Jaywalking

Until the arrival of the motor car, the street belonged to humans and horses. The motor car was regarded as an interloper, and was generally blamed for collisions with pedestrians. Cities introduced speed limits and other safety measures to protect pedestrians from the motor car.

The motor industry fought back. Their goal was to shift the blame for collisions onto the foolish or foolhardy pedestrian, who had crossed the road in the wrong place at the wrong time, or showed insufficient respect to our new four-wheeled masters. A new crime was invented, known as jaywalking, and newspapers were encouraged to describe road accidents in these terms.

In March 2018, a middle-aged woman was killed by a self-driving car. This is thought to be the first recorded death by a fully autonomous vehicle. According to the US National Safety Transportation Board (NTSB), the vehicle failed to recognise her as a pedestrian because she was not at an obvious designated crossing. In other words, she was jaywalking.

As I've observed before, ethics professors like to introduce the Trolley Problem into the ethics of self-driving cars, often carrying out opinion surveys (whom shall the vehicle kill?) because these are easily published in peer-reviewed journals. A recent study at MIT found that many people thought law-abiding pedestrians had more right to safety than jaywalkers. Therefore, if faced with this unlikely choice, the car should kill the jaywalker and spare the others. You have been warned.

 

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Update Nov 2020

According to the New York Times, the motor industry is concerned that if pedestrians know they’ll never be run over, jaywalking could explode, grinding traffic to a halt. One solution, suggested by an automotive industry official, is gates at each corner, which would periodically open to allow pedestrians to cross. To compensate for the failures of technology, comments Greg Shill. In a later tweet he notes

Auto companies spent a century establishing a reputation for prioritizing the sale of their products—in other words, profits—over safety and other goals, and automated vehicles stand to continue that trend. Trust is earned.

(second screenshot: https://t.co/bz5tbevs7N) pic.twitter.com/KQDx0gVKo0

— Greg Shill (@greg_shill) November 9, 2020

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Jack Denton, Is the Trolley Problem Derailing the Ethics of Self-Driving Cars? (Pacific Standard 29 November 2018)

Aidan Lewis, Jaywalking: How the car industry outlawed crossing the road (BBC News, 12 February 2014)

Aarian Marshall and Alex Davies, Uber’s Self-Driving Car Didn’t Know Pedestrians Could Jaywalk (Wired, 11 November 2020) HT @rickspence

Peter Norton, Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street (Technology and Culture, Vol 48, April 2007)

Katyanna Quach, Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street? The AI had no clue about jaywalkers (The Register, 6 November 2019)

Joseph Stromberg, The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking" (Vox, 4 November 2015)

Eric A Taub, How Jaywalking Could Jam Up the Era of Self-Driving Cars (New York Times, 1 August 2019) HT @greg_shill


Related posts: Whom Does The Technology Serve? (May 2019), The Game of Wits between Technologists and Ethics Professors (June 2019)

 

Updated 13 November 2020

The Quantum Organization

In road traffic, says my friend @antlerboy, the one with the most momentum has the most responsibility. Perhaps that's true in other fields too?

Meanwhile, in a hierarchical organization, the one with the highest position has the highest authority. This is known as positional power. Unfortunately, responsibility and authority are not the same thing. (The philosopher Robert Brandom talks about the asymmetry of responsibility and authority in terms of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic.)

According to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum can be determined, and vice versa. This is one of the central principles of quantum mechanics.

An analogous problem in most organizations is that responsibility and authority are poorly aligned. In other words, the person who pulls the strings isn't always the one who gets the blame when something goes wrong. And similarly, the person who does the work isn't always the person who actually knows how to do it properly. Position versus momentum.

There is a useful technique for organizational analysis known as RAEW (responsibility, authority, expertise and work), which was described by Roger Crane in the 1980s and adopted in some versions of Information Systems Planning. Unlike better-known techniques for responsibility assignment such as RACI, which describe how responsibilities ought to be distributed in an ideal (linear, clockwork) organization, the RAEW technique allows us to analyse how (badly) responsibilities are distributed in a real (chaotic, quantum, snakepit) organization.

And maybe fix some of the problems?

