Translator: Asuman Okatan Reviewer: Reiko Bovee
Thank you.
I want to combine, actually many of the areas I have combined in myself.
I started off as an engineer, and then became a psychologist,
and then helped found this cognitive science field,
and then I migrated to design.
What I really care about is the way
that technology interacts with people and society.
That's a very important topic with relevance to persuasion.
I want to actually talk about what is happening today,
most of which you know, but I'm going to remind you.
I want to talk a little bit about some design theory,
which actually comes from cognitive science
which I will use to talk about the impact of persuasion
and perhaps a possible resistance.
Let me start by examining something very different
from what we talked about,
namely all the forces that are allied against us,
asking us to do things against our will
in two different meanings of the word, "will."
So "will" is things that we don't wish to do:
things that we decide we don't wish to do,
but we end up doing them,
or against our will as in free will where we are persuaded,
perhaps to buy something
that we didn't, otherwise, think that we needed or wanted.
Both of these are different.
We act against our will, our conscious will
when we eat that luscious dessert that's in front of us
that we know violates our diet.
In order to stop eating this,
we actually have to have, in consciousness, the prohibition to act.
Years ago I wrote a paper about this with Tim Shallice,
a neuroscientist.
We actually decided that if we put people in front of a luscious cake,
and we said, "Don't eat it,"
they wouldn't.
But if we walked behind them and said "Boo!"
they would find themselves eating the cake.
That is, once the conscious mind
is distracted from the act of forcibly keeping you
from doing what your subconscious wants to do,
your subconscious takes over.
So, there are really two kinds of minds:
the subconscious which is automatic,
and the conscious which is slow, deliberate,
does not have direct control over what we do,
only can exert biases.
That's a simplification of what really goes on in the brain,
but it's a useful simplification.
We also act against our will when we purchase a popular piece of music,
not necessarily because we like it
but because we want others to see it in our playlist.
Or we buy a new automobile because the old one is old,
and people will think badly of us, or even the way we dress.
Both of these last two examples are engineered.
They're engineered deliberately
by those who market music, and those who design the taste.
For example, potato chips
Can you eat one potato chip?
Or do you start eating the potato chips and finish the bag?
Well, it's not accidental.
The potato chips have been designed
to induce this craving for more and more and more,
designed through the chemicals that are put into them,
that will affect the hormonal balance and designed by the soft.
Of course we are continually being assaulted by modern technology,
by tweets, by blogs, by advertisements.
We're left with little time for thought, little time for reflection.
Yeah, we're given opportunities to connect to long lost friends,
and make new ones who seem to share our interests.
All these services are free, we don't pay for them.
Isn't it really neat that we can examine the stuff on the Internet?
We can tweet, we can go to Facebook, we can go to Netflix -
well that's paid, that we have to charge for.
But on the whole, most of this stuff is free.
In the 20th century, that was a long time ago.
We got used to having things for free like radio and television,
or things that were subsidized like newspapers,
so we didn't have to pay the full cost.
We thought that was not a bad trade-off;
we knew what the trade-off was: it was advertisement.
By allowing ourselves to be subjected to ads,
we got these things for free, and it wasn't too bad
because the advertisement was very explicit.
We knew when it started, we knew when it stopped,
and we could ignore it, go out and get a drink
when the ad comes on television
or in the newspaper, read it or not, we could choose where to move our eyes.
That trade-off was simple.
It also changed an outlook.
We were no longer people
We were consumers.
The job of the consumer is to consume
The advertisements were there to help us consume
because that's how companies kept in business by causing us to consume.
This all started a long time ago.
Probably the first major indication is the automobiles.
In roughly the 1950's, the automobiles deliberately designed themselves
so that you would have to buy a new one every two or three years.
Not only would they fall apart
but there was an annual fashion change, if you will.
The style of the automobile would change,
there'll be new features every single year
and every four or five years, there'll be a major change in the automobiles,
so that it was very visible to other people
when you had an old automobile
that was not in fashion
Automobiles pioneered this that you should always have a new thing
If you did't have a new thing, you were shamed,
and the advertisements helped increase the shame.
The advertisements were sometimes subtle
because they were sometimes the contents of the media
that we were watching or listening to radio, newspapers, magazine,
and then later on television.
We are consumers.
The trade-off again with the advertisements
is we gave them permission to send us the advertisements
because we thought we could also control whether we watched it or not.
In the industry jargon, we were not even called consumers,
we were called eyeballs
because what mattered was attention.
In other words, what they were buying was our attention,
or what the advertisements were paying for was our attention,
our eyeballs.
So again we are consumers, and our job is to consume.
In 1958 Packard wrote a very influential book at the time.
It was called "the Hidden Persuaders,"
in which he realized
that the marketing industry and the advertising industry
were doing numerous studies trying to understand
how to convince us without our being aware
that we are being convinced.
A huge amount of good applied psychology
was being done in the advertising journals.
Now let's move to today.
There is a new revolution, the technology revolution
We go through certain cusps, and we had one a number of years ago
when the personal computer developed
and then the personal computer actually became usable,
and then the power of computation increased, the Internet developed,
the browser developed,
and then the cellular telephone or the mobile came into being
and became everywhere pervasive.
Today we're on a different cusp.
It is brought about
because all of these technologies have matured and now suddenly the fluff
that's been in the research laboratories for the last 20 years
are finally affordable and possible.
