Our guest today is Dr Nat Kendall-Taylor. Nat received his PhD in Anthropology at UCLA and in 2008 he joined the FrameWorks Institute where he is now the CEO. Frameworks is a non-profit research organisation in Washington DC, founded by Susan Nall Bales in 1999.
FrameWorks uses rigorous social science methods to study how people understand complex social issues such as climate change, justice reform, and the impact of poverty on early childhood development. FrameWorks is centrally concerned with how people use heuristics, mental models, and patterns of reasoning to make sense of social issues, and then developing evidence-based techniques that help researchers, advocates, and practitioners explain them more effectively.
Nat explains what drew him from pre-med to anthropology. He did his PhD at UCLA because of the Anthropology department’s “unapologetic focus on applied anthropology” and its belief that anthropology has value to the real world. His fieldwork in Kenya on children with seizure disorders explored the question of why so few sought biomedical treatment. His experience there, working with public health officials and others, demonstrated the value of understanding culture, the importance of multi-modal transdisciplinary perspectives, and the often “counterintuitive and frequently frustrating nature of communications when you’re trying to do this kind of cross-cultural work”.
For the past 18 months, FrameWorks has been working on a project on how to frame and communicate the social impacts of artificial intelligence. The project came to FrameWorks through their long-term collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation when it became clear that some of their Grantees “had been having a lot of difficulty advancing their ideas” about algorithmic justice to the general public. The project has explored “the cultural models, the deep patterns of reasoning that either make it hard for people to appreciate the social implications” of AI as well as how to allow people to “engage with the issue in helpful and meaningful ways”. The report will be publicly available on the FrameWorks website.
As Nat explains, if the public “doesn’t understand what the thing is [artificial intelligence] that you are claiming has pernicious negative impacts on certain groups of people, then it becomes very hard to have a meaningful conversation about what those are, who is affected. That’s a major obstacle”. This is compounded when you understand that “people don’t really have a sense what structural or systemic racism means outside of a few issues, how that might work and what the outcomes of that might be.”
To bring the general public along with us, rather than simply repeating the phrases “structural racism” or “artificial intelligence advances existing systems of structural racism”, we should “unpack what that means, how that works, and give examples of issues where you can see that come into play”. As Nat says, much of this “is about examples and explanation”, and he says their work “suggests that it is a responsibility, it’s an obligation of those who understand the process of how these things work to bring the public along, and to deepen people’s understanding of how [for example] using algorithms to make resourcing decisions…can be seriously problematic”.
Nat recommends three books for people who are interested in learning more about the role of culture in communication (Metaphors We Live By, Finding Culture in Talk, and Cultural Models in Language and Thought) and ends with a call for more anthropologists to work outside the academy where they can also do work that has impact.
Read an interview excerpt.
You can follow Nat on Twitter at @natkendallt and connect with him on LinkedIn. Follow FrameWorks on Twitter @FrameWorksInst.
Update: FrameWorks published “Communicating About the Social Implications of AI: A FrameWorks Strategic Brief” on their website on October 19, 2021.
Academics mentioned in our conversation were Bradd Shore and Thomas S. Weisner.
Watch Nat’s TEDx talk, How words change minds. The science of story-telling.