Genevieve Bell: The Human Future of Technology and Innovation

[00:00:00]um it now gives me great pleasure to invite to the stage no relation of mine sorry for any confusion uh Anthropologist social scientist recently appointed senior Intel fellow and vice president of corporate strategy uh M Miss Genevie Bell Dr you thank you my friend oh I know I'm home in Australia when I go to a conference that has a raffle there is some deep pleasure in that I don't even want to really think about listen it's always my pleasure to be back home it's kind of unexpected to be back in jalong my mom was on The Faculty a deacon back in the 80s and I don't think I've been here since then uh some things seem remarkably unchanged um some things I don't recognize which is about how it should be it's also always my pleasure to get to come and talk at conferences like this I always feel like I should start with a set of apologies they usually involve things like I'm an anthropologist you shouldn't have apologize for that but when you're in a room with people who probably aren't it you know requires a bit of explanation I also should apologize cuz I flew in from the states yesterday and while I know you've all been at a conference this whole week I was at a conference there have flown here to be at a new conference and there hasn't been enough coffee um or as Cameron and I were commiserating earlier neither enough water or baroa either um so I'm very impressed that you're all here at 9:00 on a Friday morning at the beginning of a day of what I know has been a long conference so I promise this will be as engaging as I know how to be all right so that's that I thought what I would do given that I had a little bit of a chance to talk to some of the other Keynotes talk a little bit about the future I always think it's nice at the end of a conference to go forth and think about what might come next and for me you know I spend my time all over the world a lot of my time in Silicon Valley and a lot of my time in conversations about what the future would be like and I really wanted to kind of think about that a little bit here um I want to kind of add here this is not a conversation for me about what is the next big technology what is the next thing people are going to build but a little bit more about what are the questions we would ask about how the future is going to be and what are the kind of responsibilities we all have as technologists in building that future so who am I to tell you all of that well clearly I'm Australian but you can hear I've been gone for a while um I grew up all over Australia but principally in the Northern Territory my mom was an anthropologist and I grew up on her field sites in Central and Northern Australia in the 1970s and 1980s I spent most of my childhood at an AAL settlement called ali karang uh where I mostly didn't go to school didn't stop me getting into Stanford later haha um but at the time there wasn't a lot of school there was a lot of hanging around with ariginal people who remembered their country before European you know Europeans and cattle and fences and who took my brother and I out with them all the time so I was incredibly lucky right most of my childhood was spent without shoes not in school so far two bonus points right there um I got to kill things which was great um in America I always have to add it and I ate them afterwards they kind of worry I might be a sociopath with those kind of Tendencies but you know hunter gatherers and it was an extraordinary childhood right I went from there to the United States for University stayed for postgrad was finishing my PhD at Stanford in the late 1990s where my area of expertise wait for it wait for it was Native American studies and feminist Theory you can see precisely how I would go from there to Intel I mean it is the most obvious hiring path you have ever seen if you're Australian because truthfully I got my job at Intel when I met a man in a bar in paloalto exactly I'm routinely asked for career advice and I think hm say yes to strange men in bars no so I was in a bar I was in palto this man comes up to me and asks me what I do classic American come online what do you do really and I said I was an anthropologist he said what's that I said I studied people he said why so this was not a good conversation for either of us I said they were interesting and he went hm what do you do with that exactly and I said well you know I was a 10e track professor at Stanford about which I was probably overly smug cuz truthfully that's a kind of hard you know KN to crack in the US and he just looked at me and said couldn't you do more and I thought yes I could not have this conversation with you anymore and so I left which made it incredibly strange the next day when he called me at home because we're talking 1998 and my mother who among many other things is an imminently sensible woman who explained to me you should never give your number to strange men in bars if you didn't want them to call you and so I had not given this man my number and it's 98 so it's before LinkedIn Facebook Tinder certainly before Google there was no white box on the internet into which you could have typed redheaded Australian Anthropologist and my name would have popped up these days if you do it I'm number one or two in the search which it says I'm doing something something right but I'm not entirely sure what anyway this guy did it the old fashioned way he called every anthropology department in the Bay Area there were seven and what he said to the secretaries of each one of those departments is do you have a redheaded Australian and Stanford went oh do you mean Genevie do you want her home phone number yeah I hastened to add it was the '90s so you know this man calls I tell him I'm not interested cuz really strange men on phones no insult to most of you in the room but you know I just that wasn't going to be a go for me um and he sort of said no no no I'm not interested in you like that I'm like then why are you calling he's like well you seemed really interesting and can I buy you lunch and one of the things I have discovered about myself is that no matter how many years I am post my graduate experience the promise of free food is still motivating and so I went and had lunch with Bob Bob introduced me to a whole of other people in the valley ultimately introduced me to the people at Intel who also thought I seemed interesting 1998 Silicon Valley if you had a pulse and an opinion you were interesting and they say to me come have a job interview with us I'm like okay what would you like me to talk about they're like oh whatever you're working on so I go to Intel and a room full of Engineers listen to me for an hour talk about Native American ethn history and federal Indian relationships between 1880 and 1920 suffice it to say they were not mesmerized but you know surprisingly all the same they offered me a job which was odd and I said no because they seem very strange people indeed um for all the obvious reasons and for seven months Intel wed me they called me once a month and said have you changed your mind yet I'm like is there a job description and they go no and that seemed odd to me um cuz I was in the universi where there were very rigorous many page job descriptions and then one day nearly 17 and a half years ago I remember waking up in my house in the Bay Area and realizing that I was at this kind of moment of a decision and in some ways for those of you who are raised in Australia you will recognize this is being a very Australian kind of moment right where you can pursue a path that seems really clear and the one that you have obviously been on or you can go stuff it and do something completely different and part of the kind of legacy of my childhood was that my mother was incredibly determined that in addition to having this sort of set of really different experiences that we should understand that there was a moral obligation to make a better world that you couldn't just sit on the sidelines you actually had to put your heart your soul your passion into making the world better and I thought I was doing that as a professor I thought that was a way to do that that education was clearly that but I realized here was Intel which I think