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Simon Wardley: The vast majority of business tools that I see in use, fail to give you position and movement. I find them useless for context or learning. (April 8, 2016)

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Related Posts: Clockwork or Snakepit? (June 2010)

Robert Brandom, Interview, Summer 2008. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdIPuERVjk0 Transcript: http://www.filosofia.it/images/download/multimedia/08_Brandom%20Interview_transcription.pdf Archived 2014-11-11 at the Wayback Machine

I.G. Macdonald and R.A. Veryard, Modelling, Business Relationships in a non-Centralized Systems Environment, in A. Sölvberg, J. Krogstie and A.H. Seltveit (eds), Information Systems Development for Decentralized Organizations (IFIP Transactions; London: Chapman and Hall, 1995) 

Wikipedia: Master-Slave Dialectic, Responsibility Assignment Matrix, Uncertainty Principle.

Open University: Handy’s four types of organisational cultures

Updated 18 June 2020

Agility and Fear

Frank Furedi argues that human thought and action are being stifled by a regime of uncertainty. The only thing we have to fear is the ‘culture of fear’ itself (April 2007),

McGregor introduced the distinction between Theory X and Theory Y, referring to different beliefs about the behaviour and motivation of workers, which may be embedded in management practices and organization culture. Ouchi argued that McGregor's distinction doesn't work for all cultures, and identified a third theory, Theory Z, which he used to explain the behaviour of most Japanese companies and some Western companies. Theory X refers to a set of beliefs in which workers are lazy, require constant supervision, and are motivated only by financial rewards and penalties. Theory Y refers to a set of beliefs in which workers can be trusted to pursue the interests of the firm without constant supervision, and respond to a range of motivators. Theory Z refers to a set of beliefs about lifetime commitment between employers and employees. eBook Foundations of Business Business Awareness Workshop

If we frame fear in terms of Theory-X, then it becomes fear-and-blame and we can all go tut-tut. But isn't there also a way of framing fear in terms of Theory-Y, without yoking it to blame? Performing artists may experience some stage-fright prior to producing an outstanding performance, and while excessive stage-fright may be debilitating, some degree of anxiety may be a positive stimulus. Are we to ban all forms of anxiety and uncertainty from the organization, so that everyone can feel cosy and safe?

And what about Theory-Z? If an organization is under existential threat, then the members collectively need to focus all their energy and creativity on restoring the viability of the organization, and it would be perfectly normal for them to be emotionally as well as intellectually engaged in this task. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.

All I'm saying is that there are different types of fear, which may have different effects on organizational behaviour. Fear-and-blame is one particular type of fear, but there are other types.

Many workers rightly feel responsible for their work. In most organizations, employees or contractors are ultimately vulnerable to loss of status or loss of earnings if they fail to perform satisfactorily. A completely fear-free organization would be disengaged from its customers and environment, and therefore ethically problematic.

However, a caring organization may be able to attenuate some of this feeling of vulnerability, and provide some kind of safety net that allows people to take reasonable risks without too much fear of failure. Whereas an uncaring organization either fails to provide proper boundaries, or amplifies the sense of vulnerability by capricious and unjust management practices.

Emotional Intelligence

Some of my thoughts here were originally posted in a discussion in the Linked-In Rightshifting group.

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In my work on organizational intelligence, I have always tried to make it clear that intelligence of the whole is not equal to the aggregate intelligence of its parts. An organization such as a university can be packed with brainy people, but if they don't talk to each other, the collective intelligence of the whole can be pretty poor.

Something similar applies to emotional intelligence. A large religious organization can be packed with sincere and caring people, mostly with very high personal levels of emotional intelligence, but if they don't trust each other (or conversely trust each other too much), then the collective EQ of the organization could leave much to be desired.

It is also worth noting that intelligence is not always correlated with ethics. Thus some individuals with high personal levels of cognitive and/or emotional intelligence may use their powers for selfish, deceptive or manipulative ends, and this may well have a negative impact on the collective intelligence of the organization.

My primary goal in working with organizations is to increase the collective intelligence of the organization, but I'm very happy if individuals get some personal benefits from this as well. This would apply to emotional intelligence as well as other kinds of intelligence.

