The Big Questions About AI and Freelancing (S1 E4)
Most conversations about AI tend to collapse into two camps: enthusiastic adopters and vocal skeptics. Felicity Wild thinks that binary is exactly the problem.
Felicity runs an organization called Nobody Cares About Ethics, and she spent a decade as a copywriter before pivoting to help freelancers and solopreneurs think more carefully — and more honestly — about where AI fits into their work. In this episode, she and Liam dig into the questions that don't get asked enough: who actually benefits from the AI boom, what cognitive atrophy really means for freelancers who rely on AI for writing, why using a chatbot as a sounding board can quietly undermine your best ideas, and how to build a personal AI code of ethics that goes beyond empty principles. They also end up somewhere unexpected — talking about dumb phones, supermarkets, and what it means to find a middle ground with technology rather than going all in or opting out entirely.
If you've ever felt vaguely uneasy about how much you're relying on AI but couldn't quite articulate why, this one is worth your time.
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Episode Transcript
Liam: Well. Felicity. Hi, and welcome to the Freelance Success Podcast. It's so nice to have you. You came in and spoke to us at FLXA few months ago. We, I've been pushing people towards your AI ethics course and I just thought you'd be the perfect person to talk to. Again, I think it's been a few months because things change so quickly with AI, it's definitely the number one topic of conversation, and you have one of my favorite perspectives on it.
So with all that being said, Felicity. Thank you for coming. Hello, how are you?
Felicity: I'm good. Sorry. I'm good. Thank you for having me.
Liam: My pleasure. Just so people know who you are and what you do, I'm going to let you just give us a rundown of. What your, what your whole thing is. Tell us more.
Felicity: Yeah, sure. I am, my name's Felicity Wild and I run an organization called Nobody Cares About Ethics.
And it is, as you can probably guess, all about AI ethics, And I was formerly a copywriter and I switched to AI ethics partially because it felt really important. And I also, I've spent 10 years, a decade as a copywriter making information accessible and relevant. To people to different types of people.
And I wanted to do the same with AI ethics, because I think it's got a really a really bad image problem. I think a lot of people think it's just kind of compliance theater or it's tactics used by skeptics to stall progress. And actually, when I was studying AI ethics, I saw that. I think it's really the key to better progress, which I think we're going to be talking a lot about today.
I think it's the key to having better conversations about AI, where there's a lot of gray areas and a lot of emotions, and I think ethics is a really good way to help you with other people as well. It's, it's a conversation based discipline. Just talk about this better and work towards, a better place.
because I don't think right now we're, we're in a particularly good place. I think there's a lot of confusion, a lot of uncertainty. And I really see ethics as the key to try and help make all of this a little bit better. So that's what my organization is focused on. More practically. I help people have better conversations around AI at work with workshops.
I also run a cohort based program for freelancers who are thinking about AI ethics and want to talk about it with other people who are also have the same questions working through the same problems around where AI fits in with their work and all the ethical issues around surrounding that. I also speak at events and I do things like this podcast.
Liam: Awesome. Okay, so you do a lot, but all of it is kind of wrapped around that core idea of AI ethics,
Liam: And I want to go back to what you were just talking about, which, because I asked people to kind of come up with a word or a phrase that we can use as a launching point. And I love the one you came up with, which is progress.
And you were just talking about that. And I think about this a lot. Because, you know, I think, I don't know how old you are. I'm 39 and so I got my first cell phone when I was 17. My first, you know, Facebook came out my freshman year of college. And you know, it was an interesting time to grow up because you kind of get to live in both of these analog and digital worlds and.
Sometimes I look back and I remember thinking when the phone came out or like when the iPhone came out, like, this is so cool, it's going to change everything. Same thing about social media. I was like, this is so awesome. This is the future, you know? And now I look back and I'm like, geez. I really wish I had waited longer to get an iPhone or, or maybe never gotten one.