I sort of understood in 1998 might be in the middle of the biggest technological transformation of my lifetime and that you know if they wanted me an anthropologist and a feminist which I had explained to them the day they interviewed me they said is there anything else we need to know about you and I said yes I'm an unreconstructed Marxist and a radical feminist I know thank you it was the 1990s and I really didn't want the job but when they said to me will we like that I do remember just sitting there and going uhoh and I smiled very sweetly and said that I thought the first six months might be difficult so I was really surprised they kept you know sort of offering me a job and then I did I had this moment where I realized I could go an academic which is what I had been in some ways raised to be it's only what I'd spent my career pursuing or I could throw it all in and go to Intel and have no idea what I'd be doing when I got there but be in the middle of this incredibly heady moment of building out the infrastructure we now all live with and so I said exploitive deleted quit my job at Stanford and went to Intel in a twoe period in my life that was a little bit chaotic had to explain to my professors at Stanford why I was leaving them to go to a company they never really heard of had to explain to my family why I was abandoning Stanford and going to Intel had to explain to people that knew me reasonably well why I was moving from California sunshine to Oregon rain I thought that seemed fairly foolish and then on my second day at the office I had to reassure myself that I hadn't made a terrible decision cuz my new boss sat me down and said great really excited that you're here we need your help with two things I'm like really for seven months there was no job description and now it's two things they'd better be good and says yeah so we need your help with women and I look at my boss and go which women and she says all women I was like all 3.2 billion women yes she says and I go okay um what would you like me to do with 3.2 billion women my says it would be great if you could tell us what they want exactly excellent so in my notebook of the day I write down women all and underline all and try to imagine what is the research project I will do that it will explain that women all is not a useful category right number one and number two offer some insights that might be useful and I'm a researcher that is like as good as it gets right so I'm offing a happy little Ry and then I realized that this boss has said there were two things and if the first thing is women all exactly it is terrifying to imagine what your new boss might think the second thing is and I reckon I hoped it would be men cuz then it would be like everything was mine and that would be good but no my new boss says here at Intel again 1998 we have an R problem and I think well yeah I have an R problem too I don't know what that means so I say so what does r stand for my new boss says that's rest of world mhm and I'm like so for clarity where is World such that you have a rest of world my boss says oh that's America and then there is rest of world and we have a problem with that and I'm thinking you do and I don't need to do research to tell you what it is exactly so I looked at my notebook and I said to my boss I'm go back to my desk now and I went back to my desk and I looked at my piece of paper and I thought women and rest of world well either I have just made the biggest mistake of my life or I have a lot of job security and it turned out in addition to having a lot of job security I also landed in one of the best roles a human being could hope for right I mean my job for now 17 and a half years has been to explain human beings to a technology company and that's not a bad thing you know spent a lot of time with Engineers helping them understand everyone else and you know I have worked in lots of roles in that time I've been in product groups I've been in the labs I've LED Advanced R&D Labs these days I sit in the strategy office and in all of those places my job has been to think about what it is that we care about as human beings what frustrates us what we're passionate about and how all of those insights can shape the next generation of Technology development these days I get to add to that somewhat awesome job description but I'm also responsible for helping Intel think about what does the future look like not just for people but for technology for government regulation for the whole kind of kitten Kaboodle so when I'm asked at the moment how I would describe myself it is as a full-time Anthropologist and a part-time futurist which means that mostly As I think about the future I'm thinking about it from the point of view of human beings not just technology and of course as human beings we've been fascinated about the future for a really long time whether it was about being able to predict the future so think about oracles the Oracle of Deli I sometimes think I might be that except without the dead goats um whether it's about forms of divination so the notion that the you know the entrails of animals the patterns of birds the movements of the the Stars could tell us something about the world the way the world was going to be and we were interested in being able to predict the future because it let us think about where did we place our bets who did we pick as our allies how did we go to battle were there ways that we could control the world around us and the outcomes and there been lots of ways that that got manifested most of them now we would look at and think they may be more about Superstition and mystical elements than actual truths but the notion of being fascinated with what the future might hold and the ways we might describe it is in some ways a human preoccupation that scans many cultures and I would say tens of thousands of years of course in more recent eras we have spent a great deal of time telling stories about the future whether it is in the science fiction that I'm willing to bet most of us grew up with or the science fact that suspend suspiciously like science fiction all at the same time this piece here was taken from a 1957 Ad In Time magazine that was placed there by the American Association of electricity companies in which they extol the virtues of electricity now really what you should be able to see there more than anything is that is a self-driving car Circa 1957 now the way you know it's 1957 is he's driving and wearing a tie and they're playing a board game and the text under it is really instructive right because it reads things that we would recognize I mean it basically says this is about a self-driving car it's about safety it's about avoiding accidents it's about managing congestion those should sound like familiar things cuz gosh that's the value proposition we currently have around self-driving cars the same advertisement goes on to say well you know there's all this great stuff in your home that uses electricity and there's more stuff coming basically microwave ovens your food will cook in seconds electricity will close and open your windows Smart Home fantasy being here for a bit oh television screens will hang on the walls you're like really good oh there'll be a box outside the house that Heats and cools okay well for 1957 that's not a bad kind of swath of what the future might look like of course it's also deeply revealing about what its present look like it tells you a great deal about 1957 right not just about what the future would look like it tells you that already in California in 1957 the freeways were congested driving was dangerous people worried about their safety people imagined that technology could liberate them from those things it tells you that they hoped for more convenience because that was the promise of technology in those moments that food would cook more quickly so you didn't have to spend all of your time laboring in the home of course it doesn't tell you all the other things that we know have happened in the many many years that have transpired since this right lots more cars led to lots of pollution led to different Notions about Transportation led to car culture led to an entire manifestation of identities tied up in the cars that were driven