Rahim Hirji on Solutionary Voices: what algorithmic drift takes, and how to take it back

Zoe WeilWhat problem are you working to solve?

A couple of things I would say is that I probably hit a few roads by accident. I chose my career based on what I thought was the best training and I went into banking. Absolutely hated it and had to find a way to meander out trying to find my own calling. The question for me then was really about how do you find what the problem is that you need to solve. Very early in my career I thought that was within the media space because I thought that I would be able to impact people in that area. And then by chance got into education and very quickly realised that this was a space that I wanted to play in. It was a place where even though I am not an educator, I am not a teacher, it was a place where I knew that I could impact individuals.

When you think about the problem that I am trying to solve, there have been many problems along this route that I have been in. Firstly, just by getting into it, you realise that you can change people's life trajectory. That is quite a powerful thing to realise when you understand that someone's life could be very much different in ten or twenty years time if you have the right impact earlier on. Similarly you can help others who have had a great trajectory already by topping up a little bit with tutoring. Some of my early parts of my career were in online tutoring when it seemed like a very weird thing to have someone on the other end of the internet teach your child maths.

My last two or three years has been all around trying to understand how AI is affecting people, and I have seen it. I see very clearly that it has been done in the wrong way. So I find now my calling is to open up people's eyes to the fact that whilst AI is so powerful for us as the human race, it allows us to be more human. Really what I am trying to do here is open people's eyes up to opportunities, to missteps that have happened along the way. People are drifting to rely on algorithms and technology more so than they should be doing, and I feel that is my calling and that is the problem that I am trying to solve.

Zoe WeilWhat inspired you to write the letter to your daughter when she went off to college, and how did she respond to you sharing it with the world?

For me it was a very selfish thing in the beginning because I always feel as if we are running out of time, and life is a finite thing, and parenthood is a lifetime thing once you have kids, but it is a finite period when you have your children at home. Exams are in the way, life is in the way, and all of the things that I wanted to say, I knew there was not going to be a time that I could say it in the right way and probably in the most appropriate way for my daughter. So I wanted, very selfishly, to make sure that I had given the right pieces of advice from my perspective. We are not all knowing, but I wanted to give it from my perspective on mistakes that I have made, and the opportunities that come ahead.

I do not think you can think about that and say I am going to do that in one conversation, or plan it out in your head that I am going to have a Sunday walk five weeks in a row and try to have these conversations, because life does get in the way. So I sat over about six months and I would keep coming back to it and adding bits and pieces as I was thinking. I told a couple of friends about it and they said, I wish I could do that. I did not quite understand when they said it. I thought everyone could write a letter. Everyone can say what they want to say. When I realised that actually not everyone can write a letter or think about some of these deep things, or necessarily have the right time to do it, I thought, let me try and make this open enough so that people who are going through the same thing can use it.

It happens to every parent at some point that their child will leave them. The child may come back, but the child is going off to a new phase in their life. I made this very late decision that I was going to just share it and publish it. I had so much outpouring of gratitude that I know that I had impact on so many parents who would not have known what to say, and they said, is it okay if I cut and paste bits and pieces of this. I said, of course, absolutely, that is the reason why I put it out. To be brutally honest, at some point when I was writing that letter I would cry. I did not know what was happening to me. I am not sure if that was because my own daughter was leaving, but I would be in tears writing this.

I let my wife read it before we shared it. She had her own way of communicating with her daughter and that was equally emotional. She read it and said, this is beautiful, this is exactly what I wanted to say and you have been able to say it, and I want to say something slightly different, and I am going to say that in my own way. But she was in tears. Friends who I had not spoken to in many years messaged me saying, have not seen you in ten years or since university, why are you making me cry. Complete strangers were sending me notes and it was a little bit overwhelming. Having done that, I think I had done the good thing for my daughter, because she has that artefact at that point going into university. She will have that artefact as she comes out of university, and hopefully she will have that artefact that she can pass on to her own kids.

Zoe WeilOne of the pieces of advice you gave her was to meet people utterly unlike you. What were your reasons for putting that there?

That was a failure of my university life and my early career, that I was drawn to people who were similar to me. I studied computer science, was a bit of a nerd, liked people who liked the same music as me, and was a little bit less experimental in those years because I think I was still finding myself. People had said go and do things you have not done before, but I was just closed to listening to that. That was the reason for me to do it, because I saw so much opportunity in being able to meet completely different people. To be rich in people's opinions, in different personalities, in growing yourself because of people's different personalities, because of people's different experiences, and learning from them and then widening your view of the world.

