Cashless Society 101: A Practical (Values to Action) Guide to Ethical Leadership and Inclusive Innovation

By Brian Asingia

Did you know that cashless and contactless transactions increased by over 30% during 2020-2021?

More than a third of consumers report that they never use cash to make purchases. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies improve, their effects on society include shifting how people all over the world buy and sell g

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637308691

Brian Asingia

After beginning his career on Wall Street, Brian Asingia branched out to work in the intersection between technology, finance, business, and the arts. He has consulted for startups, governments, diplomats, educational institutions, and programs. Asingia is now the CEO and co-founder of the DreamGalaxy Platform, an innovation studio that trains, advises, and funds ethical entrepreneurial leaders to launch, grow, and scale inclusive innovations. Always fascinated by modern ethics and the idea of a cashless society, Asingia turned his attention to writing. He was inspired to pen Cashless Society 101: A Practical (Values to Action) Guide to Ethical Leadership and Inclusive Innovation to inspire and engage the next generation of ethical entrepreneurial leaders around the world.

Book preview

Cashless Society 101

A Practical (Values to Action) Guide to Ethical Leadership and Inclusive Innovation

Brian Asingia

new degree press

copyright © 2021 Brian Asingia

All rights reserved.

Cashless Society 101

A Practical (Values to Action) Guide to Ethical Leadership and Inclusive Innovation

ISBN

978-1-63730-666-6 Paperback

978-1-63730-755-7 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-869-1 Digital Ebook

To my love and family:

The world is yours and dreams do come true.

Trust Culture,

Asingia.

Contents

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INTRODUCTION

From Values to Action

CHAPTER 1

From Strange Fruit to Streamed Lynchings

CHAPTER 2

Ethical Leadership Is Timeless

CHAPTER 3

Cash Is King and Greed Is Good

CHAPTER 4

Cashless Society as a Philosophy and Digital Ecosystem

CHAPTER 5

Identity in a Cashless Society

CHAPTER 6

Ownership in a Cashless Society

CHAPTER 7

Trust in a Cashless Society

CHAPTER 8

Scale in a Cashless Society

CHAPTER 9

The Power of Individual Agency and Activism

CHAPTER 10

The Power of Shared Value

CHAPTER 11

The Power of Shared Responsibility

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a loud stentorian voice, ‘What are you doing?’ whereas ‘What are you thinking?’ is the only question that any single civilized being should ever be allowed to whisper to another. They mean well, no doubt, these honest, beaming folks. Perhaps that is the reason why they are so excessively tedious. But someone should teach them that while, in the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.

—Oscar Wilde (In Praise of Disobedience)

Introduction

From Values to Action

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It is not knowledge we lack. What we lack is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.

-Svant

A racist feels their beliefs are just as right as an activist and that is our ultimate human dilemma, as we lack a shared set of values to agree on and embed in AI systems, Ernst & Young Ethical AI Advisory Board member Reid Backman, PhD, shared with me at the start of his interview for this book.

His comments mirror those of Dr. Annegret Berne, a German expert lawyer for labor law, who reminds me the road to hell is paved with good intentions if you look at the religious Crusades to current technology…Humanity has not changed behaviorally in the last centuries since the colonialism and mass slavery eras, often extending groupthink and white supremacy ideology devoid of cultural relevance and localization. Our COVID-19 reaction, for example, was driven by fear and a short-term fix of policy mandates devoid of long-term testing or research such as masks mandates, initially unapproved vaccines, and costly lockdowns without ample testing of their long-term impact on individuals’ health and rights. COVID-19 has shown the clear lack of ethics in defining both policy and equity distribution of vaccines locally and globally.

There is no doubt the business world has become the business of ethics. The Wall Street Journal states engaging on social issues is now part of the CEO job description but cautions it’s a treacherous path. CEOs put themselves on this path by responsively engaging in social issues with their employees and partly as a form of marketing, says Harris Diamond, former chief executive of ad giant McCann Worldgroup, adding, Once you open up that door, you have to live by it.

The proliferation of ethics and inclusive innovation debates in organizations are nothing new but are certainly trends here to stay. People are getting hired in technology companies without the proper or timely training to understand the ethical and valuable transfer consequences of the increasingly complex and automated systems they design and operate. The Wall Street Journal reported in April 2021 if Apple is King Kong and Facebook is Godzilla, mom-and-pop online merchants are worried they’re the screaming, scattering citizens who are about to get stomped as these two giants battle it out.

Looking at BigTech firms like Apple and Facebook, the last few decades have lost trust through the terms "Too Big to Fail, Fake News, Misinformation, and Deep Fakes," among other Internet-worthy memes. For example, Tate Ryan-Mosley writes for The Technology Review beauty filters are changing the way young girls see themselves, and the most widespread use of augmented reality isn’t in gaming: it’s the face filters on social media resulting in mass experiments on girls and young women that will show how technology changes the way we form our identities, represent ourselves, and relate to others.

In this book, I examine the ethical positions of people from various walks of life. Barack Obama places faith in America and the American dream through his book, A Promised Land. MIT professor, AI expert, and innovator Dr. Lex Fridman uses his Lex Fridman podcast to engage his peers and the scientific geniuses of our time across disciplines from AI to physics to psychology and philosophy. These conversations seek to answer complex questions about the ethics or effectiveness of artificial general intelligence (AGI), or the nerdy, Is our humanity a simulation for another intelligent species?