ideas about food ideas about Labor ideas about what was public what was Private ideas about energy consumption this tells us what the technology would look like it didn't much tell us how we would experience it but it's also deeply revealing about that moment in time as is one from just a little bit less than 10 years later so Gordon Moore one of Intel Founders wrote a very famous though not when he wrote it article in 1965 in which he predicted from 1965 to 1975 integrated circuits would increase at a particular kind of rate and in order to make this argument he starts with a paragraph where he describes what he imagines the world will look like when integrated circuits are everywhere and he sets this Vision out 50 years he basically says in 2015 this is what the world is going to be like and he says there'll be computers in the home connected to some kind of terminal you're like go Gordon you got the internet it's like there will be some kind of smart mobile Telecommunications system you're like check mobile phones it's like there will be semi-autonomous cars you're like again really okay and then delightfully the last line in this says an electronic watch only needs a screen to be feasible today 1965 you're like yeah okay like another perennial kind of object that we hoped we could make smart think about how many stories you can think of about smart watches smart kitchens smart recipe appliances for the kitchen smart fridges we have all of those stories that kind of run through our thinking right right and part of what happens here is that every new technology gets accompanied by a set of stories about the world it will make and a set of stories about what that world will be like usually terribly functional stories stories that say here is what the technology will be not necessarily stories that say here is how we will experience it the stories are usually at the beginning of what you know Gartner would now describe as the hype curve where we go yay new technology Everything Will Change usually about a year later we go ah new technology nothing good can come of it and a couple years later we go oh was that it hype curve in three words yay hm oo nonetheless you know one of the challenges to all of these particular ways of thinking about the future is they tend to be really singular they say it's going to be one piece of technology electricity integrated circuits and one kind of very linear singular future and most of us know that what it looks like looks different in different places the future has always looked different in Australia than did in America if only because we were 18 and a half hours ahead and in a different season but frequently for other reasons right we have different affordances different infrastructures different challenges different regulatory Frameworks and different cultural preoccupations as Australians we were early adopters of a whole lot of technology that didn't mainstream in other places until much later whether it's ATM machines VCRs mobile phones even the internet we have a country of early adopters there's all kinds of reasons for that but much of it is cultural so there's this interesting challenge in these stories we tell about the future about how kind of singular they are and how little they allow for the reality of adoption of technology which is all in my mind about things being very messy and very complicated so Gordon says really pretty straightforward 50 years later we know it's actually really messy like in any given day I encounter all of that technology in very different ways and I'm sure you do too I recently came to my ATM machine in America put my card in it and it said happy birthday and I was like well that's just really creepy like a you're the first person to wish me a happy birthday which may be sad and pathetic but B why do you know it's my birthday I mean I know you and I this they've got my mortgage so they have all this details but like what else do you know about me when do you plan to tell it to me and who else are you telling and I had that moment that many people have when they encounter data being used about them where you think creepy that's just faintly troubling of course they exceeded themselves about two months later when I put my card in they wish me a happy anniversary and I thought huh with whom and then I realized it was with them I know and I thought and you're not taking me out to dinner very sad so you know there's the happy birthday but you know there's all the other stuff too right I got into a taxi not that long ago in Amsterdam and the driver looked at me and said are you in a hurry odd question from a taxi driver I said no and then I looked at his kit right and he had an integrated nav system a separate navigation system three phone booking systems and a payment system all screens in his cabin and a printer and I sort of looked at that and he said cuz the navigation systems crash and I need to reboot it he's like how are you I S of fil like okay like how are you going to do that he said I'm going to turn the car off and count for 30 seconds and turn it back on again and I thought maybe I have a paper clip in my handbag I could help you with this and I realize that you know we have this notion about this technology but the solutions that we are bringing to Bear to fix them are the ones that most of us were taught 20 years ago about how to fix a computer turn it off count to 30 turn it back on again and maybe it'll fixed itself imagining that scaling to a smart city is genuinely terrifying and we know there are behaviors that we still haven't quite caught up with right I was in basically my life is just airport to airport in case it sounds like it's glamorous it really isn't but I was somewhere recently and I watched a woman stand on a tabletop to photograph her food and I was the only person who thought that was interesting in the whole restaurant and I photographed her photographing her food so sad there is this moment right when the technology comes with unintended consequences social regulatory legislative and how do we unpack all of that stuff right and how do we think about all of it well for me we have this interesting question right of how is it that we're going to make sense of the future of Computing the future of a world made digital the future in many ways that all of us are building and part of it I think the challenge is that it's no longer going to be one thing you can't just say it's going to be one piece of technology it's going to be one buildout it's going to be one world right the reality is it's going to be lots of them and for me one of the challenges when I'm routinely asked what's the next big thing what's the killer app killer technology is that I think it misses the point which is that it's never going to be just one thing it's going to be lots of them and they're going to look different and different different places and oh by the way the hardest piece about it is going to be not the technology but how we manage it what does that technology like when it lands in our lives us as human beings right and what will the implications of that be and what I want to do is just walk you through a couple of pieces of technology and sort of soci technical trends that are already in our lives but are going to shape the next decade and just tease out some of the ways that I think this is more complicated than it appears and you can start with the easy stuff you can just start with connectivity spent a lot of time talking about 5G and my current life I spend a lot of time talking about Telos we spend a lot of time talking about the network in Australia we certainly spend a great deal of time talking about the NBN fiber to the node and other things and all of those conversations are about the affordances of the technology and a little bit about the regulatory framework what is more complicated in all of that is the relationship between the devices the network and the human beings most of the devices that you have with you in this room that you have elsewhere in your lives function best when they are constantly connected to the network whether it's for electricity a signal content they are happiest when all the little bars are full as human beings it turns out we function better when we're