How better tech could protect us from distraction | Tristan Harris

296,289 views ・ 2016-07-14

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:13
What does it mean to spend our time well?
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I spend a lot of my time
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thinking about how to spend my time.
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Probably too much -- I probably obsess over it.
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My friends think I do.
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But I feel like I kind of have to, because these days,
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it feels like little bits of my time kind of slip away from me,
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and when that happens, it feels like parts of my life are slipping away.
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Specifically,
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it feels like little bits of my time get slipped away
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to various things like this,
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like technology -- I check things.
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I'll give you an example.
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If this email shows up --
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how many of you have gotten an email like this, right?
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I've been tagged in a photo.
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When this appears,
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I can't help but click on it right now.
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Right? Because, like, what if it's a bad photo?
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So I have to click it right now.
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But I'm not just going to click "See photo,"
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what I'm actually going to do is spend the next 20 minutes.
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(Laughter)
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But the worst part is that I know this is what's going to happen,
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and even knowing that's what's going to happen
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doesn't stop me from doing it again the next time.
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Or I find myself in a situation like this,
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where I check my email and I pull down to refresh,
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But the thing is that 60 seconds later,
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I'll pull down to refresh again.
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Why am I doing this?
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This doesn't make any sense.
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But I'll give you a hint why this is happening.
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What do you think makes more money in the United States
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than movies, game parks and baseball combined?
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Slot machines.
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How can slot machines make all this money
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when we play with such small amounts of money?
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We play with coins.
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How is this possible?
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Well, the thing is ...
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my phone is a slot machine.
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Every time I check my phone,
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I'm playing the slot machine to see,
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what am I going to get?
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What am I going to get?
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Every time I check my email,
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I'm playing the slot machine,
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saying, "What am I going to get?"
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Every time I scroll a news feed,
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I'm playing the slot machine to see,
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what am I going to get next?
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And the thing is that,
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again, knowing exactly how this works -- and I'm a designer,
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I know exactly how the psychology of this works,
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I know exactly what's going on --
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but it doesn't leave me with any choice,
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I still just get sucked into it.
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So what are we going to do?
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Because it leaves us with this all-or-nothing relationship
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with technology, right?
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You're either on,
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and you're connected and distracted all the time,
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or you're off,
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but then you're wondering,
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am I missing something important?
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In other words, you're either distracted
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or you have fear of missing out.
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Right?
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So we need to restore choice.
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We want to have a relationship with technology
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that gives us back choice about how we spend time with it,
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and we're going to need help from designers,
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because knowing this stuff doesn't help.
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We're going to need design help.
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So what would that look like?
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So let's take an example that we all face:
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chat -- text messaging.
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So let's say there's two people.
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Nancy's on the left and she's working on a document,
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and John's on the right.
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And John suddenly remembers,
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"I need to ask Nancy for that document before I forget."
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So when he sends her that message,
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it blows away her attention.
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That's what we're doing all the time, bulldozing each other's attention,
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left and right.
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And there's serious cost to this,
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because every time we interrupt each other,
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it takes us about 23 minutes, on average,
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to refocus our attention.
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We actually cycle through two different projects
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before we come back to the original thing we were doing.
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This is Gloria Mark's research combined with Microsoft research,
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that showed this.
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And her research also shows that it actually trains bad habits.
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The more interruptions we get externally,
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it's conditioning and training us to interrupt ourselves.
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We actually self-interrupt every three-and-a-half minutes.
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This is crazy.
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So how do we fix this?
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Because Nancy and John are in this all-or-nothing relationship.
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Nancy might want to disconnect,
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but then she'd be worried:
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What if I'm missing something important?
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Design can fix this problem.
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Let's say you have Nancy again on the left,
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John on the right.
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And John remembers, "I need to send Nancy that document."
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Except this time,
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Nancy can mark that she's focused.
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Let's say she drags a slider and says,
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"I want to be focused for 30 minutes,"
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so -- bam -- she's focused.
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Now when John wants to message her,
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he can get the thought off of his mind --
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because he has a need, he has this thought,
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and he needs to dump it out before he forgets.
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Except this time,
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it holds the messages so that Nancy can still focus,
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but John can get the thought off of his mind.
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But this only works if one last thing is true,
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which is that Nancy needs to know that if something is truly important,
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John can still interrupt.
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But instead of having constant accidental or mindless interruptions,
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we're now only creating conscious interruptions,
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So we're doing two things here.
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We're creating a new choice for both Nancy and John,
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But there's a second, subtle thing we're doing here, too.
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And it's that we're changing the question we're answering.
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Instead of the goal of chat being:
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"Let's design it so it's easy to send a message" --
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that's the goal of chat,
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it should be really easy to send a message to someone --
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we change the goal to something deeper and a human value,
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which is: "Let's create the highest possible quality communication
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in a relationship between two people.
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So we upgraded the goal.
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Now, do designers actually care about this?
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Do we want to have conversations about what these deeper human goals are?
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Well, I'll tell you one story.
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A little over a year ago,
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I got to help organize a meeting
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between some of technology's leading designers and Thich Nhat Hanh.
