Leading with Courage: Johnian joins Cambridge Festival panel on ethical challenges in business
Dr Cillian Ó Fathaigh (2014) was one of four Gates Cambridge Scholars who spoke about leading with courage in today’s world at the Cambridge Festival this month.
The event, chaired by journalist Catherine Galloway and held at Bill Gates Sr. House, featured discussions about everything from the role of leaders in resisting Big Tech, Big Food and ‘Big English’ to the importance of embedding ethical practices in their work in an age of autocracy, misinformation and lack of trust.
Cillian Ó Fathaigh, Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University Kraków and co-founder of edtech start-up Pulc, said education is often assumed to be an inherently good thing that drives equality, but that is not always the case, as his friend and fellow Gates Cambridge Scholar Arif Naveed had taught him.
He said that COVID-19 exacerbated education inequality. His start-up, which uses genAI to tutor students rather than doing the work for them, is looking to address this as well as the crisis in the humanities and to boost minority languages in the face of ‘Big English’. He said Big Tech is trying to convince people that there is only one way to use AI based on extraction of data, but the new AI tools can be used by anyone to create different models. He added that people should experiment with technology. “Don’t let Big Tech own technology,” he said. “Go and play with it yourself, even if you don’t have a technology background.”
The other speakers included Ella McPherson, Professor of the Sociology of Media and Technology, Co-Director of the Centre of Governance and Human Rights at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Head of Cambridge’s School of the Humanities and Social Sciences. She linked growing concerns about the use of generative AI in scholarship and its threat to the core values of academia – learning as doing and the joy of discovery as well as worries about plagiarism and the environment – with the 19th century Luddite movement which opposed the move to industrialisation.
They were joined by D’Arcy Williams, CEO of youth-led movement Bite Back, who is opposing the cultural zeitgeist in his role in enabling young people to speak truth to power about how food systems are failing them and causing ill health. He said the food industry had been good at promoting the idea that individual actions are the best way to promote health rather than taking responsibility for how Big Food is driving unhealthy patterns of eating.
Also speaking was Dan Greenfield [2005], co-founder of PetaGene, a leading genomic data management company. He talked about his experience of setting up his company and putting ethics at the centre from the start.
The Cambridge Festival runs until 2 April and is a mixture of online, on-demand and in-person events covering all aspects of the world-leading research happening at the University. Dr Christina Faraday is also curating an exhibition, Tudor Contemporary, for the festival.