intimately disconnected when we can have a moment when we aren't switched on and truthfully we have managed this in some sneaky ways over the last 15 years for a long time in Australia we used to choose to go on holidays to places where there were black spots and many exactly many people were kind of it off when you know the 4G came along and you're like well now hello I used to not be able to get a phone call here and I loved that about this place I own a house in rural South Australia and part of the reason I bought it was the first time I was there and I said to the guy in the pub where's the you know got a Wi-Fi hotspot he took me out into the main road and pointed he said it's that way and I'm like at the school he said no in Port Peri I'm like that's 150 km away he said yes and we like it that way okay because part of it it turns out we actually need time to feel different part of you know the challenge of constant connectivities that flattens out the Contour of time day night weeks weekends it all starts to feel a little bit like the same and as human beings we have long-standing social structures designed to let us not have that whether it is religious one so think the Sabbath think Sunday think lent think Ramadan we have a whole series of structures that are designed for us to experience time differently but we have devices that want to constantly have it all so we have that one sort of problem with connec the second one and I think this is an interesting one as we start to imagine ensembles of devices is that one of the promises I frequently hear my colleagues tell me about is everything is going to be seamlessly connected turns out as human beings seamlessly is not good for us we actually want things to be sometimes seamless but frequently seamful you don't necessarily want as every Vision Video I can think of suggests to go from what you're watching on television in your house to your car to your laptop to your phone because your children might be in your car your boss might be near your laptop you don't necessarily want to subject everyone to whatever television show it is that you think you're liking at this moment in time cuz I sck next to those people on airplanes and I wish they wouldn't so you know there's a piece that says context matters tremendously we did a bunch of user research quite some time ago now where we were suggesting that you could build better backup systems for consumers we're like you know when the devices come home the system will know the devices are there just automatically back up everything yeah no turns out no um and the adults were like yeah yeah yeah that's fine and the teenagers were like absolutely not no way and the parents are going what are you talking about kids like do you want every photo on your phone backed up on the house hard drive I don't think so everyone's like good point so there's this moment here right where part of what is happening is we use different devices for different purposes doesn't necessarily mean we want the thing to feel and look the same across all of them we don't necessarily want content to follow us and to about every single one of you in this room has more than one email address exactly if you only have one you are in fact weird statistically we have multiple email addresses because we want to control access to ourselves we want to present ourselves in different ways in different places we want different things to come to us we don't want all of those email addresses to have one single front to us cuz there's the spam things and the political things and the in-laws things and the work things you don't want them all in your inbox trust me you want them in different inboxes some that you only go to once a month to just hit all delete so connectivity right what does it actually mean to connect things what would be connected and how is in fact a much more deceptive question than getting the NBN right that that would be nice too then there's iot 500 billion connected devices was the last story I heard but this flashed through my Twitter feed not that long ago and I thought it was excellent of starting to imagine what would a connected house feel like well it might feel like exactly the fridge likes your microwave update it might not feel good so 50 billion I know you're all slow readers right to the bottom Back Eyes back here okay good so 50 billion connected devices we talk about Smart Homes we talk about smart cities we talk about connected stuff the reality is we're going to be in the middle of much of that part of it is what is it to connect all of those things and how will they be connected so again think about how are you going to reboot your smart home what happens when your thermostat decides to reboot itself and resets itself to a different season than the one you are in not helpful um you know what does it mean to think about as I have now been in three different conferences recently with academic colleagues of mine who would whip out their phones and go I was one in La at the beginning of the week he's like here's my house in Melbourne we're like your Ager panthers look sad he was like yeah thanks for that then he goes to the inside of his I'm like who are those people he's like those are my kids I'm like do they know you've turned the camera on he's said well they're my kids I'm like and yet he's like well they know the camera is there I'm like knowing the camera is there and knowing you've turned it on are two completely different things so that kind of issue right about what is that going to feel like when we started doing field work with consumers who had early Smart Homes we would go and ask them about you know what was going on and a couple of things came to the FL very quickly first thing was consumers said well suddenly all this stuff I didn't know about I have to know about all the time now I don't know how to make sense of it which ran the gamut from one particularly argumentative couple in the US where the conversation went like this he said why do you do laundry every day washing she said you like clean clothes he's like have you been doing the washing every day she's like for years he's like why didn't I know about it she's like where did you think the clean clothes came from he said yeah but you're using a lot of water she's like again clean clothes he's like but every day she's like yeah he's like wow did I know about this she's like clearly not and so here have this piece of technology that laid bare a set of domestic habits that were invisible and on the one hand that's probably actually quite useful in terms of how we start to remap and make or Equitable certain kinds of domestic labor but it was really complicated in terms of the consequences of it similarly we have been studying toilet flushing I really do have the best job ever um and the conversations between household occupants about who flushes toilets under what circumstances unexpectedly interesting but also really contentious right cuz here are things that have been quote unquote invisible that iot suddenly makes quite visible and when you start to say to Consumers well let's now imagine who are the other sort of entities that are going to now hear about your toilet flushing Habits Like are we telling you water company are we telling your doctor are we telling your service provider your health insurance company and suddenly the phrase that everyone uses is Gossip are you telling me my house is gossiping about me because what they've moved from thinking about is privacy to reputation and from a single device to a notion of what is that aggregation of information going to say about me what are the judgments that will be made about me and who's going to know about it play that out to a city level start to think about how does that get managed it's a lawsuit that's just been resolved in um the state of Illinois for the city of Chicago who had outsourced their traffic light management system to an external vendor who was being penalized for not generating enough revenue and who changed the time that the yellow light was yellow on the traffic lights to diminish it just enough that they caught more people running red lights than they had before an engineer God love him became quite convinced that they'd shortened the