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Thich Nhat Hanh is an international spokesperson for mindfulness meditation.
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And it was the most amazing meeting.
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You have to imagine -- picture a room --
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on one side of the room, you have a bunch of tech geeks;
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on the other side of the room,
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you have a bunch of long brown robes, shaved heads, Buddhist monks.
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And the questions were about the deepest human values,
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like what does the future of technology look like
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when you're designing for the deepest questions
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and the deepest human values?
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And our conversation centered on listening more deeply
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to what those values might be.
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He joked in our conversation
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that what if, instead of a spell check,
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you had a compassion check,
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meaning, you might highlight a word that might be accidentally abrasive --
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perceived as abrasive by someone else.
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So does this kind of conversation happen in the real world,
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not just in these design meetings?
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Well, the answer is yes,
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and one of my favorites is Couchsurfing.
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If you didn't know, Couchsurfing is a website
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that matches people who are looking for a place to stay
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with a free couch, from someone who's trying to offer it.
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So, great service --
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what would their design goal be?
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What are you designing for if you work at Couchsurfing?
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Well, you would think it's to match guests with hosts.
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Right?
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That's a pretty good goal.
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But that would kind of be like our goal with messaging before,
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where we're just trying to deliver a message.
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So what's the deeper, human goal?
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Well, they set their goal
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as the need to create lasting, positive experiences and relationships
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between people who've never met before.
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And the most amazing thing about this was in 2007,
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they introduced a way to measure this,
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which is incredible.
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I'll tell you how it works.
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For every design goal you have,
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you have to have a corresponding measurement
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to know how you're doing --
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a way of measuring success.
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So what they do is,
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let's say you take two people who meet up,
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and they take the number of days those two people spent together,
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and then they estimate how many hours were in those days --
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how many hours did those two people spend together?
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And then after they spend that time together,
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they ask both of them:
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How positive was your experience?
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Did you have a good experience with this person that you met?
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And they subtract from those positive hours
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the amount of time people spent on the website,
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because that's a cost to people's lives.
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Why should we value that as success?
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And what you were left with
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is something they refer to as "net orchestrated conviviality,"
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or, really, just a net "Good Times" created.
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The net hours that would have never existed, had Couchsurfing not existed.
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Can you imagine how inspiring it would be to come to work every day
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and measure your success
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in the actual net new contribution of hours in people's lives
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that are positive, that would have never existed
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if you didn't do what you were about to do at work today?
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Can you imagine a whole world that worked this way?
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Can you imagine a social network that --
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let's say you care about cooking,
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and it measured its success in terms of cooking nights organized
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and the cooking articles that you were glad you read,
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and subtracted from that the articles you weren't glad you read
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or the time you spent scrolling that you didn't like?
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Imagine a professional social network
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that, instead of measuring its success in terms of connections created
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or messages sent,
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instead measured its success in terms of the job offers that people got
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that they were excited to get.
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And subtracted the amount of time people spent on the website.
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Or imagine dating services,
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like maybe Tinder or something,
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where instead of measuring the number of swipes left and right people did,
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which is how they measure success today,
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instead measured the deep, romantic, fulfilling connections people created.
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Whatever that was for them, by the way.
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But can you imagine a whole world that worked this way,
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that was helping you spend your time well?
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Now to do this you also need a new system,
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because you're probably thinking,
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today's Internet economy --
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today's economy in general --
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is measured in time spent.
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The more users you have,
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the more usage you have,
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the more time people spend,
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that's how we measure success.
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But we've solved this problem before.
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We solved it with organic,
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when we said we need to value things a different way.
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We said this is a different kind of food.
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So we can't compare it just based on price;
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this is a different category of food.
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We solved it with Leed Certification,
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where we said this is a different kind of building
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that stood for different values of environmental sustainability.
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What if we had something like that for technology?
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What if we had something whose entire purpose and goal
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was to help create net new positive contributions to human life?
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And what if we could value it a different way,
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so it would actually work?
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Imagine you gave this different premium shelf space on app stores.
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Imagine you had web browsers that helped route you
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to these kinds of design products.
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Can you imagine how exciting it would be to live and create that world?
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We can create this world today.
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Company leaders, all you have to do --
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only you can prioritize a new metric,
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which is your metric for net positive contribution to human life.
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And have an honest conversation about that.
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Maybe you're not doing so well to start with,
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but let's start that conversation.
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Designers, you can redefine success; you can redefine design.
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Arguably, you have more power than many people in your organization
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to create the choices that all of us live by.
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Maybe like in medicine,
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where we have a Hippocratic oath
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to recognize the responsibility and this higher value
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that we have to treat patients.
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What if designers had something like that,
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in terms of this new kind of design?
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And users, for all of us --
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we can demand technology that works this way.
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Now it may seem hard,
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but McDonald's didn't have salads until the consumer demand was there.
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Walmart didn't have organic food until the consumer demand was there.
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We have to demand this new kind of technology.
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And we can do that.
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And doing that
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would amount to shifting from a world that's driven and run
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entirely on time spent,
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to world that's driven by time well spent.
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I want to live in this world,
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and I want this conversation to happen.
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Let's start that conversation now.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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