, needs to use social media for their jobs, partly because we've seen what is possible and we've become reliant on that mode of many to many communication and and ability to sort of network and share thoughts and information. And it's very difficult once you're aware of that sort of thing to totally put the genie back in the bottle and go back to you know pretending that that none of that ever happened. So people are looking for alternatives. I mean, I've somewhat to my surprise, sort of largely settled on LinkedIn as the main platform that I use at the moment. I've experimented with others like Blue Sky and Threads as well, and they're they're kind of functionally fine. The challenge is that one that the value of these platforms comes from the network effects. And so if you go from a position where you've got sort of a network of thousands of people on on Twitter, as it was, to one where you've got 13, it sort of feels a bit like shouting into the void, and it's quite difficult to work up the enthusiasm. Whereas I had, you know, an existing network of sufficient scale on LinkedIn to make it worthwhile, which I think is the same for a lot of people. And I think it's been interesting to see how some of the norms and the tone on LinkedIn have changed a little bit as a result, I think, of people using it more as their primary social media platform. I think it's got away from the sort of comically stereotyped, you know, model of people just making very grandiose pronouncements about, you know, I am pleased and delighted to announce that this weekend I got my 10-meter swimming badge or whatever, and I'd like to thank us long list of people. To one where people more are more likely to kind of share information about other things that they've seen as they might once have done on Twitter, and also to share more about themselves as people. So there's been kind of more of that personal content on LinkedIn, which which, you know, I quite like, I have to say. I think that mix of the personal and the professional is is good. My guess in terms of that question of, you know, will we ever find a Twitter alternative? Because I don't think any of the current ones do kind of fill the gap that's been left by Twitter. One thing that comes to mind, one question is, you know, is that even the right question to ask? You know, should we be saying, oh, you know, Twitter has imploded and it's terrible, we need to find direct replacement for it? Or should we be seeking to take some lessons about the dangers of platform dependency and and the kind of slightly unhealthy nature of our relationship with social media? You know, again, personally, yes, probably. I think I spent far too much time on Twitter at various points, and I have probably benefited from that being forcibly taken away from me. Uh, and I think, you know, the the challenge for for lots of organizations at the moment is they're kind of hedging their bets. They're they're trying to decide where to put their, you know, allocate their time and resources in terms of multiple different platforms. And that's exhausting. I mean, if you're a individual one-man band like me and you're trying to kind of put content on LinkedIn and also experiment with these other platforms at the same time, you can, you know, fill every single day doing that stuff if you're not careful. And there is a real question about the value of doing that is, and I think for charities and non-profits that are you know having to make pretty acute decisions about how to allocate resources, that's difficult because they feel like they have to make a you know a call about which of these platforms are going to be the ones that that are worth pursuing longer term, and maybe you know, existing platforms um that provide something of a safe option like LinkedIn look more appealing in that context. I guess moving away from the question of the social media landscape as a whole and and how charities use it and thinking about some of the phenomena that we see as a result of social media and how they relate to philanthropy. One of them I flagged up last year, I think for the first time in these predictions, and has very much, I think, panned out. I have to say it's the prediction that I'm most proud of from last year, is about the rise of social media influencer philanthropy. And particularly, I've I highlighted Mr. Beast as a phenomenon in the last podcast and said that, you know, I suspected that there would be some question marks about the way in which he does his philanthropy and and what it what it says about the template that is being provided for young people, particularly about you know what philanthropy and giving looks like. And that very much has played out this year. There's obviously been quite a bit of controversy about Mr. Beast and his model of philanthropy, and he's been accused of various things from taking a sort of Victorian attitude to giving, representing illness and disability in quite old-fashioned ways, uh kind of sensationalizing philanthropy, white saviourism, all these kinds of things. And then this has sparked a real debate because, you know, he himself has pushed back on a lot of these criticisms, and a lot of his very ardent supporters online, often sort of younger people who follow him, similarly, I think, have not really, you know, they've kind of taken his side in some of this and said, you know, you should stop criticising him while he's trying to to do good in the world. And I think, you know, this is a whole rabbit hole that we could go down, and indeed I've written a fairly long article, I think, that will be out at at some point in the new year probably, uh, for a journal kind of exploring this question of how we should interpret Mr. Beast, you know, whether we should see him as a positive thing or not in light of the his philanthropy and the way in which he's doing it. But I guess the the prediction for the coming year is first of all, we will see more controversy around Mr Beast. I think particularly because in the most recent iteration of of this, he put out a video where he was building wells, I think, in in sub-Saharan Africa, and he put it out sort of saying, Oh, you know, I'm going to get cancelled for this. So he's clearly kind of leaning into some of that notoriety that his philanthropy is bringing and some of that criticism, and deciding that rather than taking it on board and and kind of changing the way that he does things, he's going to get more and more combative. So I suspect that will become, you know, something that we'll see more and more over the coming year. Particularly, it has to be said, if that results in more, you know, clicks and likes and subscribers, because that's