yellow and started timing it discovered that they had done so and that they were doing it at different variations to basically trap people for speeding which point the state of Illinois realized they didn't actually know how the system was being utilized at all imagine what happens as these systems start to exist get threaded together who has control about them who regulates them what are the affordances that will be built into them by whom and under what circumstances and suddenly talking about 50 billion connected devices doesn't just sound like an opportunity but also a place with tremendous questions and tremendous prospects for things being a little bit more complicated than they appear similarly we could make the same case about big data when we know there are yet a bites of Big Data coming we know this is going to meet incredible build outs of infrastructure of data centers of data center controls and Regulation and a tremendous amount of scientific research done on the basis of it and also a tremendous amount of other kinds of work that sits on top of it I spend time with data scientists a lot and usually what they say to me is more data equals more truth I find myself usually thinking no more data just equals more data because part of the reason about that is that data doesn't necessarily equal truth to start off with what's in a data set is often uneven it's frequently more complicated than it appears and if it involves human beings it is frequently delightfully and complicatedly inaccurate turns out the average human being tells somewhere between 6 to 200 lies a day by the time you get to 200 you're running for American President I Hast to add but you could oh I wish that I wish that were as funny as it used to be um but you know 9:30 in the morning you could have gotten to a six already enjoy dinner last night sleep well coffee good enjoying this conference speaker oh yeah and you're there you're already there now were any of those like necessarily you engaging as my grandmother used to say the sins of omission or just commission you know which way are you going here right are you actively lying to the point of deceiving others are you merely attempting to keep the social skids rolling on that's fine unless you have data sets built on top of that with the Assumption of Truth now sometimes there are data sets where in fact if everyone is lying it doesn't really matter I have a colleague of mine at the University of Cornell who did a study on online dating as you would um he discovered that 100% of Americans lied in their online profiles no way way all of them does that every single one of them which is great cuz then you just know right it's not so good if it's 80% but 100% was pretty good he actually discovered that men and women lied about completely different things this probably wouldn't surprise you either uh men added 3 to 5 in to their height and women shaved off 3 to 5 PBS from their weight I want to suggest those aren't actually Equitable but whatever um also turns out as he started to play at that work men lied more but women got away with it more I just offer that to you as you go home to your various domestic relationships and ponder that however if you are building data sets where you are collecting human information you have an interesting challenge for some of my colleagues who work in this space they're really excited about the appearance of data collection objects that suggest you can start to get out truth so you know you say you didn't you say you exercise but your Fitbit said you didn't move off the sofa all day long now of course on the one hand your fitbits probably accurate to a degree on the other hand why are you saying you sat on your sofa or why are you saying you exercise right there's a piece there about what are we also revealing when we don't tell the truth that is particularly interesting here but it means most data sets have Monumental flaws in them and it turns out so are the ones that collect machine data it's not just that humans lie it's that machines aren't always entirely accurate about what they're up to either now of course all of that sits on top of another very complicated thing which is the rhetoric of the early days of the internet so if you listen to Kevin Kelly and Stuart brand and all those men from the well one of the things they were very convinced about was that the internet would bring transparency that what data really just wanted to do was be free and if you could make data free and transparent then many social ills would be transformed of course the reality is that transparency is actually an ideology maybe one that you're in favor of but it's still an ideological statement and it is increasingly clear that as's an ideology not everyone who is on the internet Embrace is it think about the complications we have seen in the last oh I don't know 2 or 3 years between National Security transparency who holds the data and under what circumstances and we're increasingly at a point where data sets generated by you are not necessarily owned by you I'm wearing a um a Quantified Self object this one's a misfit by a Kickstarter company who was recently acquired by fossil when I bought that object I didn't know that fossil would be its ultimate owner the data that my body has generated goes with the sale not with me think about what that looks like as we play all of that out right about who owns data who profits from it where does it move how will it be managed it's not just about how it's collected but it's also about how it will be made sense of and of course one of the first ways it will be made sense of is through algorithms and that's all really well and good except that every algorithm in bed is a set of assumptions about the way the world works and a set of ideas about how things should be what data sets go with what data sets under what circumstances and at the moment most of the big algorithms that we encounter in our lives are ones of recommendation if you're you know user of I player Netflix Amazon Google you know pretty much everything even your bank um there are algorithms that say okay if you did this then you will like this and they're predicated on your behavior on the behavior of other people like you and they're always retrospective never prospective and one of the challenges here is that they're finding things that other people have already liked what does it mean to imagine a world where our choices about everything from media content to news to food possibly even to travel are shaped by what other people like us have already done how do you start to imagine a world will we get to reinvent ourselves will we get to be different than we have been we choose to go in another Direction becomes increasingly difficult if the choices that are given up to you are what you have always already done or what other people have always already done I often think about this as the problem of algorithms of recommendation versus algorithms of Wonder or algorithms of surprise which turn out to be quite difficult unsurprisingly that's why no one's done them but you know imagine an algorithm or a service an app cuz they all sit on top of those that doesn't say to you welcome to Melbourne Jan beef we know you need a flat white here are the three coffees you should go get best ones in Melbourne by the way no one agrees to that but here are the other three that everyone else didn't agree to but you know you can get to about five and here's a map to take you the closest way and here is the Uber app to tell you that Uber is coming convenience package to go and you know I like a coffee always very happy to come home to coffeee that is good it would be a different thing to imagine that same app says yeah yeah yeah we know you want coffee and there is coffee but between here and the coffee there's a piece of public art you should see CU it's beautiful and because you need a moment to stand in front of an installation and have a moment of just wonder now do you want that every time you want coffee no most of the time you just want coffee but imagining a world where it is possible that part of what the technology delivers using all that data is a moment of surprise of delight of Wonder is a very different way of starting to imagine