The main area of discussion arising from this concept was about the issues foreseen in its implementation. Most people felt sceptical that a service could create the right kind of culture where people didn’t interpret disagreement as conflict. People felt that although the app’s mechanisms to bring people together were really exciting, the idea of connecting people based on differences of opinion could be problematic, and that doing so in a group setting would be really challenging as group dynamics are often more intimidating for people. While the proposition makes allowances for this by learning about people before,during and after their interactions with other people, this would nonetheless be the biggest issue.

People were positive about the ideology of bringing people together in an environment where disagreements could be voiced and listened to. But everyone felt that they had not been heard and that others wouldn’t listen to them, with many people openly describing political correctness as being a confusing, inaccessible, judgmental and isolating force. It is clear that for a proposition like this to work, the principles of those services would have to be ingrained and upheld in as much user behaviour as possible.

In essence, the perception is that it would be overwhelmingly difficult to orchestrate an online or offline culture that would prevent users’ interactions from becoming conflicting and would likely create conflict and unpleasant experiences.

The counterargument to this claim is that the culture of existing, purely digital, social media platforms have created a climate that heightens the more combative elements of our, very natural human behaviours. If these environments are capable of influencing our interactive habits in this way, then surely this is evidence that, with the right design, they can indeed be redirected toward more constructive cultures.

Another discussion point around this proposition looks at it assuming that it can do exactly what it describes —bring people together and curate conversation that enables people to feel listened to and understood, even if not agreed with, and in this point we assume that this effective proposition would be adopted on a large scale – within this parameter we ask questions about the possibility of distorted public opinion and inauthenticity.

As with other propositions of this nature, there is nothing decidedly new about the idea of technology coordinating interactions between people, but what it alludes to is another more concerning progression —if large parts of our communities are brought together based on algorithms, and even those interactions and conversations are orchestrated based on algorithm design —we may be creating conditions for larger scale distortion of our ways of interacting. In turn, we may begin to question the authenticity of the interactions we have with other people. The question is, if a singular (albeit sophisticated) algorithm should flourish as a means of arranging our interactions, particularly around societal topics, could this be corrupted or have other effects of a similar calibre of existing social media (which often break down discussion)?

The first thing that arose out of the research with parents was that there is a clear problem. For parents, the increased amount of time that children spend online, the breadth of their experiences and environments they engage with online exposes them to a plethora of issues, content and perspectives, which the parent will have no idea or no role, in —unless they intervene, censor content and experiences i or rely on the child to come to them and report. None of which are equivalent to a model where a parent is broadly (at specific ages) present and has control over the things a child is exposed to, mediating as they see fit. As children spend more time in online spaces, they simply cannot be parented in the same way, leaving parents concerned and at a loss with fairly basic mechanisms that they find insufficient. Some of them speak of this solution as a more sophisticated middle ground, which helps them parent and support their children without needing to be permissive or too authoritarian.

While it is clear that some parents would greatly welcome having additional tools at their disposal, a clear discussion that emerged from the research is that, while there is no right or wrong way of parenting, there is concern for these tools to be used inappropriately. Parents talked about their partners having extreme views or not respecting a child’s privacy. So, we raise the perspective that while these tools do potentially help parents protect their children from societal biases, or commercial and political agendas, what means are there to protect children from their parents?

It could be argued that should this coercive threat be realised, then it may be an inappropriate response to make the power struggle a battle between organisations and parents and to take that battle to the child’s device. Perhaps, it would be preferable to look for policy interventions to counter organisational threats. If the battle has to arrive at the child’s device, then a more child-focused approach may be more enabling. A service that engages children with value for them (and centres on the internal growth and learning of a child to understand multiple perspectives and build their own views) would surely be a more resilient offering. However, the question remains —under whose authority and guidance should a child’s perspective be defended and nurtured?

The most striking point that arose from the proposition was that teachers felt that the issue with empathy lay with the parents rather than the children. In most instances, the teachers described children as having quite plastic models of what it means to be a different person and were able to fairly easily empathise with others and alter their values if they found that they were in conflict, and were encouraged to do so. However, the children’s parents often had solidified beliefs and were now in the role of instilling or enforcing those beliefs onto their children. This meant that they were often actively constraining their children’s ability to fluidly adapt their perceptions of other people’s experience. With this perspective in mind, many participants proposed that the service be adapted to somehow include parents into the experiences, perhaps through school, community events.

Teachers also explained that what was lacking in children’s educational experience was the space to discuss, ask questions and explore the relevance of what they were learning. In this sense, the concept of learning about other people’s experience should be considered as an opportunity for them to learn about themselves and what these empathy experiences expose about who they are.

Many agreed that virtual reality was a fantastic way to create transformative experiences because of its immersive capability. However, they felt the content of some of the empathy experiences would likely be uncomfortable for many children. Therefore, the design of the experiences and the intensity with which they expose children to someone else’s life would have to be considered, not just on an age rated basis, but potentially on a case by case basis. To ensure those experiences were appropriate, it would be important to take into account what individual children are experiencing, what the community is going through andthe culture within the school. —all of which make the administering of this type of education highly challenging.