essentially what drives Mr. Beast's business model. I think the other thing we'll see is more imitate imitation, Mr. Beast. So we've already seen this a bit. There are people like there's an influencer in India called Harsh Asai, and there there's various other ones around the world who are who have taken on board the idea that actually people quite like watching, you know, extravagant acts of altruism or or, you know, kind of random acts of kindness, and that they have therefore kind of modelled their own YouTube presence around that idea. All of them are doing it at a significantly lower level than than Mr Beast, but I think some of them will kind of maybe tap into their own ways of doing things that bring their own success and kind of grow that as a market. And I think you know, this in the same way as Mr. Beast raises some sort of you know positive kind of ideas about the fact that at least he's choosing to do good with his money, and he also raises lots of concerns about the way in which he's doing it. I think we'll see that even more with some of these people operating at a lower level because it's a lot less transparent and you know often what they're doing probably has far fewer safeguards than are in place for for his philanthropy. And so I think that's something to watch over the coming year. I think another interesting thing just to flag up about social media that I I've been noticing is the you know, there's been a real growth, I think, of kind of fandom culture over the last few years. I mean, fandom itself is is nothing new. I mean, I've read and listened to various things about you know quite how far back in history you can trace the idea of of celebrity culture and fandom. But I think at the moment what there is particularly is a real kind of globalisation of fandom, and I think a willingness on the part of young people to be very sort of cosmopolitan in their tastes. So I think you know the rise of K-pop as a phenomenon is really interesting. You know, I say that as a parent of a a daughter, eight-year-old daughter who is a massive blackpink fan and likes K-pop more broadly. And she's not even online yet, but she's sort of very culturally into this stuff. And I know that kids who are a bit older than her are and are kind of doing stuff online are enormously into this fandom. And I think I was reading something else, um, you know, a report from Meta saying that it saw one of the key areas of growth for Instagram in 2024 as being the rise of India's Gen Z Instagram users and the ways in which they are acting as drivers of taste and sort of meme culture. And I think it's this really interesting to see some of this cultural shift of the way in which you know the kind of tropes on social media and the the norms and the memes are being generated. So it'll be interesting to see if that has any impact on you know the work of philanthropy or civil society. That might be one to watch for a few years down the line, but it's it's certainly something to bear in mind. And then I guess the other you know question that's always there at the back of the mind when we're talking about social media is you know, are we going to do anything meaningful about the clear negative impacts of of social media on mental health and and well-being any sort of systemic level? I think you know, we've we've spent a lot of time, you know, and I've been talking here about how we uh kind of find replacements for some of the platforms that maybe we're no longer able to use, but there is also a kind of broader question about whether all of this stuff is based on kind of problematic models of tapping into you know semi-addictive behavior and reward centres in the brain and and kind of designed to to um so trap people in cycles of of usage, you know. And there's lots of people uh who have kind of written about this and thought about it, and there's increasing amount of talk over the last year about you know people sort of quitting social media or taking breaks from it, because it's just the human brain is essentially not really designed to deal with this kind of constant flow of information, and it it is pretty exhausting. It's something I wonder about myself. I don't know that I manage my own usage of social media and you know my phone especially well, and it's something I would like to get better at. And I guess the relevance of that for charities and and philanthropy is that, well, firstly, again, you know, people working within that world, it's an important part of maintaining their own personal well being, but also it's the sort of thing that lots of organizations will find that they are called upon to address if they're working around mental health or with children and young people, or indeed, actually with any demographic group. Because this is not something that is particularly restricted to children and young people. But you know, this might well be kind of a growing cause area or sort of a theme that cuts across cause areas for lots of organizations. Okay, I want to move on at this point and talk a bit about artificial intelligence. This has you know very much, I think, been the year of AI. At this at this point last year, we were just talking about the launch of Chat GPT, and I think you know that was reflected in our predictions for last year, saying that this was going to be a big deal. And it turns out it has been a big deal, and there's been it's developed further, and the capabilities of generative AI, I think, have you know are quite remarkable and have been really kind of accelerating at quite a rate. And I think this has raised all sorts of questions about what it means across different sectors, like you know, education and the law, and for for charities, I think it is the thing that has really made a huge difference to making a technology like artificial intelligence, which a few years ago was maybe slightly theoretical and science fiction-y, into something hugely tangible. Because now organizations can be asking themselves questions about well, how could we use Chat GPT for our fundraising or for our grant making? And and what about if people applying for grants are using ChatGPT? What is our approach to that? What sort of policies do we have in place? So I think there is a really sort of tangible way into this. I slightly worry that it then narrows people's views so that artificial intelligence only becomes about Chat GPT when actually it's sort of much broader than that as an issue. But I think it is a really useful starting point. So I guess you know, there's lots to say about this. So there's various ways in which Chat GPT and kind of generative AI more broadly is already having an impact on organizations in lots