I wish I had not dived head first onto Twitter. You know, I wish. And so this time around now we have this AI coming out. It's changing everything again. It's like everyone's saying the same stuff, this is the future. And I'm looking at it like, oh gosh, not again. So I don't know. Do you feel the same way?
I mean, do you see AI as progress?
Felicity: Yeah. I am 38, so we have very similar experiences here and I do wonder if, if I speak to a lot of people who are a similar age to me and we're all asking these similar questions. So I don't know if it's because we have like one foot in both camps with the kind of pre digital and then, you know, younger generations who are more like digital native.
I don't know if they're asking these same questions. But yeah, we've definitely seen that timeline develop. Mm-hmm.
Liam: And,
Felicity: Sorry, what was the question? Can you ask me the question again? Well,
Liam: just, what's your take on, do you see AI as progress? Do you see it as mm-hmm. More dangerous than progress?
What's your take on, on it? Because to me it's, it's a genie out of the bottle, right. So we're going to have Yeah. With it.
Felicity: I mean, I think it's happened and like you said. Outta the bottle. I think I mean I guess it's innovation because it's new. But then whether it's progress, I think that depends on who's defining progress, which is a question at the center of my work.
What, what does progress mean? Who does it benefit? I think for certain people, for a very narrow few people, there are huge benefits. And I think a lot of the like billion dollar hype machine is geared towards. Making the rest of us feel like there are huge benefits for us as well, whereas I am not so sure where that balance lies and if that necessarily is true.
Which is why I think it's really important to ask a lot of uncomfortable questions about this and interrogate what we're really doing here because I think the same questions that I'm asking today would've been relevant about. Social media. And that's just something I never thought about when I was like, like you, I wish I hadn't gotten social media so quickly, if at all.
And the same with a phone. If I actually now have ditched my smartphone and I have a dumb phone, so I'm, I'm going backwards.
Liam: I know, and I actually really want to talk to you about that because it's an idea that I have been toying with, and I know a lot of people have been toying with getting rid of their phone or, or reducing their phone, but I don't, I don't want to quite go there yet because a lot of what you were just saying.
Really does resonate, I think, especially with these freelancers who are like, is this actually benefiting me? You know, I think, well, just to clarify, so when we talk about this narrow subset of people, are we talking about like the Sam Altman's of the world, the people who are going to gain financially from this giant AI bubble?
Is that right?
Felicity: Yeah, yeah. The billionaires who are going to be getting richer. I think that the concentration of wealth and power is huge.
Liam: Yes. And you know, one of the, where do you see, so you then you say on the other side of it, for the rest of us there's a lot of pretending like it has these massive benefits.
Can you gimme some examples of that, of like where you think maybe they're trying to pull the wool over our eyes and how useful this tool is?
Felicity: Yeah, I think I think a lot of the discourse is around sort of speed and efficiency and automating. And I think. For a lot of cases, we don't often think about what we lose when we speed things up, when we make things more efficient, when we do more and more and more.
I would argue particularly, I'm I, well, I have background in copywriting and I know you do as well, particularly when it comes to writing that I don't think we need. Yeah, I think we've got, like, we've got plenty of words. We're drowning in information and drowning in like content. So I think, I think that's really like the trade off there.
The, the more, the efficiency. Well, what happens to better on the other side of that, the quality and, and is, is quantity, does that always beat quality? I think that is at the core of a lot of the hype. I don't often see. People talking about use cases where they have used AI to make something genuinely better.
I know there's that, the line that a lot of people say is that it can handle the grunt work so that you can handle the strategy and, and like the creative thinking and the judgment. I don't see, I don't see a lot of examples of that actually playing out and like quantifiable evidence as to how things are actually better.
Liam: Mm. Do you think it. Those people who are saying, I've done this, you know, AI has made this better. I mean, I don't know. Sometimes I feel like, because I do use AI, right? Mm. I'm a human living in 2025. There's a, there's no avoiding it. Mm-hmm. And you know, it's one of the things that gives me the creeps about it the most is like the ancy of it all.
