What do you find most rewarding and most challenging about the work you do?<\/p>\n
Peter Rogers:<\/b> I work in enterprise sales for Workvivo, an Irish company that was bought by an American company a couple of years back, Zoom. In terms of the rewarding aspect of what I do, it\u2019s problem solving. I\u2019m quite a process-oriented individual. When you\u2019re working in sales, that takes two forms. It\u2019s how you can resolve issues for your customers and then how you can operate more effectively within the business. <\/p>\n
It sounds cliche or corny, but being able to actually solve someone\u2019s problem has a material impact. The challenging part \u2013 I know all of us here have worked for large American companies \u2013 is the lack of cultural sensitivity, in terms of difference, can be really striking. <\/p>\n
Fatima Ahmed:<\/b> I\u2019ve been working in the tech sector for over a decade now across a number of major platforms in various trust and safety and regulatory compliance-type roles. My work has been focused on tackling online harms, from hate and harassment to money-laundering, protecting democratic processes through election integrity work and also building inclusive tech communities. I transitioned into tech in about 2013 from the international development and NGO sector.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve recently finished maternity leave with my second child and I\u2019ve decided to take a couple of months just to recover. What I find most rewarding is centred around the humans beyond just the tech. The problems themselves are fascinating. We\u2019re often looking at harms that have existed throughout human history \u2013 all forms of harassment and exploitation and hate \u2013 but now they\u2019re manifesting on platforms that literally didn\u2019t exist when I started my career. That is a challenge.<\/p>\n
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Fatima Ahmed: ‘The platforms that we\u2019re talking about have become fundamental infrastructure for billions of people.’ Photograph: Alan Betson <\/p>\n
Aaron Rodericks:<\/b> I\u2019m the head of trust and safety at Bluesky. It\u2019s a small start-up that is trying to do social media differently. Previous to this I was at Twitter for about five years and became one of the co-leads of trust and safety there as well. As someone wanting to make the world a better place, you get that fix every day. You are in a very ugly fight to try to come up with norms that humans can largely agree to, and it is an incredible struggle. This is the first job that I\u2019ve ever had where I stepped into a public role and then users yell at me and call me horrible names. So learning to build thicker skin has been a huge part of this role.<\/p>\n
How has your profession changed in recent years, and what forces have driven those changes?<\/p>\n
Peter:<\/b> There used to be, particularly in sales, this sense that if you hit your number, you had your job. Those things are gone now. AI has become omnipresent. AI can accelerate solutions to the problems. These kinds of things are groundbreaking. But the other side is we hear about insurance companies resolving claims based on inherently baked-in biases within an AI structure. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve seen a power shift post-Brexit where a lot of functions have moved to the Middle East, specifically to Dubai. If you\u2019re looking for funding now, that often takes place in Dubai and executive function is often being moved out of Ireland and the UK into the Middle East.<\/p>\n
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Peter Rogers: ‘There\u2019s a huge brain drain … our housing and cost-of-living crisis is driving people away.’ Photograph: Nick Bradshaw <\/p>\n
Fatima:<\/b> The profession has gone from being quite niche to being central to major societal questions, especially trust and safety. When I started in YouTube in 2013, it felt very new, and most people you told about the work would not really know at all what you do. The platforms that we\u2019re talking about have become fundamental infrastructure for billions of people. We are seeing a lot of automation, but so much of what we do relies on human judgment. We are yet to see where that will go. On a global scale we\u2019re seeing Europe move more towards comprehensive regulation of technology … We\u2019re seeing other jurisdictions pull back, and trust and safety work becoming a lot more politicised.<\/p>\n
Aaron:<\/b> The pendulum has swung. You saw massive lay-offs in 2022 in the trust and safety and social media industry; you\u2019ve seen a lot of people switch to consulting or outside of the space. It\u2019s all gotten tied up with these geopolitical tensions. Certain governments are regulating a whole lot more, but that\u2019s also getting wrapped up in this dialogue on freedom of speech. If that was just what was happening, great, but this is also happening at the same time as billionaire ownership gets consolidated.<\/p>\n