of sectors and will have you know much more of an impact as we move into 2024. I think it's having a huge impact on productivity. There's lots of tools available that allow you to do all sorts of things from you know making slide decks to audio editing to creating marketing copy to managing your emails, all of which in one form or another, you know, contain generative AI tools. There's also, I think, you know, interestingly from the point of view of charities, some of these tools are being focused on accessibility as well. So there's some interesting tools that are designed to allow things like real-time translation to overcome language barriers, or audio description based on image recognition to overcome issues with visual impairment, or allow people who have you know speech difficulties of one sort or another to make themselves easily understood. So I think actually it could be, you know, if really some of these tools could be really important in kind of leveling the playing field for different groups when it comes to engaging in in various ways within society, and that's hugely positive, I think. I think the the area that's really maybe been focused on this year is around creativity as well. I think the for a long while the idea was, well, of course, you know, you can automate some of these things that are essentially relatively like rote tasks, but when it comes to actual creative writing or creating you know images and art and music and these sorts of things, that's always just going to be the preserve of human beings, isn't it? And I think you know the existential question that's been raised this year by some of the tools we've seen is you know, is that genuinely true, or can uh you know artificial intelligence tools actually be as creative as human beings? We you know a lot of this uh we've seen a lot of people focusing around on this around sort of written material. And I know in higher education there are huge sort of challenges at the moment in terms of working out whether you allow the use of these tools and if you know if you're going to try and and ban them, how you do that and how you determine when they've been used and where it's acceptable to use them as a starting point and where that becomes sort of an unreasonable use of the tool. But there are also lots of tools for things like image generation from text and you know the early versions of things like generating video entirely from scratch from from text prompts. So I think you know there's there's a huge proliferation of these tools and the potential in them is, depending on your point of view, absolutely you know, exciting or terrifying. I guess the other thing that we've started to see that will make a real difference as well is that these tools are getting integrated into products and services that people are already using. I think a year or so ago you had to kind of go out of your way to find tools like you know, stable diffusion or you know, Dawly or things like this. Whereas now, you know, Microsoft and Adobe and Google and others are integrating generative AI into their search functions or into their software and things like PowerPoints and other things, so that they just sort of fade into the background and it's not so much about using AI tools anymore, it's just about the capabilities that they bring to the table. Um so I think that will make a big difference for people. But there are also some really interesting ethical questions, I think, that we're already starting to see, and we will see more of certainly over the coming years. I think there's already been a few examples of scandals or you know, criticism over the use of generative AI by nonprofits. And we will see, I think, lots of cases of charities and nonprofits getting it wrong when using generative AI. So there was a case this year of amnesty, I think in Sweden using an artificially generated image of someone being subject to police brutality, and they used this to illustrate a tweet, I think, about a report they had coming out on police brutality in Colombia. And there was a little, you know, a bit of text at the bottom saying that this image had been generated by by AI. People sort of said, well, hang on a minute, you know, if you're trying to make a point about this being a real problem, you know, and and you're kind of trying to leverage your authenticity as an organization to make that case strongly, feels as though it undermines that case if we know then that you've had to go and generate this image using using an artificial intelligence tool. And so people, you know, people raised some kind of ethical concerns about that. And I think this is something that we will see quite a lot more of. You know, I certainly was reading a report on 2024 social media trends from Hootsuite, and they're predicting a big rise in organizations using AI for their social media over the coming year. So everything from sort of ideation, so coming up with the ideas in the first place through to editing, refining, you know, image generation, potentially audio, that kind of thing. Because it, you know, when there's an onus on organizations to generate more and more content and these tools are available, it's very tempting to use them. And probably use responsibly, why not? But I think what that question of responsible use of these tools means is going to get really important in this coming year. I think, you know, there are quite pragmatic questions as well about whether people respond well. As we've said, you know, in the case of Amnesty Swede, when it was found that they had been using these tools to generate an image, it probably backfired on them and undermined the impact of the point that they were trying to make. There's also, I think, early evidence. I've certainly seen one academic paper showing that people are less likely to give to a fundraising campaign when they know that the imagery used in it has been generated using artificial intelligence. And so that obviously becomes a practical barrier, if you know not even an ethical one. Actually, if it's tempting to use these pictures for a fundraising campaign, but you know that people will then give less once they find that out, the two options are well, don't use those tools in the first place, or use them and don't tell people that that's what you've done, and then you're into a whole kind of ethical minefield. So I think you know, these are the sorts of questions, you know, in a practical sense that we're going to have to be dealing with. And I think another thing that we're going to see that's going to be really interesting is moving beyond the tools that have been provided for us by tech companies to organizations, including