I think it was a game changer for my daughter. She is doing a course where there are two parts, a history part and an innovation part. I said to her, join every single club going, even if you do not want to do it. She said, oh, it costs ten pounds to join this one, I am not going to go. I said, just go to every single one, pay for all of them, and then go to all of them, and if you do not like it then do not go again, but at least you have tried. By the time she had gone through all of these socials, and she is a little bit like me, an introvert of sorts, she had really stepped out of her comfort zone.

In that first two or three weeks of university, you are allowed to be someone else. You can reset. There are not very many places in your life that you can reset. You can reset when you go to a new school, when you go to a new university, perhaps when you start a new job. You can do this later on in life, but it becomes more difficult because you are set in your own ways. What she said to me at the end was, I am glad you gave me that advice, because after about a month she would bump into people in the street and everyone knew her. All her flatmates were saying, how do you know all of these people. I said, you may not choose to be friends with these people long term, they may just be acquaintances, but in three years time you might need them as a friend, or as a network, or they may become good friends as you grow and as they grow. You can learn from them and they will learn from you, and you may have very different opinions on certain things, and you will be able to argue that out to get to a point where you believe in something so strongly that you agree to disagree.

Zoe WeilThe book seems different from your career trajectory. What made you write SuperSkills?

From the outside it does not look like a natural trajectory, going through edtech for all of this time and then doing this physical artefact about human skills. But if I go back ten or fifteen years now, it all comes from a point in time where two things happened. The startup that I co-founded was a business called EtonX, and we founded that business in China. I had never been to China before. New culture, new type of people, new way of doing business, very fast, big city, and I was a little bit out of my comfort zone.

What I found there was two things. One, there was an opportunity for the business that we were building, which was teaching soft skills. I had seen kids in China and they were very bright. They excelled at maths and science and some of the hard skills. At the time, and it was in the press, and this became part of the raison d'etre for the programme we built, they did not have this area which in China they called leadership skills. As I looked at that, I saw that this is an opportunity. The World Economic Forum and PISA were not really talking about that at the time. It is only over the last five or ten years that people were talking about critical thinking, and everyone talks about critical thinking these days, but no one was really talking about it in detail at that point. So that set me on this path to build the best possible programme for these teenage kids, and that meant researching these skills.

On the other side, there was this other thing that happened. I had studied computer science and thought I was ahead of the game, maybe arrogantly. But going into Shanghai and meeting large organisations, Alibaba and Tencent and some of the startups there, I suddenly saw that machine learning had taken this step up. I had not seen that in the UK or in Europe or in the West, but I was seeing it very clearly in China. When I looked at that I was saying, I have read about artificial intelligence for so long, but this is it in a real way, and it is happening in this country, so it is only going to be a matter of time before this is going to hit the West.

What I did at that point was try to read as much as I could around this subject. A lot of it was very technical. Before I knew it I had forgotten what I had learned, and as we know in the education field the best way to learn something is to teach someone else. That is how I actually started Box of Amazing, my newsletter. This was in service to myself again, being selfish again, but at the same time I was helping other people to learn areas which I thought were important. One day it was AI, one day machine learning, one day blockchain. Some days it was a trend that I saw. I think there was one that was Kit Kat sushi. Things that I found really interesting I would just write about and share the reading that I had been doing. I have been doing that now for ten years.

If I had not done my newsletter I would not have been able to build the muscle to be able to write. It took me a while to get the right cadence, once a week, the right style, and to make it engaging enough. It is very difficult to do that on a regular basis. You build your muscle and then you have got to take another step to be able to build a book. It nearly killed me, because it was so difficult to cognitively hold some of those ideas in your head. I can hold an idea for a week and write a thousand words, but holding multiple strands with multiple stories and trying to weave that into a narrative to get across a certain idea I found very difficult.

Then, as I was researching this with organisations, I realised that the things I had been thinking about when I was in China, about what could be the next skills that we needed to learn, and whether there is a model we can build for that, that is where the framework came from. In this very weird way, having had the opportunity to go to China set me on this path for this book, and I only realised that very recently. I believe that the framework I have put together is powerful for humans. There is a simplicity behind it that people can get behind and realise the importance of human skills that they need. But also at the same time, the world is moving, and these skills will move with them if they treat them seriously.