I can feel it stroking my ego. And I can feel the animal part of my brain responding to having my ego stroked. And then sometimes I feel like maybe that's convincing me that what AI has done is actually better than it. Than it would've been if I just did it myself. Do you know? Do you see what I mean?
Felicity: Yeah, yeah. There's automation bias is a, is a, is a real phenomena. The, the human tendency to trust machines and computers over our own judgment, over the judgment of other people and the expertise of other people. It's a, it's a recognized phenomena. And I think to some extent the larger, like the chatbots that we interact with are designed with that because it's addictive.
And you know, they're designed, I, I, when I've used chatbots, I, you feel yourself getting sucked in. It's, I think it's rarely the conversation. Rarely you tell 'em that you, you have a goal, you want to achieve this certain thing and. Can they help me do this? But I find you sometimes never really get to the end point where that goal's achieved and it just like,
Liam: oh yeah.
Felicity: Keeps going and gets, it's like engagement, you know? It's, it's sort of engagement bait. And then there's also, hang on, I've talked about automation bias. Can you ask your question again? because I think there was a second point I was going to be there.
Liam: Actually, I love what you were just saying about this, the way that it always ends in a question when you're working with AI chatbots, right?
There's never an end to the conversation and it really is an attention grabbing thing. And another phrase that I've been using, and I don't know, maybe there's an actual term for this that you can help me with, is I, I refer to as the AI slide, which is like, the more you use AI, the more your brain wants to just like.
Relax on the couch of AI. So, you know, I'll use it to be like, you know what, I'm not sure how long I should cook this potato for, at what temperature? And then the next thing I know, it's like telling me how to make this whole meal. And I was like, wait a minute. I was about to cook a meal by myself. I don't need all this help.
Is the, is that a phenomenon you see a lot with the people you're talking to?
Felicity: Yeah, I think it's like the AI equivalent of doom scrolling. You open up, you're given social media app and then to, to, I don't know. Oh, well you often don't know why you open it up. You do it out of habit and then all of a sudden, like half an hour is gone and you've no idea.
You've no idea where it's gone. And I do think chatbot algorithms are designed with the, with the same thing. There isn't, I don't think there's a term for it. But yeah, like the kind of, it's not cognitive atrophy because that's your skills. Decaying, which I is another issue, but yeah, the think more about that slide.
Yeah. The like slide into kind of comfortable yeah, it's like an on demand. It's like a kind of on-demand, like vending machine of, of stuff and you just keep getting more and more. It's, yeah. I think we should. Terms, what
Liam: was the term that you just used? Cognitive atrophy. Was that the phrase?
Felicity: Cognitive atrophy? That's the, that's relating to skills. So if, like, skills decline, so say you're a writer and you start using, you start relying on AI for writing more and more. There's been, there's been studies that have measured the impact that that has on your skills and it does. Erode your skills and your confidence as well.
I think because unless you practice something, the worse you get and yeah, there's a measured, there's a measured result there. So I think that's something that we all have to be careful of is not really or, or finding. So even, I know lots of people use AI to write, and I'm not saying don't use it to write, but I think also think about.
That the service goes down and you have to write by yourself. I think you need to be careful about preserving your skills so that you can do that.
Liam: Yeah. Scary stuff. That kind of brings me to my next question, maybe, which is I'm really, you know, obviously we're on a podcast about freelancing here, and you have a.
That, or a service that is specifically for freelancers struggling with AI ethics, What made you want to talk to freelancers specifically about this issue? because it seems to me like everybody on earth is dealing with AI at this moment. Why specifically talk to freelancers?
Felicity: I think firstly because I am a freelancer, so I kind of, I can like directly relate to all of the struggles that people are having and I think.
Secondly, because I know a lot of freelancers work alone and sit there in your study, in your spare bedroom, spiraling about these things and you don't really have anyone to talk to about them. And I think I set up the cohort based co course because I thought that would be a really good structure to help.
