Westworld airs on Foxtel’s Showcase at 12pm and 8.30pm on Mondays. Photo: HBO
The new HBO series Westworld started on Foxtel this week. It’s an update of the 1973 movie of the same name, produced under the guidance of JJ Abrams, who was responsible for the superb The Force Awakens instalment of the Star Wars series.
If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s giving nothing away to say that the series focuses on a kind of theme park that people – “newcomers” – pay a lot of money to visit. There, they interact with “hosts”, which are robots, for want of a better word, though much closer in looks and behaviour to actual humans than the robots in, say, I, Robot.
It’s early days but the pilot was promising and it looks like it’s going to focus on the age-old question of what happens when technology created by humankind surpasses, either by design or accident, humankind’s ability to control it. Already some of the hosts are playing up and not doing what they’re supposedly programmed to do; and the creative director of the theme park, played by Anthony Hopkins (pictured above), seems strangely unperturbed by what’s going on. He’s either a fatally hubristic individual, or this is part of some diabolical master plan. We’ll probably find out in coming episodes.
(So far the hosts have only turned on each other, but it doesn’t take a genius to guess what’s coming next.)
At first it seemed like a neat analogy about technology being put to use not to replace people or what people do, but rather, to serve people’s needs and wants – and it tied in nicely with the launch this week of AMP’s new advice business, accurately if unimaginatively called AMP Advice, and a look into AMP is adopting robo-enabled services to support financial planners.
But then the CFA Societies Australia put on their 20th anniversary dinner on Wednesday evening, featuring a hypothetical run by Geoffrey Robertson QC, and a new perspective presented itself.
The focus of the hypothetical was ethics in financial services – and as I tweeted (yes!) on the night, it could have been a very long or a very short conversation. It turned out to be just about the right length, and both fascinating and hugely entertaining to boot.
Geoffrey Robertson’s hypothetical
Like Westworld, Robertson invited the audience to ponder questions of not only “what ought I to do”, but also, just because we can do a particular thing, whether we should do it. It’s a similar sentiment to that expressed by the Jeff Goldblum character in Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Hats off to each and every one of the panelists who played along gamely with Robertson as he traversed a range of hypothetical situations and ethical conundrums.
In a deliciously embarrassing moment, Robertson laid out a scenario where an analyst overhears a conversation between a mining company’s chief executive and (if memory serves) its chief financial officer about a rich seam of a kryptonite that it has discovered, and which will cause its share price to rocket. The company is going to announce the discovery at 2pm tomorrow. The question posed to the panel was: should the analyst trade in the company’s shares, before the announcement, based on this information?
It’s a fairly simple answer: aside from the legal issues surrounding insider trading, it’s clearly also unethical, and as good CFAs the panelists stuck to the script about such actions being contrary to the CFAs’ code of ethics.
But then Robertson developed the scenario further to include the chief investment officer of a superannuation fund who has placed a sell order on the mining company’s stock at the close of trade the day before the announcement, and to whom the analyst brings the information about the kryptonite seam. Should the CIO rescind the sell order?
Ethical behaviour
And then to make matters worse, the CIO’s mother calls and says she’s planning to offload her holding in the mining company because it’s been languishing and isn’t paying dividends; what does her son think about this idea?
It served to show that ethics and ethical behaviour is not equally clear-cut in all situations. The panelists eventually navigated their way through the scenario with integrity and reputations intact, but there were some sticky moments along the way.
The panelists in Robertson’s hypothetical traversed some rocky ethical ground, as the characters in Westworld are likely to do in coming weeks, and all of this was a reminder of something Simon Longstaff, from The Ethics Centre, told Professional Planner last year: that ethics is something that an individual has to consciously work on, all the time. Ethical dilemmas present themselves at often unexpected moments and in unexpected situations. Professionals have to practice how they respond and how they exercise their ethical “muscles”. And they must be especially vigilant in a corporate environment, where groupthink and conventional wisdom can take the organisation in an ethical or undesirable direction without anyone noticing until it’s too late. The chief executives who appeared at the banking inquiry this week might attest to that.
But there may be some good news for financial planners. Robertson made the point that most of them are not professionals anyway, so many of the responsibilities and obligations of professionals remain purely voluntary.
Different playbook for lawyers and planners
He was able to illustrate a difference between law as a profession and financial planning as a non-profession by engineering a discussion with a lawyer, which is subject to professional privilege and hence the lawyer is not obliged to alert the regulator to possible insider trading, and a conversation between the adviser and a client, which is subject to no such privilege because the adviser does not hold professional status.
After the hypothetical, I spoke briefly to Julian Morrow, of the Chaser and The Checkout, about his role on the panel as the financially illiterate consumer. He played it well, for someone who is clearly not financially illiterate at all. Indeed, it took someone with an incredible grasp of finance (and, of course, ethics) to produce a piece of television like The Checkout’s take-down of the Abbott government’s proposed neutering of the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) laws
And while Morrow sought to pass credit to co-Chaser Craig Reucassel for the segment, he did describe it as “a high watermark” of explaining complex financial issues in simple terms. Check it out, if you haven’t seen it before; it’s absolutely worth 10 minutes of your time.