nonprofits, starting to develop sort of third-party applications of them. So OpenAI launched fairly recently the ability for people to create what they call GPTs, so sort of specialized domain-specific versions of chat GPT built on that technology and on that framework, but where you can essentially build your own bots or your own sort of search functionality around a particular, you know, theme or area that you work in. And it'll be really interesting to see whether any nonprofits kind of try and make use of this and how they go about developing it. It's possible that it's you know something that will be used for giving, and we'll we'll come on to that in in a moment. And I think this is this is where we get into an area that I think is particularly fascinating. And I and I, you know, I keep saying I feel as though it's under-researched or underthought about, and I and maybe the fact that I keep banging on about it means that that it's not underthought about at the moment, and maybe there are plenty of people thinking about it. But is the way in which artificial intelligence is not just going to affect decisions that are made about us and that affect our lives, but it's going to affect the decisions that we make as individuals. And there are a few elements of this. I mean, one is that we're seeing, I think, the beginning of what you know Accenture in a report I saw is calling the great interface shift. So one of their one of the statistics I saw in another report by Gartner, they reckon that by 2026, 30% of new apps will use AI to drive personalized adaptive user interfaces. And there's another bit from Accenture saying generative AI is upgrading the internet from informative to intelligent and the experience of using it from transactional to personal. And the point here is that these tools, you know, what we've had traditionally in terms of search is kind of list-based search, which is algorithmically driven, but essentially passive. You kind of put your search terms into it and you're presented with a list, and that list is ordered according to you know a very, very expensive and clever proprietary algorithm in order to provide you with information. And the difference with these new interfaces, which are more interactive and adaptive, is that they are kind of conversation-based in some sense, either written conversation currently with ChatGPT, or conversational, in you know, if it's through a sort of voice interface. And this is a sort of fundamentally different way of finding information, you know, partly because you you don't get a huge long list of things, you get an answer or a couple of answers. And so the nature of the way that you interpret that that information is different. You probably think, oh, well, that's that's the answer, or those are the answers, rather than when you look at a list, you're like, well, here's a whole selection of answers. And actually, if I'm canny, maybe I'll look a few pages down the list just to see whether I can beat the algorithm. But when you're using some of these new types of interfaces, it's more about a kind of ongoing two-way exchange where you're refining the information that you're trying to find through sort of follow-up questions and prompts. And that's a fundamentally different way of doing things. And it reflects, I guess, a growing user expectation that the information that you're provided with is personalized. You know, it's it's not that you're just finding the information that's available to everyone, you're finding the specific answer to your question and it is tailored to you. And, you know, people want that sort of personalization, but it maybe that personalization is the thing that comes at a cost in terms of us kind of allowing ourselves to be manipulated, either for sort of positive ends or not, because I think it's it's this kind of adaptive and responsive way of providing information that opens up new possibilities around things like what they call hypernudging. So obviously, nudging is the idea that's been around for a long while in terms of behavioral economics, where the way in which you present choices to people, the choice architecture, has a determinate impact on the choices that they make. And if you're clever, you can kind of present choices in a particular way to nudge people towards one course of action, although you obviously still allow them them choice. Difficulty with hyper nudging, or the you know, the new challenges with hyper nudging are that it's the same idea. You kind of present people with information or choices in a particular way to drive them towards things that you want them to do or you know, actions that you need to take. But it can be kind of constantly iterated and adapted depending on how they behave at each step. And so actually, you know, it's is potentially much more powerful in terms of driving people towards specific behavior, and it is potentially a lot more difficult for the user to kind of avoid the nudge. You know, if if somebody has kind of put items in a certain position on a supermarket shelf in order to try and have one at eye level and make people take the healthy option, for instance, once somebody knows that, it's not that difficult to just look on a different shelf and find the information they want. But if you are going through a website, for instance, and trying to kind of make choices and clearly, you know, it the interaction is designed to drive you towards one particular choice rather than another. If at each stage, you know, that that interaction kind of takes on board that you want to choose, you know, the wrong course of action and then sort of finds another way of presenting you with a you know an option of going towards the right course of action, and you can't break out of this loop, that's going to be quite difficult. And I think that raises big ethical questions in terms of you know personal autonomy when it comes to making choices. And why is this relevant for you know, when talking about philanthropy and and charity and civil society, I I hear you ask, well, this is, I should say at this point, this is something that I have written an article on for a book that's coming out on philanthropy and AI next year about the kind of ethical questions about how we might allow AI to influence our individual choice making. And I guess the the key points to me are that sort of practical issues in that again there's some evidence that we respond less well to information that's provided if we feel as though our own personal autonomy and making choices has been undermined. But there are also kind of more fundamental theoretical concerns about whether these tools could be used to try and shape the choices that we make