the work that algorithms could do for us similarly as we think about autonomous Machinery we think about things like self-driving cars autonomous drones AI there are interesting questions that start to arise there about morals and ethics that are not just decisions about how you code for catastrophe how do you deal with a car that's semi-autonomous if something happens in front of it well you know they'll people will tell you work with those people that we have built an accident triage tree we know what should happen you're like okay what decisions did you make at that moment in time you have an autonomous vehicle a kangaroo jumps out in front and I'm sorry we have yet to be able to model effectively kangaroos bouncing kangaroo goes bouncy bouncy bouncy car has to make a decision do you hit the kangaroo never a good look but maybe better than the other choices do you s out of the way if the kangaro potentially hit property do you try and rescue the driver the passenger children the pedestrians outside if you live in a world where all those people are insured by the same Insurance Company the person outside may be more valuable than the people in the car the property may be more valuable than anyone you may want to rescue the person driving or the children in the back cuz they are our future or you know the person in the front because they know things or any number of calculations right and you may have to make multiple decisions is it better to hit one pedestrian and save four people inside the car is it better to damage property and risk life all of those decisions are being hardwired into technical objects most of those decisions are not technical decisions they're moral decisions they're philosophical decisions they're ethical decisions about what is the world you want to operate in some companies increasingly have ethesis on staff to start worrying this stuff through but every time you think about an algorithm you have to imagine at least I do algorithms are theories the thing about theories is we encode certain assumptions in them about the way the world will be so how you start to unpack that and ask the right critical questions really complicated so it turns out is this if algorithms were complicated security is more so when I was growing up in Silicon Valley security just meant you know software patches on computers not really that anymore think about iot think about the network think about those algorithms you can hack them that's kind of messy how do we start to think about security against that entire formulation what does it mean to think about a world where people are hacking infrastructure so you know the occasional steel plant in Germany airplane or two maybe a Jeep you know what does it mean to hack medical technology so pretty well-known hack in the United States of uh insulin and morphine drips in hospitals about 80% of them are vulnerable not good um you know what does it mean to start hacking other things so there was a interesting hack done on 23 and me which is a genetics profiling site in the United States someone took the data and created basically a race wall you couldn't get to the site unless you could prove you were white so how do you start to imagine data being used in all these other ways right so so the traditional models of security don't scale to this right that's all a problem you also have the human element in all of this which is that you know the most popular password in the world is still 1 2 3 4 5 or password um you know so that's always a bit of a problem we like to share our passwords it's not helpful when you go for multiactor authentication we frequently share our technology objects with other people so that gets a little bit complicated it's really hard to secure a credit card with a phone if you lend your credit card to someone else which many of do hard to secure things if multiple people have your password I know some of you have done this it's bad and yet happens all the time right so how do we imagine a world for all of those things equally difficult when you start to say well that's okay we're just going to go to Biometrics okay so biggest hack in the United States of American government activity last year took a million fingerprints in the data Trove that was captured okay it's one thing to change your password me I can go from password to password star one okay fine don't love it but can do it how you going to change your fingerprints what does that start to mean right as we start to say well little bit more complicated and let's not forget at least certainly in the US and Europe the conversation about security is now a conversation that is also intimately twinned with conversations about National Security and about governmental interests and about at what point do you allow tokens for various things back doors for people where does the line for security exist and what does it look like how do you think about things like everything from th to the blockchain to Notions of encryption and of course the irony of the histories of all of those things where they sit now is a complicated landscape security never as simple as it appears and also one where as human beings we have a hard time working it through the metaphor for securing things is still a padlock on most things the notion of a lock or a password that's a very particular idea rhetorically about what you up to that also just isn't going to scale to other things um and the combination of this and iot is remarkable if you haven't read uh Bruce Sterling's the Epic struggle for the internet of things it's like best 60 page pmic you can you've got a weekend coming up immediately download it and read it and then you'll never want to connect anything to anything ever again of course security also leads you to conversations about privacy um I found this photo attached to a garbage bin in Los Angeles 3 days ago as I was throwing out my coffee cup and I just was like mesmerized like we now put this on trash recepticles wow what does that start to say right we know that humans care about privacy we know that there has been a lot of rhetoric in the tech field that says the Privacy gen Genie is out of the bottle I also think there's a lot of reference that says privacy Genie is now back in the bottle and we're taping the lid down with gaffa tape you've got Tim Cook declaring that privacy is a fundamental human right you've got various parts of the National Security infrastructure declaring there shouldn't be any privacy somewhere in between those things there a really complicated dance and for many human beings it's less about privacy and more about reputation it's not that we don't care about our privacy it's that we care about what are the decisions that are made when all those data pieces get stitched back together again and what are the assessments that we made about it on the basis of that and this is one where the regulatory framework is really interesting and really complicated so what it looks like in the US is very different than Europe is very different than Australia it's very different than a whole range of other countries do you own the data about you is it owned by a third party who has access to it what data sets can be combined with others is a court case pending in the US at the moment where a healthcare service provider bought credit card data and could Now link your credit card activity with your Healthcare data and was starting to see I mean you know in some way some really unsurprising stuff there is a direct Corr between Ikea flat pack Furniture purchasing and emergency room Admissions and we've all been there there was also perhaps again unsurprisingly a direct correlation between the number of times you purchased macers in a month and your overall health I know shock who knew um but you know it's one thing for that to be true it's another thing for them people to raise your rates on the basis of it so how do we start to think about what privacy looks like under those circumstances right and what what does it mean to release data under one circumstance and then have realized that you have released it under several others how this all plays out isn't just as simple as saying well you just need to have opt-in on your website yeah not so much I have a colleague