Key Takeaways

• Technology can overstep boundaries in influencing behaviour.
• Public shaming may not be effective or ethical.
• Potential exists for tech to promote safe behaviour in workplaces.

Topics

• Technology
• Innovation
• Company Culture

Transcript

Sometimes technology takes things a little too far. So I saw a recent post on X about how a Chinese screen implementation was working on a busy road crossing. Effectively, if pedestrians were jaywalking, the screen showed pictures of them and shamed them in a way of maybe getting them to conform to more safe behavior. Now, I think it's pretty obvious that that is way overstepping the mark and most people would find this authoritarian and creepy. It doesn't matter so much in China, but it certainly would matter in the West. However, beyond obviously just saying that that feels wrong, there is something in this as an idea. If you are in real time observing unsafe behavior, say in a workplace that could and should influence the content that goes up on screen. Now naming and shaming might not actually be that productive in terms of helping people, it might even make them double down. But what if you could see that people were, for example, regularly not putting on health and safety goggles and hats, and that started to influence a higher frequency of explanations as to why this was the right thing to do to try and influence that behavior back in. So obviously, I'm going to give this a very low zero out of five score for the implementation. But in terms of the idea and how this could be better implemented, I'll give it a three. And if I saw a good implementation, I'll give a four or five. So that's my signs of genius score. Let me know in the comments what you think