To bring people together and help 'em talk about these things together. Because I think it's really difficult to get any sort of perspective if you're just sat by yourself reading headlines on social media. So part of it was that wanting to help people get together. And I also think it it can be really valuable because as a freelancer you want to be able to lead conversations with clients.
With clients. And I think you need support to help you do that. And particularly around AI ethics where you I speak to a lot of freelancers and they're often. At the mercy of uninformed clients or clients who maybe don't really care as much as they, as they should, either through a lack of knowledge or a lack of care and having some structure, having the confidence to be able to push back and lead conversations about that and defend your own expertise, I think is a really, a really valuable thing.
So I want to help freelancers with that specifically because I don't think they really have the support available. You know, you're not working in a team, you don't have other people to support you with that.
Liam: Hmm. Yes. I mean, I have two thoughts on that. First of all, the idea of this, the freelancer sitting alone in their room, right?
I mean it, that speaks to me. I'm, I'm alone in my little tiny office right now. I'm also, you know, I'm a single guy. I don't have a family, I don't have any colleagues. Sometimes AI has been a person that I can talk to in the middle of the day and they'll talk to me about anything I want to talk about enthusiastically.
Do you see? Dangers of using it in that way. As you know, a lot of people, I hear a lot of freelancers say, I'm using it as a sounding board. I'm using it as, you know feedback tool. Is that, in your opinion, I mean, I don't know if you agree there is an okay or not okay usage of AI, but what do you think of people who are using it as sort of a companion in that way or a colleague?
Felicity: Yeah, I'll, I'll do, I'll deal with colleague and companion separately because I think there's two different issues. I think firstly, as a colleague, using it as a sounding board sometimes, and I'm speaking from personal experience now, I've used it. As a sounding board for like a strategy or something that I'm thinking of.
And I'll, because of the kind of builtin s sycophancy, it will tell me that I, it, you know, this is a great idea and I'll develop something. Mm-hmm. And be really enthusiastic about it. because AI's told me that all my ideas are brilliant and kind of things go on challenged. And also it doesn't have any embodied real world experience in this.
So I don't, it's the, the. Being told that something's a great idea, it doesn't really have any anything to back it up. It's just, it's designed to keep you talking. It doesn't really mean that your ideas are great in practice, and I find that then I get stuck in this loop of kind of endlessly strategizing when actually what I would've been better doing is just putting my initial idea out into the world and testing it.
And building from real world feedback. because that's really the feedback that matters. And so I've instead got stuck in this kind of endless loop with AI, strategizing, strategizing, building the perfect strategy putting it into action, and then it just, it just hasn't worked at all because it's built on like completely false foundation.
There's no there's no substance there. And yeah, I think kind of getting ideas out into the world and testing them in the real world. At the earliest possible opportunity, which is quite uncomfortable, particularly for a perfectionist like me. But that would always be my advice. It's not really like an ethical concern, it's more just what I find works.
Liam: In
Felicity: real life or not. And then on the other side, with the companionship I think it's, I totally understand it and like I know a lot of people have used it for therapy and stuff, which I think that, I mean, the bigger question is like, why are people feeling, why don't they have options available to them and why speaking to a chatbot the only option?
So I'd never judge anyone for doing that. But I think the danger there, and this probably is more of an ethical concern, is the lack of friction. It is not, it is not really a real world relationship with another human, with a friend, even with a therapist. There is, there is friction there. You know, you people, a friend will call you on your bullshit.
So to some degree will a therapist likely or challenge you or ask you to confront uncomfortable questions and not kind endlessly validate you. Which I think is, is healthy and I think that is often missing and can lead you to go down dangerous paths because there's a lack of friction. There's a lack of challenge.
Yeah. So two, two slightly separate issues.
Liam: Right. I thank you for calling me out on my, my conflating companion and colleague because they are two different things. You know, I'm very obsessed with, maybe obsessed is the wrong word, intrigued and horrified by these stories of people going into psychosis because of their work with AI or forming these very.