Zoe WeilYou said writing the book almost killed you, but you have also said the book may have saved your life. What did you mean?

I think if I did not have anything to hold on to, I might have continued the struggle. My readers and my friends and family know that I went through some serious health conditions before and during writing that book. Having gone into hospital midway through writing the book, not because of the book, I came out of it and lost my way a little bit. It is like being on the motorway. If you stop for a bit, you lose your footing and you need to get back to your speed again. I actually did not want to start, and I was pretty depressed about what had happened to me from a health perspective. I felt very sorry for myself and I found it very difficult to get back into holding all of those things cognitively.

But I knew that that was a thing that I needed to do, and the output of that would help individuals. I knew that if I continued and fixed the book to be as good as it could be, and it is never going to be perfect, that I would be helping myself and helping others at the same time. I am lucky that I had it, because in progressing in a recovery, you need something to hold on to.

Zoe WeilCan you unpack what you mean by algorithmic drift?

Drift and design is the central premise of the book. It is not a skill, but it is an underlying area that you need to think about. The easiest way to describe algorithmic drift to people is: are you sure, when you go to Netflix, or you go to Google, or you go to Google Maps, or you step foot in a new city, that it has been built in the best possible way for you? Or is there an inkling in your head that it could be built for someone else, or someone else's profit, or for the flow of traffic, or for some other reason?

We have seen algorithms in our lives for many years, and it is only because AI has now come to the forefront that this becomes even more important. I know many people now who will default their thinking to these great superpowers that we have available to us. A lot of people are just going straight into that without thinking themselves. I call that concept drift. The very nature of drift is not necessarily just algorithmic. It is also to do with your brain. If you have outsourced your thinking to the machine, you also might be outsourcing your life in general. You choose to pick up your phone the first thing when you wake up. What happened with that? We did not have phones twenty or thirty years ago, but now this phone sits right next to our bed. I am guilty of that. Should the first thing that you do be to hug your loved one, or meditate, or breathe deeply, or have a glass of water? There probably should be, but most people go to the phone. There are hundreds of examples of that drift into our society.

Where I would love people to go is to understand there is a level of agency around that. You can choose not to be a sleepwalker, which is what I call it in the book. Some people do not realise that this is happening and they are very efficient in doing things. If you just think about atomic habits and the things that you might do without realising there are algorithms in play, you become this concept that I call programmed. You are very good at doing the things, but you are actually not sure who you are being controlled by. That is very dangerous as an individual, and in humanity, and we have seen it in history, being programmed by others. So I would love for people to take a step back, look at that concept, and say, I am going to take matters into my own hands and become a designer, a designer of my own life that is going to be beneficial to me and to others.

Zoe WeilHow did you land on the seven skills, and which are you best at?

I have spoken to individuals at organisations for quite a while, so there has been a lot of research in trying to understand what companies are doing, how they think about things, speaking to lots of chief people officers and chief HR officers as well as individuals within the organisations who are doing different parts of the work. Some might be in product, some in finance, some in operations, some on the front line, just to understand what people do, what they see as important, and which companies are doing well and which are not.

I am not an academic researcher, so a lot of this was me grouping things up together and pattern matching. There was a long list of twenty skills that I ended up with, and I looked at them. Some had subskills and they came together and I got to a lower number. Then I consulted with the actual experts, the World Economic Forum, McKinsey. Broadly, the work that I had done aligned very much with the work that these proper researchers had done, except I found them not very accessible. They have listed the things there and there is not very much around what you might need to do as an individual. You need to learn about these things with stories and examples and failures and wins. So I took my ten, got them down to seven, figured out which were actual skills and which were traits that sit within them.

There were points where I was sitting there thinking, what am I going to do, I have got to eight. I think seven is probably right. Three is too little. I am going to give you an exclusive today. My eighth skill that I decided to drop was relationships. It is not that I do not believe it is important, because I think it actually weaves itself across all of these skills. It is just something that sits there along with things like judgement.

When you speak about these seven skills and when you explain them to others, people will say that it makes sense to me right now and what I am going through. When I first came up with the list maybe two years ago I think people were not quite sure. They would say, AI can have empathy. When you speak to them about it now, I think people have moved on and have got a clarity around it that they are saying, yeah, this feels right, and I want to learn more about these skills and how I translate them for myself in my daily life, but also for my team and for my family.