So, we have multi touch screens
which was in the laboratories 20 years ago
and we have, what else?
Pervasive communication, huge amounts of memory storage,
cloud storage which allows an incredible amount of computation.
The worlds supercomputers now are available to anyone of you.
If you want a supercomputer, you simply go to Amazon
because Amazon sells books and they sell things.
To do that they need huge amount of computers behind
to figure out what's being bought, what's being sold, what's in inventory.
and to help you buy by saying, "Oh, I see you looked at this.
People who are similar to you have purchased this,
or looked at these other devices, so, why don't you look at those too?"
Now that computer power is being used all the time.
So Amazon will sell it to you.
Today in Silicon Valley, most start-ups don't bother to buy computers;
they borrow their time from Amazon, they borrow their memory from Amazon
because that way it's very flexible.
If you need to put together, 1 million processors
you can do it.
You can do it; its processors are for rent.
So, you can do incredible things.
So, the revolution is a lot of things.
It's computation, communication, displays, powerful sensors,
the Internet and this concept called apps
and then monstrous computational storage,
and what we call the "cloud" which we did store in some locations,
some place in the world or distribute across the world,
and we don't have to worry our minds about it; it's taken care of for us.
Now let me back up to a bit of theory.
It's really applied theory.
In the 1980's, I introduced a concept from perception
that is called affordance, and I introduced at the design centre.
Affordance allows, tells you sort of what a technology affords,
what something affords.
This table affords support; these notes afford not just reading but flexibility,
so I can change my speech as I even give it.
The new technologies, the technological affordances
are connecting, observing, spying, correlating, data mining.
So the story has changed rather dramatically.
Let me talk about an artificial company.
Suppose we have a company, and I'll call it "Buogle."
Now Buogle makes many things available to people who use it for free:
their search, specialized search for authors, airline flights, hotels
comparison shopping, restaurants.
Buogle also makes available cloud-based documents
spreadsheets, drawing packages, 2d, 3d
and blogging tools, websites and amateur and professional videos.
Buogle even makes us operating systems for cell phones
which they give away free to the manufacturers.
So why does Boogle do this?
How do they survive?
Where do they get their money?
What's their product?
So what is Buogle's product?
And who are their customers?
Most people think it's search.
Well, it isn't search, it's you.
You are the product:
your data, your interests, your intentions.
In the past, advertisers only knew your demographics,
and what you might be reading or watching or listening to.
Now they know your age, your wealth, where you live
who you go out with, what you're thinking about,
what you're looking at, what you're buying
and when you read something, they even know
what pate you're reading at the moment if you're using an e-book.
If you're watching a video that's being streamed to you,
they know what you're watching.
If you're watching TV through a video data recorder
they know when you watch it.
They know which ads you skip for which,
when you rewind and watch an advertisement again.
They know a tremendous amount about you.
On top of that, they love walled gardens.
They want to make their place so attractive
that when you go you never ever leave.
We have walled gardens all over.
Google is a walled garden, so is Amazon.
Apple would love their iTunes to be a walled garden,
but so are other sites.
In Europe we have your own sites,
so market plus would be a site for example.
To be fair, Buogle or Google, whether real or imagined,
doesn't sell your details with your name on it,
but they collect all of this.
That's what they sell out to the advertisers.
They know everything
This is coming to even more places, so that look at the Internet.
Where is the internet?
It's on your phone, it's on your computers,
it's in your cars, in your navigation system
it's on your TV.
LG just released a TV set that has the Internet built in,
and they released it with advertisements,
so they have a company that provides advertisements
on your TV set whenever you turn it on.
You have your entertainment centre, your TV sets connected to the Internet
as is your blue ray DVD player,
as is your video data recorder,
as is whatever service you use for streming video if you want,
and of course your computers, your cell phones,
and soon pretty soon your toilet and your refrigerator
and your microwave oven.
For that matter, there is a new thermostat in the market
that is connected to the Internet, so it knows what the weather forecast is.
I can go on and on in this but I won't.
Let me just end up.
There is another concept.
It's kind of a theory of mind.
The philosopher,
Daniel Dennett, argued once
about three different kinds of stances we can take with regard to things
He called one the physical stance, the designer stance,
and the other one, intentional stance.
What he meant was: if I see a chair or an object
I look at it physically and try to figure out how to use it.
Or I try to figure out why it was designed this way.
Let me look at that designer stance.
If we start to understand why the advertisements are here,
that's knowledge
If every time we see something, see something advertising,
and we say to ourselves,
"Why was it there? What did they have in mind?"
that's knowledge.
That knowledge is the beginning of moral resistance.
Knowledge is partially it.
Nudge?
Nudge is a direction,
but nudge is too weak, it's too subtle
What we really need is something like a powerful reset.
What we really do is to change the value system that we have.
That old is good, not bad to be replaced.
Old is good, green is good, sustainable is good, fair is good.
Now, that plus our knowledge,
plus our understanding of the role and the importances that designers play
is a big beginning.
I just have to warn you though, the way the world works.
Just like spammers spam, we build in anti-spam devices,
spammers are clever, they get around the anti-spam devices.
They produce more.
Terrorists terrorise.
We figure out ways against them, they figure out clever ways around it.
People try to break into our security are especially good.
They're computer science professionals.
They break into the system, we fix that break,
they find a new one.
The same will happen with the knowledge game.
So it's time to reset,
but we'll have to be resetting for the rest of eternity
Thank you
(Applause)