when it comes to deciding where to give. And I think the questionnaire will be, you know, on what basis are those choices being shaped and by who? Because again, if we return to the idea mentioned in the the previous half of this podcast that increasingly we're going to be seeing online giving taking place through non-charitable platforms, so social media platforms or payment platforms, then if those organizations if those kinds of uh platforms are providing us with information to guide us when it comes to making choices about giving, what are the the algorithms that they're using to do that and what are the goals that they've been designed with in mind? Because you know, those are going to become extremely determinate questions if essentially those those algorithms start to shape the the entire universe of choices that we have when it comes to giving. So I think this is something that we need to be be wary of, and that I think we will start to see over the the coming year. I think it's maybe still a few years before you know the full impact of kind of recommender algorithms for philanthropy is is felt. But I do think so this confluence of people increasingly giving online through commercial platforms that are offering giving functionality, many of whom are very advanced already in their experiments with artificial intelligence. And also now we have this capacity to maybe make third-party applications of existing AI tools. You put all that together, and I think we're going to see the development of tools that are designed to provide people with information and recommendations to guide them when it comes to philanthropy. And then these questions about, you know, what are the values that are guiding those recommendations, what are the algorithms that do it, how transparent are they, how accountable are they, and all these sorts of things I think will become hugely important. Just zooming out to a bigger picture level about AI and so getting away from that individual choice point. I guess another thing that that I think we need to watch over the coming year is where the overall narrative about AI goes. One of the really interesting things recently has been the whole kind of chaos at OpenAI, which is the company that makes Chat GPT. And there's been a few interesting elements of that. I'll come on to some of the others in a second. But one of them is that it's sort of highlighted that, you know, in the way that the narrative has been framed, the explanation for why this whole situation came about is that there essentially is a division within the tech world and one that was reflected within OpenAI itself and within its corporate structure, as we'll hear, between people who are boomers on the one hand, you know, people who kind of think that the tech is brilliant and that we should just, you know, go hell for leather in developing it, you know, as fast as we possibly can and put more and more money into it, and the doomers, on the other hand, who are sort of most worried about the potential to accidentally create a sort of super intelligent artificial intelligence that will you know enslave or destroy humanity. And you know, this this sort of tension between the boomers and doomers has been presented as the as the kind of key ideological battle in AI. I guess the the relevant point about that for philanthropy, well, there's there's two. One is that there's a philanthropy link in that the doomer ideology, particularly and sort of existential risk concerns about AI have a very strong effective altruism flavour. And you know, a lot of the people who are on that side of the argument are you know aligned or affiliated with the EA movement. But then the more important part of it, I think, is does that binary narrative of boomers and doomers leave enough space for where I think most of philanthropy and civil society that is actually engaging with AI at the moment genuinely is, which is to say, you know, we do have concerns about the technology, but it's not necessarily about the existential risk and you know the superintelligence challenges. It's more about the immediate real-world short-term impacts of AI that we're already seeing in terms of you know its capacity to sort of entrench bias in systems that are deciding important aspects of people's lives, or you know, its ability to produce and proliferate misinformation and this kind of thing. So I think you know, that is a challenge because obviously I I think it's taken a while for philanthropy and civil society to start getting up to to speed with issues around AI. And there have been some encouraging signs this year. There was the announcement of a big new sort of $200 million coalition of foundations in the US, for instance, that's putting money behind this, and there's you know similar work going on in the U in the EU. And all of that work is very much focused around that space of you know, we're we're positive about some of the potential of the of the technology, but we also think that we need to ask questions about the way in which it's developed that focus on those sort of pragmatic, immediate impacts on society and particularly on kind of marginalized communities. And if the narrative that's been created as through the uh open AI story becomes the dominant one, that it's you know, you're either a boomer or a doomer, I think that is unhelpful for civil society. Okay, so let's move on to a couple of other things. It turns out I can yak on about this stuff for ages, and I could definitely keep going on AI, and I should say we've got a whole episode on philanthropy civil society in AI that I'll put links in the show notes to, and you can uh hear a lot more of those sorts of thoughts. But I want to cover a couple of other things as well. The first one is is crypto, which I'm gonna say very little about cryptocurrency and blockchain this year. Again, there's an episode on it specifically, if you want to hear my thoughts on it. We've covered it in detail in previous years. I guess all that needs to be said about it is you know, this year we've seen almost the demise of Sam Bachman Freedom, and he hasn't quite been, you know, ascent to the slammer yet, but you know, the big sort of poster child of crypto philanthropy from 2021 at least, you know, is kind of disgraced and his name lies in ashes. But we've also seen some other big names in the crypto field go by the wayside. So Binance has has now gone and CZ from from Binance has gone. So a lot of those big figures have disappeared. So I think the sense that there is a kind of credible marketplace and that these big players in, you know, that profess to be the big fish in in cryptocurrency, you know, are to be taken at face