Surreal relationships that are quite problematic. And you know, I totally agree with you talking about getting the idea out there, because AI will have you in the planning stage. It will keep you in the planning stage because that's where it's, it sees its own value to you, right? That's why we have communities like freelance success.
That's why you have courses like you do. It's places where you can actually go and talk to other humans about this stuff. You can get the same kind of feedback, but it will be from people who genuinely want you to succeed rather than a bot that just wants you to keep chatting. Okay. So that, let's see, we talked about you and freelancers.
One of the other, oh, the reason I reached out to you actually, you've like, done all of the reading, like Yeah. I feel like sometimes you've done all the homework for me on what I need to know about AI and I, that's why I really, and encourage people to sign up for your mailing list because you do these great breakdowns of the things you've been reading.
And one of the things that you, the one that made me reach out to you recently. It was about gender and gender bias within AI. And I remember you started your email with like AI has a gender bias because of course it does. And like, you don't have to think very hard about, about why, but, and then I know you've mentioned some other studies about the biases.
Can you tell me more either about the gender issue or other issues that you think maybe people are not on, it's not on their radar when they think about AI ethics,
Felicity: Yeah. Oh, there's, there's so many. So like an endlessly expanding endlessly expanding question or problem? I think, so I'm not gonna, I'm not going to quite answer your question here, but I'm going to talk about something like, that's sort of an answer to your question.
When I think. About AI, I think it about, it's a mirror, but it's also an amplifier. So any inequality, any problem that exists in our society, because these systems, the large language models are trained on human data. They're trained on like the whole of the internet. Any, any inequality that exists there gets amplified and mirrored.
So any problem, sorry, mirrored then amplified. So any, any inequality, any injustice that you can think of in the world that exists inside the LLMs, but like
Liam: mm-hmm.
Felicity: You know, it can be ever kind of expanding because yeah, because of the way that they're designed. So that, that's kind of what I, that's how, that's how big it is.
That's what I would like people to be aware of and to be mindful of.
Liam: Do you think? I mean, this is something that I've been thinking about recently, right? Every so often you see people talking about, you know, what they've done with AI. Recently, I was on a Reddit thread reading about the Epstein files, and someone had talked about how they've uploaded the Epstein files into an AI.
LM to read it. And I'm like, other people have told me they've uploaded their entire novels into AI for people to read. I know you talk a lot about proprietary information, client information. What do we know about. Like these LLMs, first of all, are they going to take these things that everything that we enter and use it because like, is it ethical to put something like the Epstein files into an LLM that will then integrate that?
What about racist literature that gets entered in? You know, AI doesn't have a a moral compass, does it?
Felicity: No. So
Liam: is that, am I right to be fearful of that kind of usage of it?
Felicity: I mean, I think in. In terms of like the Epstein files and racial novels and stuff, I think that horse is already bolted. I think that the models have been trained on a lot of, a lot of that stuff already. So it already, all of those things that you're worried about, the biases, they, they already exist inside the system. So I don't know necessarily whether uploading more would, would make a difference at this stage. I think it's already, you know, it's already it's already a problem.
But then the other point that you made about like proprietary data and intellectual property from a more like business side of a business point of view as a freelancer, I think. Important thing to remember is that if you are using a large language model, using a chatbot for generative purposes, any prompts that you put in.
You have to be okay potentially with anyone on the internet seeing that because the systems aren't secure, no matter what the privacy policies say, there's a potential for data leaks. There's also the potential for corporate acquisitions, which I think is a very underrated thing that we, if we think about like what happened with Twitter you know, five years ago Twitter was a very different place to X today.
So we always have to be mindful that these are. Commercial entities and they can be acquired, and the data that's stored somewhere can then be used for a purpose different from the initial purpose. So I think the safest thing to do is assume the whole Internet's watching. So if you're working with client intellectual property with proprietary data, there are, there are techniques for anonymizing, for stripping out.
It's like, it's, it's tiresome work. But I think it's important so that you keep data out of these systems if you don't want other people to see it.