of mine at the Royal College of Art who has produced the loveliest um proof of concept design piece that is a little baby printer about this big and all it does is print out uh service contracts from websites like everyone you've ever signed up for just as a way of saying are you aware what you've signed up for if you actually read everything the terms and conditions of every website you're attached to a you'd never stop reading and B you'd you know not a good look but there's a piece that says what does it mean to think this as this scales out what's it going to mean to think about privacy when we think about smart thermostats in your home what does it mean to think about privacy when're talking about smart telephone poles or traffic lights or structural grids you know there are certainly people in the world of sort of science fiction and digital art who are starting to do things like uh as a really quite well-known project in the UK of people who worked at how to put makeup on your face so that it thwarts CCTV cameras so think about facial recognition you can actually use light and dark makeup in a way that renders your face not a face this is a lot of work you would not want to go through it every morning but it starts to say something about how all of that gets configured right so how do we imagine working through that and what are the questions we would ask and then there's two more for me that kind of top of mind I think particularly as I come back home but also because these are conversations that seem to be going all over the world is we are frequently told that the cost of memory has almost gone to zero so storage is unlimited we just should store everything you know whether this is Ray Kurtz's notion of the singularity that Wonder we'll just be able to uplevel our brains and kind of be done with it it's an Ever moving deadline but you know there's that sort of moment whether there's the idea we should just you know save everything cuz then we can sort it out later and you start to ask you know what are the kind of what are the usage models here that we imagine and you know the persistent one that I often hear from my sort of my students and my colleagues as well you know that prental problem you have I bet some of you have had it at this conference when you go to a conference someone walks up to you knows exactly who you are and you're thinking have I met you before you know you have and you fumble for a name and wouldn't it be lovely just to have the little thing in your ear that says this is so and so you owe them an email and a book review and possibly $10 but it's unclear that it be great of course the reality of that is also that you suddenly start to imagine what if you could never forget anything again what if everything you ever did and said was just there accessible retrievable exactly accessible retrievable and perennially kind of just available if you could never get away from the things you said or had said to you turns out there are mental illnesses based on this very problem and that actually as human beings one of the ways we survive is by forgetting things but what would it mean to have systems that remember everything about us go back to my kind of vague anxiety with algorithms that there's no possibility of reinvention the notion of the data parently being with you is a little bit complicated too now of course there are lots of people who think that retaining lots of data is a good idea and you know there are complicated agendas that revolve around that and many questions about what would you know data hygiene in this particular instance look like some technologies have the benefit quote unquote where stuff just degrades any of you who used penccil know that things that written pencil don't look so good 20 years later than they did when you wrote them fountain pen slightly better typewriter excellent lasts forever uh stuff I have on floppy discs not so retrievable so there a piece with the affordance of the technology mean that certain things have just kind of disappeared but what does it mean to imagine that things don't and what are the consequences for human beings if you know being forgotten is part of what we want to think about and how on Earth will we manage this in a world where you have well I don't know Australian government regulation suggesting full data retention on the one hand and Europe wanting to go to the right to be forgotten those seem to be kind of oppositional positions and what does that mean as you move between those countries as some of us do are you forgotten in one place and intensely Remembered in another and if so how do you feel about that and does that mean if Europeans come here they can be forgotten but the rest of us have to be remembered gets a little bit complicated right about how does all of that get enacted and while those are extreme situations the mind of Persians of that are not so much and then last but by no means least in terms of the things that I think we talk about a lot that seem to be shaping the technical agenda and certainly the technical imagination but could stand a little bit to scrutiny is this notion of innovation uh or disruption hear that one too sort of twinned ideas right now of course the thing about Innovation and new objects is that they are mostly accompanied by sort of these two stories about vast utopian fantasies and vast dystopian fantasies um you know whether it's the robots which will simultaneously liberate us and kill us all so kind of kill John Connor on the one hand you know save us from boring work on the other there is a kind of a sense where we simultaneously want to have new technologies and are very interested in the things that they represent and on the other hand deeply fearful of the consequences it turns out there are some other questions you might want to ask though particularly as we talk about disruptive innovation a great deal and you look at certain sorts of disruptive innovation and think what is being disrupted to whose benefit what manners of inequities are being reproduced what new inequities are being created who's doing the disruption in whose favor is it and what isn't being talked about while all of that is happening so it's one thing to say well we've disrupted taxi systems you're like okay tell me about what that means for transportation systems passenger safety what that means for roads what that means for car ownership what that might mean for forms of pollution talk me through it right and there's a piece here that says as we get more and more taken with all of that there are questions we forget to ask now you know clearly I work in a company that is driven by the notion that we should be able to make better technology every generation than the generation before and for us some of that's pretty straightforward Moors law is a good engine where you know what is better is well known and clearly articulated but in many of these other spaces there are questions we all should ask as people who produce technology about what is better what is being you know one and lost and under what circumstances so at the risk of having now depressed you thoroughly about the future um I think for me one of the things that I look at as I look at building out the next 10 years of technology is that while the technology and the technological work is hard the reality is if it isn't also done with an awareness that there will be human beings involved in it at every Point even if in some of those instances it is just because we install them and maintain them and update them but also because we will be the objects and subjects of all this technology so how is it that we will in continue as we think about Technical Solutions to also Imagine there'll be people in the equation all the way through it how we think about educating our Regulators better how we think about engaging with our customers and our clients how we think about living in these worlds as consumers but for me more importantly as Citizens all big questions right and if we're not thinking about the human peace my suspicion is we don't quite get it right and at the risk of kind of you know moralizing just a little bit on a Friday morning while you're all still a bit sleepy I want to suggest that we get to be the