value. I think not that many people would necessarily hold that view anymore. Despite that, I guess it should be said that you know the price of Bitcoin at the moment is at a reasonable high. So there is still a market out there for cryptocurrency. So maybe crypto philanthropy is still a thing that some organizations are interested in and there's some potential for it. I have to say I'm increasingly fighting a struggle to work up much enthusiasm for it, despite it being an area that I put a lot of time and thought into over a number of years, a while back. But, you know, I guess it that's basically my thing. It's still a thing, some people are doing it. I would say for the vast majority of non profits at this point, the the risks involved in it and and the barriers to entry are too high, so I suspect it it will become a much more marginal part of the overall narrative around kind of emerging tech. I guess another technology that's you know had a lot of hype, but maybe feels as if it hasn't quite gone as far as as people were were suspecting a year or so ago is the metaverse. We have seen you know some examples of things happening in the metaverse. So there was you know interesting isolated examples like there was somebody ran a marathon in the metaverse to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital early this year and they raised £100,000. So you know interesting in terms of the potential that's there for things like fundraising. But I think from what I've been looking at and and the kind of reading within the tech world the growing consensus seems to be that there's still it's still too early in terms of the wider infrastructure surrounding Metaverse for for it to take off properly as a concept because we just don't have quite the sort of the connectivity and wireless connectivity and almost a sort of fully saturated ambient internet that's kind of everywhere available in order to make it work in the way that it would be genuinely useful. But I guess the thing to say about that is that's almost the situation that we were in with things like you know audio and video streaming not that long ago where you know you could use something like Spotify or YouTube but it was difficult because you know having enough bandwidth you had to go and find somewhere that had Wi-Fi. It was difficult you know you couldn't do it over 3G or whatever. And all of a sudden we had 4G and then we had 5G and you can download stuff quickly and you can stream it on your phone and and and this stuff becomes practical. And so actually I suspect you know we will overcome those infrastructure barriers and at that point suddenly does the metaverse become something more meaningful. So I think we'll probably maintain a watching brief on that one. It's probably not the sort of big dominant theme for 2024 but maybe into the years beyond that it's something that we need to take seriously. Another thing just to touch on very briefly is is kind of as an overarching theme I guess around all of these technologies is the ongoing question around cybersecurity. So at a basic level you know cybersecurity is something that charities are well aware that they need to to kind of get to grips with and that there is a danger often that they're sort of seen a bit as the soft underbelly and easy points of of attack. They need to be wary of that. I guess the what we will see over the coming years I think is is a sense that things are really going to ramp up in terms of cybersecurity and cyber attacks because the sophistication that will come when unfortunately lots of new AI tools and and generative AI tools are going to be put to bad uses including for cyber attacks the responses to them are going to have to become more sophisticated as well so I think the stakes are going to get much higher in this in this field and unfortunately that probably will be a challenge for for lots of nonprofit organizations. And then the two final things that I wanted to talk about in this half of the podcast sort of move away a little bit from specific technologies and they talk about sort of bigger themes and that I think are interesting themselves but obviously have kind of relevance for philanthropy and civil society. The first one is around the the future of work and what that looks like particularly in the context of an age in which we're told that automation is going to mean that a lot of the jobs that previously had to be done by humans or a lot of the sort of economic roles filled by humans can now be done by machines. And as we said earlier not just sort of traditional elements of rote labour but actually kind of knowledge based jobs increasingly might be able to be done by by machines. And I think people have been talking about this stuff for a while and about what a post-work future might look like and it's tied into all sorts of interesting discussions around things like universal basic income. But I think I've seen some interesting things written about whether actually 2024 is the year when we sort of enter into the period where you know this stuff is not going to happen instantaneously with somebody flicking a switch but it we are going to start feeling as though you know the transition towards a quite significantly different landscape of work is taking place. And there's an idea we maybe we're entering a sort of decade of deconstruction in which kind of traditional job roles and life markers and things become less relevant. So you know at a at an immediate level I saw I was looking at you know an article on LinkedIn about what they had as their key trends for 2024. And one that caught my eye was somebody prognosticating that Gen Z and their employers will face off in what they call a great negotiation. And they're sort of saying you know there is this idea out there and I think I've heard this from lots of people that when Gen Z employees come into the workplace, you know, they do have different expectations and demands and you know sometimes people feel those are unreasonable. But often I think what it reflects is that the economic situation they find themselves in compared to previous generations you know in terms of the cost of living and the their likelihood of being able to meaningfully save to buy a house or to you know afford their retirement means they have a very different outlook on you know the world of of work and they're they're going to be working for a lot longer you know maybe to them the idea of of retirement is is so theoretical as to be almost meaningless. And as a result employers that aren't able to meet those expectations in terms of kind of increased flexibility in terms of how you work and and where you work and that sort of thing are