Liam: Yeah, that's just kind of a good rule for existing on the internet, right? Assume everyone is seeing everything that you do all, all the time. Yeah. And I love the point that you've made about X because you know, not to get too deep into the politics of things, but I've been thinking a lot about a lot of my old tweets that I used to post back when it felt like a safe space, you know, to voice my opinions about things.
It does not feel that way anymore and. You're totally right in calling out that these people who are running these AI machines, who knows who's going to get their hands on it next and they're going to get, you know, the value of it is the data, I guess. Mm-hmm. Okay. So we talk a lot in freelance success about having a freelance code of ethics, and usually I use that in terms of like.
It's a good way, I think, for people to anchor their personal brand. Right? Start with what do you believe about how you do business, you know, for, and that can be everything from your you know. How, how quickly you respond to emails and everything to what things you do and do not work on what projects do you do and do not work on, you know, your DEI policies, all of that.
I recommend people start there. You have I mean, I took the free email course about AI ethics and developing a code of ethics. How do you think. Freelancers should go about this. Like, where's, where do I start with coming up with my own code of ethics around, you know, my own guidelines for myself around ai?
Felicity: Yeah. I've actually just been, I was just thinking about a step by step before we came on this, so this is very timely. The first place to start is by learning. So I think my, to do a bit of self-promotion, my a ethics course is designed as like the first step. It introduces you to the really big questions, the challenges around using AI in a work context.
And it gives you things to reflect on, things to think about with the idea that you're working towards a position. But first I think you need to explore the gray areas because I think we all have, I have a reactive, defensive, very skeptical position naturally, which. Perhaps isn't always beneficial in a business context because it looks, it looks too defensive and like I'm trying to kind of justify my own existence rather than having thoughtfully engaged with the topic and on balance, here's my opinion.
So I think it kind of helps you think through things a little bit more rationally because it is a very emotive subject and I think we all do get caught up in, in the high emotion of it all. And, and that's completely justified. because there are genuine fears around all of this. And then. I would say after you've done the reflection, you need to think about turning that into some concrete action.
So as a first step, I think about some guiding principles. Some of the things, and not all of it will be relevant. If you've gone through my course, some of the things that really stuck out to you as being very important and relevant to your specific work and to your values as well. I think it's really important that what you're talking about here aligns with your values because you've got to be able to, you know, stand behind them, own them, defend them and they've got to, they've got to make sense with, with you and your business and how you do business.
And then after you've got your principles, this is, I think. The biggest mistake is people stop at this point. But I think to have something that's really substantive, you need to then go a step further and talk about what that looks like in practice. So I know a lot of people, a lot of ethics policies or codes of conduct that I see say that, you know, we care about privacy.
Privacy is important, but then there's not that next step. To show. So what this looks like in practice, here's how we protect your privacy practically. And that involves a little bit of work going through your workflow, thinking about how you use AI each point and how, and how you do and if you don't, how you should be protecting privacy or, or ensuring fairness or working towards explainability.
Things like that.
Liam: Hmm. And you're right that it's so important to have those things just because people are going to ask. And so if you don't publish this on your website or you don't write a whole manifesto, just having an answer in your back pocket for when these questions inevitably come up is so important.
It's the same reason I recommend having a freelance code of ethics that you have the answers ready to go.
Felicity: Yeah, and you don't, you don't have to share them all, you know, you can use your judgment about when to share them, but it can be useful to have a little bit, even your kind of broad approach or your philosophy to AI to use in pitches, to use when talking about clients.
because if they do ask, what do you think about ai? It's very useful to have a few sentences there just to be able to tell and not fall back on, you know, the stuff that everyone says. I think having a unique and informed position is a real benefit. A
Liam: hundred percent. Yeah. And it's been around long enough now.
I mean, chat GBT is, yeah. Four years old almost. You should have a stance by this point. That's your own. Well, great. I'm going to give you a chance to share some of the places people can go, but before we do that, I just want to talk about one more thing, which is actually. Not just AI, but your relationship with technology and modern life, because you talk about this and you're doing it in a way that I find really interesting.