architects of our own future here right is that some of these systems if they roll out out the way they do won't necessarily be good for any of us so there's a piece here that says you know we're already building tomorrow at Intel I get to go to Labs where 2025 is already there I have a colleague of mine who says he gets to lives in the future and visits the present on weekends there is a way where I get to do that at work right I get to go and see what 2025 is going to feel like many of you are already building things that won't come to pass this year or next but at some point in the future right and we get to do all of that but there's this sort of tremendous amount of work that needs to get done too I know we spent a lot of time talking about what the digital world will look like and a lot of time building it but I think that actually means there's this huge opportunity too for about how we want to build it and what we want it to look like and for me one of my real pleasures in getting to talk to a room of technologists is to say listen we have this opportunity to make it better than it's been before to make it acutely aware of the worlds it will be in and there's this huge kind of moment of tremendous opportunity big challenges but also this me I know I sound naive I'm going to plead more coffee um but this moment where we get to be really optimistic about what the future could be partly because we get to craft it and we get to shape it with a little bit more awareness than every previous generation and you know I can live in Hope of a world where maybe I don't think that you know my house is spying on me and where we won't quite worry about data and algorithms in the same ways we could in this present moment in time that also means we have a lot of responsibility all of us in this room to get it right so on that note I'm going to tell you you all have to get it right and also collect your raffle prizes and with that I'm going to stop and say thank you what an absolutely incredible keyn note it won't be the technology it will be how we manage it and for whose benefit and I my mother would be proud and we certainly share your optimism about the future slight side note Michael who's looking after our social media uh was tweeting all about you during the last hour and uh was suddenly presented with uh Intel ads by Twitter so we know we're probably already in the future um yeah I'm sure I should say sorry for that but you should buy our stuff it's great uh geneveve uh we do have a a question from the audience it's from Paul waer and he begins with firstly thanks for a wonderful talk you said that in part your job was to explain the world to Engineers do you think there's a Converse process to explain engineers and by extension technology and knowledge to the world absolutely um and in fact when I first came to Intel there was a moment a protracted one frankly um where I had no idea what was going on um you know I consider myself to be a reasonably bright human being you know I'm educated I seem to speak English as my first language um and I would be in meetings where I literally couldn't actually get a handle on anything that had just transpired um and I used to keep my notebook would have what I could work out in the meeting and then an entire list of all the things I didn't understand which would never be much bigger like it was a very long list and I would go find people and say when you said this what on Earth did you mean and part of the way I actually managed my first year at intel was to treat it like it was field workor exactly so I made the Anthropologist into made the you know the engineers basically into my tribe and I studied them acutely um and someone worked out I had done this about four years ago and said could you come and give us an ethnography of us and I said sure and I came and did a very anthropological kind of analysis of Intel and used words like endogamous marriage practices which confused the hell out of everyone they're like oh we don't know that word I'm like it's a term of Art in my discipline um so I think one of the challenges is that there is some stunning disconnects I think between what people imagine technologists do and what they actually do there are tremendous stereotypes the way there are in almost all Fields had one of my colleagues once in an attempt to explain some of his Engineers to me told me a terrible joke that there were only two kinds of Engineers the introverted ones and the extroverted ones and he said and there's a simple way to tell the difference I said uhoh what is that he said the introverted ones are looking at their own shoes and the extroverted ones will look at yours I thought that's not a very funny joke um and I think one of the challenges has been about how you make sense of the work of technologists how you create room to imagine the possibility of it and how you think about communicating that in ways that I think open up what's actually going on inside Fields so you know we spent a lot of time in Australia talking about stem and I think that tends to limit the conversation cuz it limits our imagination to the disciplinary practices rather than the activity um all of which is to say yes there are days when my job is actually to explain what's going on inside the building to everyone outside the building um and it's a terrifying responsibility frankly I also think it there's work on all of us to be better about talking about what we do in ways that make sense beyond our own disciplines I think you know one of the things that's kept me at Intel all this time was that there's actually really hard to be an anthropologist at Intel that would surprise all of you um and part of the difficulty is that you constantly have to explain your thought process your theoretical tools your disciplinary tools to people who know nothing of it and the work of that has actually been a perverse pleasure that you actually have to get much better at explaining what you're good at to people who don't know any of your shortcuts and it makes me a better researcher because I have to do that piece and I think there's a bit that the reverse of that is true too right I mean I have certainly over my years taken my engineering in colleagues into the field with me um which always resulted in interesting interactions where they'd explained to me that people were idiots cuz they were using technology poorly and I'm like maybe you designed it badly that was but I do think there's that piece about and I don't think it's just a an engineering or a technologist thing I think you know there is incredible work we could all do to be able to put ourselves in other people's shoes more often and to be able to kind of see the world through other people's lived experiences and it it's work and discipline but I think it's really rewarding and one of the things we started doing at in was actually taking our senior leaders into people's homes because it turned out most of them were American and had a very particular vision of the way the world worked so the first time I took a senior engineering lead into a home in China having spent two years impressing on him that Chinese homes were quite small and that we should think differently about you know radio radiuses among other things and he standing in someone's living room when he puts his hand on the ceiling and his hand on the wall he's like Jen this home is quite small I'm like stop touching their house oh my God and he's like it's really quite small I'm like and he's Chinese people look keep me going I got nothing I know I'm really very sorry but I think there is that bit about you know how do we all work on being better about explaining what we do and its value to others but also listening to the concerns that other people have about the solutions we are building and trying to have just this much respect for them because ultimately in all of that there are better Technical Solutions was a very long way of saying yes I explain Engineers to others but often poorly ladies and gentlemen we've all seen something incredibly special this morning and um I do have a a small token of appreciation to uh if I can ever pick it up from the table to thank jev for all of her efforts this morning my absolute pleasure jev f