On which I am best at, I would say I have a slightly different skill. I only recognised this when I had a conversation with Rudy Karsan. When I was talking to him about what I was doing, he put his finger on it and said, you are the translator at Babel. I did not quite understand him at the time, but I have done some thinking around that area. I am not the smartest in the room when I go and speak to the academics. I am not the smartest in the room when I go and speak to the tech people, or when I go and speak to the chief people officers. All of them have got a level of expertise, even people in the workplace doing their jobs, but they all have this different AI hat on them. The CEO will be thinking about revenue opportunities or cost cutting or process. The chief people officer will be thinking about what we can do for our individuals in this new world. Finance people will be looking at cost cutting. The academics are looking at all of the research to try and predict what is going to happen in the future, because we have got no blueprint for the world that we are going into. I sit in between all of those areas, in that I understand each of these prongs, but I am not an expert in either of them. I sit there as a very good generalist and connector.

Zoe WeilHow can people committed to principled innovation in theory actually follow through in a complex, interconnected, globalised world?

Principled innovation is probably one of the most difficult of the skills to build into organisations. I treat people as inherently good. I know there are bad people in the world, but you give people the benefit of the doubt that they are inherently good. But when they have got a difficult decision to make, they may veer down the other route. There are frameworks that exist and I think frameworks are good, but they are also bad, because people look at frameworks and think about them as a tick box.

I have had quite a lot of people asking me, why do you call it that, why do you not just call it being ethical. My answer is that I am trying to solve a position in the future, or to protect individuals, and for that to happen you need to innovate, you need to change what we are doing. These seven skills are about being able to innovate who we are as humans. Implementing AI is innovating an organisation. But you can choose one way or you can choose the other.

You can look at some of the tech that sits there for teenagers and it causes addiction. If we had said at the outset, from a governmental perspective, that these should not be allowed to happen, then they would not have happened. You will have seen about technology being pulled from the classroom for kids, and there are examples in Australia going through different judiciaries at the moment. I feel that it is a travesty that we are having to do that once these teenagers are already addicted. So it requires a world where we are faster and we think about the good as the first thing. The first premise of principled innovation is do good. If you cannot do good with the solution that you are building, then you should not be doing it.

I am pro technology in the right way, but having a teenager whose brain is not yet at its capacity, it grows until it is twenty five, and giving them this, it is like cocaine in a phone. That is what you are giving to these kids, this addiction. Why would you do that? You would not give cocaine to a kid. So why do you give cocaine in a phone to a kid? That is the very stark example of what this is. Taking that step back is: what is the right thing to do? Forget politics. What should we be doing that ends up in a good result for everyone? Whereas what I think happens is that ethics and principles come in as a layer afterwards, when it is too difficult to make that decision. So you say, we have got this new product and the revenue potential is millions and millions, and when you say at that point, but is it ethical, the answer is, it does not matter if it is ethical, it is going to make us a lot of profit. So I would say try to bring principles and ethics right to the beginning as you are starting to think about solutions.

Zoe WeilDo you worry that people will grab on to one principled commitment and be blind to others?

I do worry about it, because I see things. You just open your eyes and look at society and you see the obvious stuff happening. There is homelessness and government can do something about that. You see parents feeding their kids with junk food and that might be an educational thing. The honest burger thing is that quandary. It is a scale to some degree. Some very bad companies on one end who just do not care about anything and it is just about the supply chain. And there is this other company which still provides the burger, but they are providing the gluten free because they believe that to be principled.

There is no balance. You cannot say, oh, it is a little bit good. You have got to look at the totality of it. If your principles around that company are not to even supply animal meat, then you have got to say that that is a bad company. There are different schools of thought and we can agree to disagree on certain cases. My point on principled innovation is that at some point there is a very easy choice for individuals, and sometimes it is education, and sometimes it is, okay, we are not going to go to this burger joint, or we are not going to buy from this clothing company because they do this. We start to see bubbles of that happening and we need to get society behind the things that are the most important, and sometimes they just do not. I am not sure how much I can solve of that problem, but there are people and there are voices that are doing that good work.

Zoe WeilYou use the Thai cave rescue as an example of augmented mindset. Would you recount it and explain why?