In complex systems, the whole is never equal to the sum of its parts. If the whole is greater than the parts, then we have a kind of surplus intelligence. If the whole is less than the parts, then we have a deficit. (I suspect the latter is pretty common.) We may be able to tackle the communication mechanisms and "information systems" (in the broadest possible sense of this phrase) to increase the surplus or reduce the deficit, but because the whole organization is a complex adaptive system then this will change the parts as well, hopefully in positive and productive ways, so the net surplus or deficit might not change, but that's okay as long as both the whole and the parts are better off.

As I see it, organizational intelligence depends on a number of capabilities: information gathering (awareness of relevant events and trends), sense-making, and decision-making, as well as collective memory and communication. I guess emotional intelligence has some of the same elements: emotional awareness (situation awareness, people awareness, self-awareness), a degree of self-discipline, and a high degree of personal and group authenticity. Along with the ability to detect and interpret emotional signals from other people, emotional intelligence brings an awareness of the emotional state of the group, which is not simply an aggregation of the emotional state of individuals. We all know that a group or organization can have an emotional state or mood, which affects all those in and around it. It is a common error to identify the person who expresses this mood most strongly, and to blame this person for causing or amplifying the mood ("scapegoat"), but removing the scapegoat merely shifts the task of expressing the collective mood onto someone else.

Here's where I think emotional intelligence is particularly important. If you want to work with a group or organization in a low emotional state, or with poor morale (and let's face it, that's where a lot of organizations are when we start working with them) you have to be able to engage authentically with the negative emotions of the group without being overwhelmed by the same emotions yourself.

Notes on Failure and Blame

Identifying the causes of failure may be an essential condition for organizational learning. Refusal to blame may lead to a refusal to understand, or even a denial that failure has occurred / is occurring. 

However, where problems are systemic or due to process design, blaming individuals obscures the problem. A blame culture also leads to an avoidance of risk. 

 

Component as scapegoat - a part takes the blame for the whole

I have lost count of the number of analyses I have read about NASA and the failure of the space shuttle. Blame the O-ring. Blame the management. Blame the narcissism of the organization [Schwartz]. 

What was most striking about these investigations, especially in the early days as the press speculated on the findings, was the tendency to focus on what, in particular, had caused the problem. It had the flavour of trying to find an appropriate scapegoat, so that certain parts of the system could be free from blame. [Smith and Berg, p 156] 

Individual as scapegoat - a person takes the blame for the system

In both health and transport, there is a tendency to blame individuals for faults in the system. Individuals are characterized as Bad Apples, as if this acted as a satisfactory explanation or excuse. 

A recent British TV programme showed a number of cases of health workers whose careers were ruined by a single error. A nurse who picked up the wrong injection after a 30 year unblemished career, and killed the patient. A pharmacist who failed to distinguish between two almost identical packs. (Obviously higher status professionals don't get scapegoated so easily.) 

By blaming the individual, the system remains unaffected. Blame is therefore a mechanism for preserving the system.

 

With transport (e.g. rail crashes) we have two opposite tendencies. One is to automatically blame the driver or the pilot. The other is to postulate some outrageously expensive piece of technology, such as a state-of-the-art signalling and braking system, and claim that this technology would have magically eliminated all risk. The fault then lies with The Management for being too mean to invest in this life-saving technology. 

Grief (for example the bereaved relatives) can then be converted into anger. With rail crashes, the driver's often among the dead, so it's apparently better for the relatives (and the media) to have a living target for this anger (and revenge). Another mechanism which sustains a blaming culture.

And then there's the lawyers. 

 

Examples

Schrecklichkeit (August 2004), A Bit of a Dump (April 2008), Emotional Intelligence (September 2010), The Quantum Organization (November 2015), Jaywalking (November 2019)

 

References

H.S. Schwartz, Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay: The Theory of the Organizational Ideal (New York: New York University Press, 1990)

K.K. Smith and D. N. Berg, Paradoxes of Group Life (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1987)

 

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Originally published at http://www.veryard.com/tcm/failure.htm 26 July 2004