finding rising levels of attrition amongst those Gen Z employees. And I guess the interesting question for philanthropy and and civil society in that this wider context of of work changing is you know what role is it going to potentially play in helping to man manage this transition to a very different future of of work. There's one version of this I've thought about before which is you know the utopian one in a way actually you know if if we're increasingly lots of elements of all of our jobs can be automated, you know, there's the the dystopian version is we're all out of work and we're destitute and we have to you know we're all unemployed but the the sort of positive version I mean the kind of Keynesian one that was always put forward is that it will it will free up human time to do all kinds of other things that are the sorts of things that we would be doing if we didn't have to do these pesky jobs. And you know views differ on this there are some people who think that if you know automation is harnessed in the right way it will lead to a sort of flowering of scientific endeavor and you know in the production of knowledge because people go off and use their time productively. There are other people who take a more pessimistic view and show that actually you know historical evidence suggests that when there is kind of mass unemployment as a result of technological change, people tend to sort of lose a sense of purpose and they really struggle to find that. So I think the interesting question for civil society will be can it help offer people an alternative sense of purpose? And is there a way of sort of offering different models of work and and productive activity that aren't necessarily based on the economic models that we had before? So could we kind of transition to a world where volunteering is seen not as something that you do sort of when you've finished your nine to five job, but is something that actually sits alongside that work on an equal footing. And you know some of the work you do might be paid work but then also maybe you know there's some form of standardized basic income as well and then people are able to do work on a voluntary basis as well alongside that and they have a kind of portfolio of these different things. And it might operate you know a bit like something like the open source movement that we've seen running for a long while in the tech world where people put an enormous amount of unpaid time and effort into creating and maintaining software tools. You know, it's essentially a huge volunteering network but but again people often see it as their work alongside other bits of paid work that they do. And I wonder if we'll see more of that um in other areas in in the future and sort of offline. I guess the the concern might be that civil society ends up being subject to slightly sort of unrealistic expectations about the role it can play in in sort of overcoming the challenges of automation if there isn't the accompanying fundamental change to political and economic systems that is going to be required. I think if we're going to get the good version of automation that only works if we change the way we think about how capitalist systems work and how we we think about you know the economy and if we don't do that and instead people just sort of say well you know civil society can sort it out or charities can can sort this stuff out that's going to put a huge burden on those organizations and one that I think is going to be entirely impossible for them to manage. So I think there is a debate that needs to open up about you know what this move and what this transition to a different future of work looks like and what role civil society plays in it. I guess the other thing I'll just say about the future work, just because I've read a an interesting book on it recently is where what it means in terms of the different skills that we might need as individuals. So the book that I read is one called Breath which I'll put a link in the show notes to and it was it's really interesting because it's essentially it was positioned as a challenge in a way to the uh the sort of Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 ideas 10,000 hours idea, you know, that all you need in order to get good at something is to spend 10,000 hours you know just relentlessly focusing on that one thing and that actually excellence comes from narrowly defined domain specific effort. And this book was sort of arguing that that's true in some kind of contexts where you have clearly defined rules, you know, things like chess and music and sports and that sort of thing. But actually more broadly when you see people flourishing in lots of fields and and particularly when you focus on people who've had a sort of transformative impact or driven innovation often you know the really distinctive thing about them is the extent to which they are generalists or they have a sort of broad range of interests and so they're able to engage in in what is called sort of analogical thinking. So sort of drawing analogies between different fields of activity at quite a sort of deep structural level. And I think this is really interesting because in in an age of automation where we're increasingly thinking about you know what is it that we're good at and what is it that machines can do, maybe it's this kind of thing that we will look to increasingly to say well this is what human beings should be doing you know we're good at thinking laterally or sort of you know joining the dots between different domains and then maybe we can you know put the the um the machines to work you know kind of digging deep within those areas and doing the tasks that we've specified for them. So I think you know there's kind of all sorts of interesting questions there about what what jobs will look like in the future and what sort of skills will be most desirable. And then the final thing that I want to talk about which is is sort of tech linked but I guess is a broader trend that links to demographics as well and I think is important is around questions to do with well at a at a at a macro level to do with population. So there is a big debate I think at the moment going on about whether the the major challenge facing humanity is that there are too many people or increasingly that there are too few or that there will be too few in the future. And you know for over the last 40 or 50 years probably the dominant narrative has been well that population growth is too high and that there are too many people and there's sort of population overcrowding and that this puts a sort of too high a strain on natural resources and we're going to sort of deplete those in a Malthusian