I know you gave up your smartphone entirely, is that right?
Felicity: Not quite. I do, I have my old smartphone. It lives sim free in a drawer in my desk. And I, because I needed it for app. My back, my bank is an app, is app based. You can't access it. So I needed it for that. And a few other things like my child's nursery, there's an app there and a few other things that just, I couldn't find a substitute or a workaround.
Two factor authentication as well. I have it so that when I'm working and I need that I still, I still have access to that. So, yeah, it's not a completely pure approach, but that's actually what I'm quite interested in because I think often there's a very binary, all or nothing, and this kind of links into AI, it links into a lot of things around technology, around sustainability, around the way that we live.
It's you know, you're either all in or you're all out. You're kind of rejecting everything or you're embracing everything. Mm-hmm. And I'm quite interested in thinking about. A middle. And this, I think I mentioned this question in my email to you, it's what does better look like? So I think rejecting entirely is unrealistic.
Embracing entirely is pretty dangerous sometimes. But is there, is there the, like a middle ground that you can, and, and it's something personal to you where you can think of a system that works for you that where you get some of the benefits and then also, you know, some of the downsides you can kind of mitigate for.
Mm-hmm. That's, that kind of drives my decisions. It
Liam: is fascinating. Yeah. because I mean, I, I'm just like curious logistically, do you get your calls forwarded to your, to your dumb phone or whatever you want to call it?
Felicity: Yeah, so I have, my dumb phone has my sim card in it, so that's where my calls go. And I still have WhatsApp on my smartphone, but that's just for group chats that aren't really time sensitive.
Anybody who would be sending me anything time sensitive knows that a text message or just a phone call is. The way to reach me. So yeah, I have, I have my
Liam: How long have you been doing that?
Felicity: Just over six months.
Liam: Okay. And what, how does it feel?
Felicity: Yeah, it feels good. It feels good. I I, a lot of this is possible because I have kind of quite a simple, quite little country life.
Mm-hmm. I already don't have a lot of like, trappings of modern life that would make this more difficult. Like, I've never had an Uber. I can't because I don't need one. I live in the country. We don't actually, the nearest city to me, they don't have Uber. They just have like regular taxis, so I don't need it.
I don't like need parking apps because you don't have to pay for parking here. I'm in the country, so, and I don't need maps because my, my mom was actually a cartographer. She drew maps for as her profession. So I know like I can navigate without GPS.
Liam: Wow. Wait, your mom's a cartographer. That is so cool.
I've never met someone who's an actual cartographer. That's very cool.
Felicity: Yeah, actually, specifically a geo a geologic cartographer. So it wasn't it. But she did like rock formations and things, so it wasn't like maps for for navigation. It's maps for like science stuff for drilling and, you know, things like that.
Liam: You know, it's funny, I was thinking about doing this myself, but I do live a city life. You know, I use Uber. I don't have a car, so Uber is my car often. Same thing with maps. Like I don't, my mother was not a photographer, so I don't have that, you know, but then I think about before. You know, Uber, I usually call it to from my house, right?
So bringing a phone and I was just abroad in Ireland actually for a few weeks, and I got by without a phone. I just would log onto wifi when I really needed it. Right? Find a pub that had wifi. And so you know what you were saying about the idea that, that you have, it doesn't have to be all or nothing, you know, you don't have to go move out.
I don't have to move to the country to do this kind of, no. One other thing that you're doing, I noticed you have a new resolution for the coming year. Can you tell me about that too?
Felicity: Yeah, so I try, I've been. Well, I realize I, I've looking back that I've done one of these resolutions each year for quite a few years.
In 2003, sorry, 2003. That was a long time ago. 2023. 2023 I gave up buying new to me clothes and that, and each, and then in 2024, I took social media off my smartphone and then, and that I just kind of basically stopped using my social media platforms once they were off my phone. So I still have them, but they're sitting dormant.