What opportunities and risks do you see ahead for your field over the next decade in Ireland?<\/p>\n
Peter:<\/b> There\u2019s a huge brain drain with the younger generation where we\u2019ve got massive emigration. Our housing and cost-of-living crisis is driving people away. It\u2019s preventing entrepreneurship. There\u2019s a really entrepreneurial, highly educated and ambitious cohort of people living in Ireland, and the Irish diaspora too. Within my own circle of friends, people I grew up with in Dublin are now in Singapore and London and New York. I feel like we\u2019re haemorrhaging optimistic and entrepreneurial people as a result of inactivity and passiveness. <\/p>\n Irish people are ambitious. Where I\u2019m a little bit concerned is I don\u2019t often see that same ambition when it comes to the governance of Ireland. But people in Ireland find solutions all the time<\/p>\n \u2014 \u00a0Peter Rogers<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s not things that have been hard fought for, it\u2019s about modernising and adapting to the world around us. If we don\u2019t do that, we lose our position in the global scheme of things. To be optimistic, we are the most educated workforce in Europe, I believe, which leads to a breaking-down of barriers. Diversity of opinion and background leads to opportunity and success.<\/p>\n Fatima:<\/b> I resonate with that \u2013 all of the friends who\u2019ve left and will never be able to come back. I was one of those people. Funnily enough, I came back home to Dublin for tech; it was the sector that I saw a future for myself in. Other friends in other sectors have had to stay in London and elsewhere. We\u2019re in quite a unique position here, being the EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Africa] hub for most major tech platforms but now also becoming a significant regulatory centre. I worked in Stripe, and when I worked on financial crimes it was so different to the social media space, where regulation was not well developed. In social media you see regulation so much less developed. <\/p>\n I was thinking about John Collison\u2019s piece on regulatory fragmentation. I personally think that clear frameworks are important and having well-resourced regulatory bodies is going to be crucial.<\/p>\n [\u00a0John Collison of Stripe: Ireland is going backwards. Here\u2019s how to get it movingOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Aaron:<\/b> Ireland has been heavily reliant on its tax harbour approach. As that potentially risks going away with tax harmonisation, there\u2019s a genuine risk that you see people going, well, why are we going to put up with the extremely high cost of housing, the difficulties in transportation, all the other unique joys of Ireland and living in Dublin? <\/p>\n You\u2019re seeing more and more news stories of lay-offs related to automation and AI, and definitely in trust and safety you\u2019re seeing a huge amount of lay-offs linked to advances in LLMs and automation being used for run-of-the-mill content moderation. So both those are threats.<\/p>\n Peter:<\/b> People\u2019s expectation of what we do is dramatically different from the reality. A lot of organisations that I\u2019ve been in \u2013 almost all of them really \u2013 are very focused on giving back to the community they operate within. The people who work in tech are the people within your community. They care about their country, and not in a jingoistic, flag-waving way, but in a practical giving-back kind of way. I think tech also provides an opportunity for us in Ireland to work towards a decentralisation. I have friends who live in Ennis because they\u2019re able to work remotely.<\/p>\n Fatima:<\/b> You get people \u2013 inside and outside the industry \u2013 who are uncritically bullish on every tech advance, friends who adopt it all and think it\u2019s fantastic. But then the opposite: people who think everyone working in tech is complicit in societal harm. <\/p>\n If you look at elections, if you only see the positive side you\u2019ve got these platforms that have democratised information sharing in really great ways. We\u2019re seeing lots of grassroots movements organised online, and a lot of perspectives that might never have made it to traditional media. But then you look at the negative and all you see is misinformation campaigns and echo chambers and concerns around corporate control. They\u2019re real problems. <\/p>\n These are just new forms of media. We had newspapers and television and radio before this, and there were people who controlled those and were making decisions about what narratives get shared on those. The difference now is the scale and the speed that we have. But the fundamental questions about media power and democratic participation are not new.<\/p>\n\n
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Aaron\u00a0Rodericks: ‘People love to oversimplify and blame the companies … sometimes it\u2019s a lot more complicated.’ Photograph: Nick Bradshaw What do people most often misunderstand about your work or your industry? <\/p>\n