Evaluating the ethical leadership from tech companies in the last decade seems devoid of hope. I personally believe most universities are underequipped to handle the talent demands of the future. In fact, EdTech start-ups and tech corporations are stepping in with certifications programs, e.g., Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Hence, ethical leadership experience and project-based learning will play a critical role in training the next generation.

This book is my attempt to help us understand how, both as a society and individuals, we can do better and fight for an ethical and inclusive future—a Cashless Society, with electronic payments or transactions and no cash transactions.

We need to do better because on top of a trustless digital ecosystem of fake news and deep fakes is a trend of creative destruction. Job losses from automation of low-, middle-, and even high-skill roles like stock picking leave a general fear of tech along racial and political lines. According to Time, Gabe Dalporto, the CEO of Udacity, which offers online courses in programming, data science, AI and more warn, If you tried to reskill a billion people in the university system, you would break the university system. Despite the fact AI impacts everyone and is here to stay, "No one is making sure the AI machines aren’t racist," reads a March 2021 The New York Times headline. A billion people will lose their jobs over the next ten years due to AI, and if anything, COVID-19 has accelerated that by about nine years, says Dalporto.

My underlying thesis is technology is unbiased. Most people believe AI is a threat to human sustainability, agency, and control; humans would never design systems that betray humanity; and data privacy is irrelevant if one has nothing to hide. But based on my research and experiences, I think:

•AI, while neutral and not an end in itself, is influenced by the human values or lack thereof programmed and codified into it

•Humans increasingly learn, work, think, and act as a herd via groupthink

•Individual agency of ethical leadership and innovation based on shared values are critical to scale in a Cashless Society

Because humans create technology, we need to be skeptical of it and work to make it more effective, i.e., less biased. There is clearly a lot of work to do:

•The European Union (EU) does a conservative innovation and regulation model where do no harm is the norm, as seen by their Astrazeneca COVID-19 vaccine halts.

•The US is an experiment and self-regulate later nation.

•China offers clear innovation policy guidance via its multiyear plans for strategic industries and sectors such as the Belt and Road Initiative, i.e., Silk Road 2.0.

•The West takes other cultures and their contributions for granted while the rest of the world is fighting to decolonize innovation.

•Inclusive innovation is the best way to guarantee a Cashless Society accessible to all, e.g., mobile banking for the four billion of the unbanked.

Personal interest and curiosity about agency, ethics, and inclusive innovation are primarily why I am writing this book. My personal journey of growing up in Uganda helped me see the dark side of corruption firsthand. In August 2006, I resisted pressure to bribe a local Ugandan official to verify via stamp the residency documentation I already had. I grew up seeing my father endlessly scapegoated and jailed for bribery scandals performed by his superiors. As if that was not enough, I learned as a nine-year-old, my mother lost her job for resisting to honor unethical favors from her boss at school. I am curious about the role of ethical leadership and decision-making in a world or society that prefers and normalizes the easier and unethical way out.

This book is for:

•Youths in your twenties to thirties seeking to find your own moral compass beyond the historical and groupthink religious, business, and political lenses of today

•An executive or emerging leader anxious about the unknown and how to lead or listen before acting through an ethical lens

•Those of us who value the power of individual agency and accountability despite social and institutional normalization of unethical and amoral policies and decisions with long-term implications

More importantly, this book is for those who wish and want to do better by questioning, asking, discussing, analyzing, and acting on the day-to-day challenges and moments of our generation. Your life starts getting worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people, Dr. Timnit Gebru, an Ethiopian American computer scientist working on algorithmic bias and data mining, said in an email before her firing from Google’s AI ethics team. The New York Times quoted her as saying, You start making the other leaders upset.

You should read to understand:

•Cashless Society as a philosophy of frictionless—i.e., cashless values-based—exchange

•Cashless Society as an ideal technocratic realization with its pros and cons, i.e., technology is neutral, but humans are not

•Ethics- or values-based leadership and inclusive innovation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The book captures inspirational stories of ethical leadership and inclusive innovation through primary interviews with leading experts and scholars. One such story is Dr. Jose Morey, Forbes innovation expert, whose greatest accomplishment is founding Ad Astra Media to bring STEAM to students through space comics and animations that look like them, underpinning the increasing lack of identity representation in science and technology as well as media. Facebook Africa CEO Nunu Ntshingila asserts their belief everyone’s story needs to be supported and shared. I also share personal stories, like when I quit a paid consulting project where the CEO was willingly ignoring anti-money laundering laws and guidelines in automating a FinTech product.

As you read Cashless Society 101, you will see the difference between what we fear about Cashless Society, "used to describe a system in which people pay for things by using bank cards, moving money over the Internet, etc. rather than using cash in the form of coins and notes" as defined in the Cambridge Dictionary, and how we can be active participants in realizing an ethically designed and inclusive digital ecosystem for all. In the 1950s, the "Cashless Society" was as much a part of an idealized modern future as the jetpack and the flying car, according to The Atlantic. This book redefines Cashless Society through an ethical lens to explore issues of identity, ownership, trust, and scale in a no-cash-transactions ecosystem as well as an ethics-first innovation society. This book is your practical guide to ethical leadership and inclusive innovation in a Cashless