I haven't logged in in. Years. And then 2025 I got rid of my smartphone and well sort of got rid of my smartphone, started using predominantly a dumb phone. And each one of these resolutions, it's, the idea has been much harder than actually in practice. It's been pretty easy and I haven't really gone back on any of them and I found that there's a lot of benefits.
To all of these decisions. The personal benefits have been huge. So this year I'm making another one, which is probably my scariest, which is I really want to stop shopping at the supermarket. Yeah, which is, which is a really big one.
Liam: That's wild. So what does that mean? You would rely on farmer's markets or CSAs?
Yeah.
Felicity: Yeah, so locally, I think it would only be, it's only possible because there's quite a good network of options, non supermarket options. Locally, I've got a refill shop for like dry produce, like rice flour, lentils, beans, things like that. There's a few Green Grocers where I can get vegetables and fruit and then, then there's a whole, there's a lot of stuff in between where there's a lot of gaps.
I'm still looking to fill, but I'm thinking there's like kind of ethical. Wholesale, like supermarkets online and just trying to fill the gaps with better choices. And yeah, I have a toddler so I don't know why I'm creating more, more hard work for myself, but I kind of had a theory that all of all of the, these other things that I've done have seemed or have felt much harder than they've actually worked out in practice.
So I think with a little bit of thought, I'm hoping that this might be the same.
Liam: Well, I'm going to be following along because I love Yeah. The idea of it. And I think perhaps my New Year's resolution will be to buy, finally buy myself the hot pink razor phone that I always wanted and never got.
Felicity: Mm-hmm.
Liam: Because I think they're still for sale and start doing this, you know, find my own path to having less time on my phone because I know you've written about how it frees up mental space.
It frees up your attention. Your, your focus. I mean, the benefits are there.
Felicity: It frees up your time. It's incredible how much time you get when you're not scrolling. That's,
Liam: yeah.
Felicity: Well, even things like the, there are, so, there are trade offs. The biggest trade off with not having a smartphone constantly is you have to accept some things.
You'll never know because I don't know about you, but quite often I just like look up a fact on my smartphone like, why does this happen? Or what does this you? You just have to accept that quite a lot of things are going to remain a mystery because you can't just look things up. That's how, maybe that's a good, maybe that's a good thing because maybe we're not actually supposed to know.
Everything all the time.
Liam: Well, to that point, when I was in Ireland, I was there with one of my best friends and neither of us had internet connection the vast majority of the time. So I had a little list going every day of like things we wanted to look up later, and it actually became this really nice.
Evening ritual where we would turn on the wifi and just go through our day, kind of reminiscing about what we had talked about, look up the facts that we had been disputing. And I was like, oh, this is suddenly a very pleasant ritual instead of like a instantaneous, and then, you know, and you know, we're, we're going to age ourselves, but there was a day when you would wonder and then you'd say, huh, I don't know.
And then you would move on. We kind of gave those days up once we got Google.
Felicity: Oh, you would, if you were really keen, you'd look in the encyclopedia.
Liam: Yes. Oh man. Maybe it's time to buy a phone encyclopedia again.
Felicity: Yeah. Or get or get in Cara back up, you know?
Liam: Yeah. Yes. Well, publicity, this has been such an, a great conversation's.
Exactly what I wanted to talk about with you today. Before we go, if people want to learn more, if they want to take your ethics courses, where can I send them?
Felicity: So you can go to, nobodycaresaboutethics.com, and the best place to start is with my free email course. It's 15 days. Each day you get a reflective prompt sent to your inbox on an ethical challenge.
You're asked to assess it from a skeptic's point of view and an AI enthusiast point of view. Way up the pros and cons, the responsibilities, the risks, and find the most ethical position out of all of that thinking. And that's, that's the best place to get started. That was, that is where I would recommend going first.
Liam: Great. And I can vouch for that. I have taken it. It's fantastic. And also, if you are a member of the Freelance Success Community, it's got a permanent place in our library, so you can check that out there. Anytime. Felicity, thank you so much for, for joining me today.
Felicity: Thank you for having me.
