Anthropy | Motivation

I was fortunate enough to spend a few days last week down at the Anthopy UK event in Cornwall. As their description goes:

Anthropy brings together responsible leaders and organisations to look at how to make the UK a better place. Working with a cross-sector network welcoming business and non-profits alike, Anthropy facilitates changing practices, building new partnerships, influencing policy and transforming personal behaviour.

I was there as a guest of the EY Foundation, with whom I’m doing some work focusing on the impact that AI could have on young people, especially those who are traditionally furthest from ‘good’ jobs.

Was great to be interviewed by EYF’s CEO, Lynne about the work, and to get to chat about the book etc too.

It was a really great event, one that really did try to live those values. I’d highly recommend it, and will be looking to be there next year, if I can.

Central to the work we’re doing with young people is the idea of motivation. In short: what gets you up in the morning? The traditional split has been between extrinsic motivation (you do a task for some external reward, or to avoid some external punishment) and intrinsic (you do a task because of your own interest.) What research suggests is that extrinsic motivation can help with more routine work (make more buttons by working the button machine more quickly, and earn more money) but that creative and problem-solving tasks don’t respond well to extrinsic drivers, only to intrinsic ones.

The thinking is that if automation and algorithmic technologies are going to come for more routine work, then intrinsic motivation will become more and more important. And if those who have been furthest from non-routine work also suffer from poorer intrinsic motivation, there’s a double effect.

But it’s not quite as simple as that, partly because AI is finding its way into creative work perhaps more quickly than into other tasks. So there are complex factors at play which propose deep questions about what drives all of us. What is the point of our toil? What are we giving our energies too? What if the rods and levers connecting these things are breaking down? Many are already experiencing this: past promises about what the future will be like if you just do the right things and get your GCSEs and get stuck into work are failing to deliver…

That’s not just a problem of ‘NEET’ young people – not in education, employment or training… which around 1 in 7 now are – but one that all of us must think about in an age of ‘intelligent’ machines whose motivations are enmeshed in algorithms, and tend to serve masters living far away.

If you’re motivated to read a copy of the book I talked about in the session, you can grab one here.