Essentially there were these kids who were stuck. They were playing football and they were stuck in a cave. The tide went in and they were going to drown. Specialist divers came in to rescue them. The interesting thing about the story is that whilst this is an example of the augmented mindset, it is actually an example of all of the seven super skills in one go. As I was writing it I said, let me find out a little bit more to see if I can accentuate this, but it was all there. There were things around data that they needed. There were decisions that they needed to make, some about when to go and rescue these kids. They needed to sedate them to take them under water. They needed to get approval from the mothers. Spoiler alert, it all went well.

The reason why it is a good example is not just because it has the seven super skills in it. It is because when people think about the augmented mindset, they just think about using ChatGPT and when do I use it. I wanted to come up with a very clear example of something that happened in the past which leveraged the brains of the individuals and leveraged the skills of everyone in that circumstance to all come together and work together. Relationships and communication became very important. Ultimately, because they put all of those things together, most of those kids survived, and there was a diver who passed away as well.

We have got to think about augmentation not as a very binary do I do it, do I not do it. We have got to think about it in a way that you can use it appropriately within your life and within the problems that you are solving. There is a part in the book, the last part, my epilogue, and I talk about it in there as well. My stay in hospital, and it is a very tough time, and when you are on your last legs trying to figure things out, what are the things that become important to you? It is the relationships that you have, the empathy that you get from the doctors and nurses. It is leveraging the data to be able to have a conversation on the right level. How do you innovate when you think there is a binary decision? Are there other options that could work to the betterment of yourself and everyone else?

What I want people to think about when they think about the augmented mindset is, firstly, that there is a choice when to use AI and when not to use it. There is a choice to put yourself in the centre of it and accentuate yourself rather than outsource yourself. Then there is this other way of thinking about AI that allows you to come up with solutions that are very human centric. Being human centric can lead to amazing results, because as we know AI is built on historic data. The way that I try and explain AI to people who do not understand AI, and maybe this is a very crass way of doing it, is that it is a very big autocorrect. You can predict these things based on data in the past. But with these very unique scenarios, it can give you some great options: to try and rescue kids from a cave, to try and support you as you make your way out of hospital, to try and solve problems in war torn areas. But if you really put the human at the centre of that, and if you put these seven super skills as part of that solution, I think you get to a better result.

Zoe WeilHow could the seven super skills be brought into the K12 realm?

I hope that this becomes something that is instilled within kids at a very early age. It is not written for that perspective. It is written for adults traversing work. It is written for curious teenagers who are trying to think about the future and where they are going to be. But I really do hope that educators and parents read it and realise the importance of instilling these. They are super skills, but they are also values and they are character values to some degree.

What is good is I have seen it in some schools already. They already have these character values of curiosity and of empathy. When you talk to heads or senior leadership teams about things like big picture thinking, they think, oh, that is an adult thing. I say, well, if you apply it to kids it can be applicable too. In big picture thinking I talk about different levels of altitude. Altitude is thinking about what you need to do in a month's time and what decisions you might make, or you might make different decisions if you are thinking about something to do in a year's time. That is very applicable to someone who is doing their first exam. How do you prepare for it? What do you need to think? What do you need to do?

If you were to get this across in the story driven way that I have tried to do, to make it very accessible to people, and if you are able to do that within K12, can you imagine what great individuals you would be bringing into the world? I am a governor at a school in London and they already have some of these things and they are already doing that. I hope that a government minister, whether they are in the UK or the US or elsewhere, sees the value of thinking about this in a different way, and how it is aligned not just for the now, it is aligned for the future, because those kids who are in school right now are going to be the workforce and the leaders of tomorrow.

It is not by just doing the same stuff. We have had the same kind of curriculum and the same type of learning for years. I go to see schools and have been seeing schools for many years, and no matter which country you go to, the flavour is pretty similar to what I went through as a kid. Many of them are pretty Victorian style. Some of them are forward thinking. But it is always a school or an institution, not very often the country, that is having to take a bet, because they believe very strongly in the type of leadership that these kids will need, and they are not getting the direction from up above. So they are coming up with their own curriculum and their own ways of doing things, the adjacent curriculum that they need to instil in these kids for the future.

Zoe WeilWhat would you like your epitaph to be?

Helped people see the way.

Zoe WeilI hope you've enjoyed this episode of Solutionary Voices and that you'll share it with others. And I hope you'll also read Super Skills. It's a fantastic book.

Zoe WeilThank you so much for all that you're doing, and for being a guest on this show. I'm really excited to see the impact that your book is going to have.