The most pressing topic was about the authorship of the experiences with many questions around proving the legitimacy of the stories being told. While it is proposed that experiences would be based on true events, they are still recreated stories that may be interpreted differently by many people. Although it is proposed for the stories to be curated in collaboration with assemblies of the public, experts, charities and individuals who have lived experiences of the issues being portrayed, it is clear that there will always be questions over the accuracy of the stories, particularly while they are being used to open children’s perceptions. There will always be some people that feel the process is brainwashing. When immersive technology gets used to provide transformative experiences for children —at what point does it become brainwashing?

One of the main discussions around the service was about who had the authority to initiate it and make judgements about the veracity of ethical claims about products and services. Who has enough neutral respect and authority in the public eye that could administer these judgements without fear of corruption or bias? This question ultimately unveils the need for someone to design algorithmic assessments, which would ‘solve’ ethical dilemmas at a global scale —people felt uneasy about where that responsibility is placed.

This question of authority goes even further when we consider the implications of the ‘ethical guides’ in Ethos. The idea that popular organisations, companies and individuals can intervene and nudge people’s actions at such a granular level, allows for huge new power amongst collectives wanting to act on the world. Large companies may be forced to comply with any widely held values of their customers. Who is to question the legitimacy of ethical standpoints?

This may seem like a simple extension of the role of an instagrammer or sponsored celebrity, but it could ultimately instill ethical decisions way beyond daily life and possibly create divisions between people in a potentially harmful way.

People found the concept of learning about the implications of everything appealing because it meant that the politics of everyday life could become more real and actionable. If buying a particular snack for lunch aligned you with a set of values, in the same way as buying a particular newspaper voting for a different leader, then you could feel more proactive and engaged as a citizen.

One criticism of the service is that it places all the responsibility of an ethical society in the hands of the consumer. Some participants felt the service could only be used by wealthy people because ‘it costs money to be ethical’ and would make people with less money feel bad.

There is an argument to be made that a service like this would still help people use ethics to discern between products, even if they have low economic power, and if it were the case that the range of products available to less wealthy people were all similarly unethical (or misaligned to some people’s values), then there is still more opportunity for people to act collectively based on the increased knowledge of a products ethics, than if there were no transparency.

That said, the service does seem to make a judgement in its assessment of the alignment between your values and how you act —it essentially questions how ‘true’ you are to your beliefs. This judgement is offensive and must either become neutral or be weighted by people’s capacity to purchase ethically, so that it would not be seen as a callous willingness to compromise to save money.

Users also felt that there was an interesting conflict within the service. The idea that the service understands you, learns what is important to you and recommends you alternatives based on that logic or based on an ‘ethical guide’ means that you can detach yourself from the complexity and burden of each decision. On the other hand, the fact that there is so much information available about the implications of each action means that you could dig deeper into any decision.

Users felt that by handing over decision making responsibilities you could live aligned to your values without the impossibly huge level of assessments that it would take to decide these things manually. However, people should regularly engage with these decisions because the world would change, new information emerges and people’s beliefs change. So, for someone to be decoded and then follow that prescribed course indefinitely would be an abdication of responsibility.

While the service was broadly well received, there were questions raised among potential users about some of the inherent risks of the service. If the service creates custom fitness goals for individuals, would it be able to understand people’s disabilities and be able to remain inclusive? For people with especially addictive personalities, while physical fitness addiction may be healthier than gaming addiction, is it fair to direct people towards it, and may it cause physical harm if taken too far?

A key discussion arising from the research was around the social element of the service. On one hand, people felt the service should be more social in ways that would promote competition between peoples fitness levels, but on the other hand people found that incentives for meetups could be an overstep. People value points as a way to promote events, however, as soon as people considered there was a health agenda behind it, which uses face-to-face socialising to help lift people’s wellbeing and activity outside online gaming worlds —they felt it was intrusive and patronising. This sheds light on the sensitivity of service interventions in interpersonal relationships, in particular with paternalistic approaches to social wellbeing.

Another interesting area of discussion is about what may be a precursor to this service. People considered that this type of service marks a clear crossing of boundaries between online gaming and offline gaming. Importantly, it’s not simply playing games in an offline environment, like playing football. It means adding a gaming layer to otherwise un-gamed parts of life to have a desired impact. To people, this seemed like a space that could be extremely exciting as it could inject fun into old experiences and build new layers of complexity to mundane parts of life. People seemed to connect deeply to the value of play in their life and perceived its re-emergence as exciting. The flip side, however, is that our compulsion as humans to engage in games and play could be taken advantage of to further agendas that may be less admirable or that the over use of such tangible incentives (like gaming currency) to influence may undermine more intrinsic motivations.