sense and there's going to be some sort of population collapse. And there was a famous book called The Population Bomb that that made this argument. But actually more recently what we've seen is a lot of evidence in many places that population growth rates are slowing down and certainly in decline. Populations themselves I guess not quite yet but the rate of growth is growing is declining. And this is something a lot of people have latched on to and said well this this is actually the real problem because from an economic point of view if we don't have younger people you know coming in at the right rate to fill the these jobs in the future and kind of drive the productivity of our economies that's going to be a huge issue. And there's definitely a philanthropy element to this in that it's become quite a sort of cause cerebre for a particular element of of the sort of Silicon Valley philanthropy that is aligned with or around the fringes of effective altruism because there is quite a sort of it's quite tied in with sort of rationalism and a and a rationalist concern around sort of population issues. Most prominently Elon Musk has made it something that he's talked about a lot and has sort of put money into looking into in some of these issues around population. I guess things say is I think this will become more of a focus for big money philanthropy over the coming year and you know it is quite a divisive issue. I guess the other thing to flag up and I wrote something about this a little while ago which I can put a link in the show notes to is that there's a pretty long history of philanthropy involving itself in population issues and it's quite a problematic history in that the the line between sort of genuine concerns about population and things like eugenic thinking is quite you know it's quite blurry and it's often been sort of overstepped in the past because you know on the one hand there is the the concert the generalized concern that there are not going to be enough people and what we can do to make sure that population growth levels are maintained. But what then you often see is people focusing on you know we need to make sure not just that there are enough people but that there are quote unquote the right sort of people and that then gets you into extremely ethically murky territory. So I think we will see you know more concerns around that sort of thing starting to emerge because there is a sort of worrying trend from the fringes of sort of eugenic or eugenics like thinking becoming more normalized and sort of presented as something that actually has a rational basis. So I think you know this is something that we need to be aware of. And then I guess the very very final thing to say on this is I think this this concern about population and and you know population growth and whether there's too few people and or or not enough people is linked into a sort of more fundamental concern about you know life and death and this is how it manifests itself at a sort of societal level but also at an individual level I think one of the other areas that I'm fascinated in and I want to dig into a bit more is is the sort of increasing tendency particularly among sort of you know very wealthy tech people to see life extension and sort of gerontology as an area of focus for their philanthropy. And again it sort of maybe raises questions about the extent to which this is philanthropy and the extent to which it's just naked self-interest but you know not not just making it possible for people to have more children and for the population as a whole to be healthy, but also focusing at an individual level on extending the lifespans of people already living, you know, most particularly often the the wealthy white men who are funding this research who themselves probably think that they should continue living for a lot longer. I think it's really going to be interesting over the coming year to see how that develops because there's quite a lot of money already going into that stuff sort of you know quietly around the fringes and I wonder if that will trickle more into the mainstream and you know whether we will see some you know sort of concerns blow up about the the fact that this has become a focus for for philanthropic money. So I think you know that's an interesting space to watch right well that brings us to the end of part two of our 2024 predictions for philanthropy civil society with a you know another hour's worth of cantering through some sorts there on the impact of technology on these fields. Hope you've enjoyed that as again uh you know if nothing else hopefully it's sort of food for thought feel free to entirely disagree with what I've said there and if you do you know please do get in touch on social media or via the Why Philanthropy Matters website. I would love to hear your points of view even if they don't agree with mine as long as you put them across in a nice way and aren't overly convocative because I don't I don't think I need that at the end of a long year. But I will put links in the show notes to places where you can find articles and podcasts and material on lots of the stuff that I've been talking about in this episode. As I say if you're interested more broadly check out the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com where you can find lots of back episodes of this podcast and lots of articles and things that you will be hopefully be interested in. You can, you know, going to what we were saying about social media earlier you can find me on social media still I'm primarily on LinkedIn these days but I'm still there in the dying embers of Twitter and I'm also sort of half heartedly on Mastodon and Blue Sky and threads so you know please do come and seek me out there if you're also experimenting with those. Other than that just like subscribe leave us a nice review on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcast it probably isn't iTunes these days is it it's just one of those things podcasters say but nobody gets their podcasts on iTunes these days but yeah do if you know anybody that you think would be interested in the podcast this episode or indeed other episodes please do you know tell them about it. I think personal recommendation is a really powerful tool um just remains to say you know merry Christmas if you celebrate Christmas and you know happy festivus uh in a generalized sense if you don't and happy new year again you know if you celebrate the lunar new year I'll wish you one of those when we get to late January. But yeah have a great festive season everyone and we will be back in the new year with a whole smorgasboard of new episodes um for you so see you next time bye