 How's the echo, is it all right? Yeah, so thank you, devops days for welcoming me. I'm actually an iOS developer. It's been very interesting to hear some of the talks earlier. And so this talk's gonna be a little bit different, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts afterwards and so on. You can find me at one of the open spaces after this. I believe they're after lunch. I'd love to hear your feedback and what you guys think about what we talk about today. So before I begin, I want you guys all to think about the number of times and for how long total you've looked at your phone, your iPad, and your computer today. And what about in the time since the last talk? Or what about the amount of time that you did during the last talk? Now I challenge you all to turn off your devices. I mean actually off, not silent, not airplane mode, shut down. I don't expect many of you to actually do this. We make excuses. Oh, I need to take notes on my iPad. I need to keep up with a Slack channel. What if my family needs me? To all those things I say, 20 years ago cell phones were a rare sight. People managed just fine. So take up my challenge, turn off your phone and computer and see how long you can keep it off. Also as a pointer, your faces glow when I use these things so it makes it pretty easy to tell if you lose faith in a few minutes. Okay, take a wrap. Put it in a box with a button. Wire the button to a food dispenser that can drop a pellet of yummy rat food into the box. You get to design the logic between the button and the food dispenser and let the rat use it. After 10 minutes of using it, we'll disable the food dispenser and over the next 10 minutes, I'll give you a dollar for every time the rat presses the button. How would you like to program the button and the food dispenser? A man by the name of B.F. Skinner tried this back in the 60s and the results of his study are changing the course of history to this day. Skinner defined five standard ways you can go about reinforcing your rat in the scenario. The first is continuous. This means that for every button press you give the rat a pellet of food, so one for one relationship instant reinforcement. Continuous reinforcement is the worst of his methods. Once you decouple the button and the food, the rat will press the button a few more times, but quickly the button pressing behavior will extinguish. I won't go into detail about a few of the middle ones, but they could be things like giving the rat food every 30 seconds, regardless of button presses, or giving the rat food every fifth button press. But the best way to get the rat to press the button and continue pressing it without a reward is variable reinforcement. Variable reinforcement is a schedule of reward that is random. Button presses, heat of reward are randomly chosen. This could be like giving the rat food after the seventh press, the 15th press, the 22nd press, 25th press, 42nd press, et cetera. This variable interval reinforcement is the most effective form of reinforcement. But the variable interval strategy exists outside of the rat box. When you call your dog's name, Sparky, come here. Sparky comes to you. You don't always reward Sparky. Food is only sometimes a reward. Other reasons you might call Sparky over because you dropped a piece of food on the floor or because you just want his attention. And sometimes you're taking him to get a bath. The lack of a pattern or the variability is what keeps Sparky coming back. Skinner's discovery isn't limited to animals. The slot machine is the quintessential human skinner box. Just swap out the rat food with money. Slot machines are designed to randomly give out small rewards on a variable interval schedule to make the user keep pulling that lever. The effectiveness of the human skinner box is why Las Vegas exists today. And maybe the Hoover Dam. The behavioral description of habit formation and reinforcement was discovered in the 1960s and quickly became the gold standard for understanding human habit behavior. In the time since Skinner's discovery, countless new fields have sprouted up, each with their own sections of behavioral studies. One significant field, for example, is the field of behavioral economics. Behavioral economics will explain why movie theaters sell popcorn, a small popcorn for $4, a medium popcorn for $6.50, and a large for $7. But I'm not here to talk to you guys about rats, Las Vegas, or movie theater popcorn. I'm here to talk to you guys about smartphones. I'm an iOS developer by trade, so I focus on smartphones. But my thoughts today extend beyond smartphones into a wide range of technologies. So I'm gonna mention five different scenarios, and I'd like you guys to stand up if it applies to you or someone you know. This is a cue to put your laptop down if you couldn't last five minutes. So get ready to stand. So please stand if you or someone you know uses their phone while driving a car and remain standing. Wow, this might go a lot faster than I expected. Remain standing, please. Please stand if you or someone you know uses their phone when they know it's getting late and they should probably go to sleep. Please stand if you currently have a desire to check your phone, or if you checked it during this talk. Please stand if you or someone you know uses their phone while in the middle of a face-to-face conversation. Sometimes you can be on the receiving end of that. And please stand if you or someone you know has lost their phone and felt a strong negative response, a stronger negative response than losing something of similar monetary value. Okay, all right, before you sit down, take a quick look around the room, including the balcony, and you might be hard pressed to find anyone who's sitting. All right, sit down, please, thank you. We are addicted to smartphones. Why do I say this? The American Society of Addiction Medicine uses five means of characterizing addiction. Inability to consistently abstain, impairment in behavioral control, craving, diminished recognition of significant problems with one's behaviors and interpersonal relationships, and a dysfunctional, emotional response. Now take a moment and think of someone who uses their phone a lot. Maybe it's a friend, maybe it's a spouse, maybe it's you, and using the five criteria I just mentioned, do you think they are addicted? Do you think that maybe you are addicted? I'd like to talk about a story that I experienced a few years ago. In an earlier life, I was a kayak tour guide, and so I'd take people out on, sit on top kayaks in the ocean, and we'd go into some caves that had swells and waves coming through, and it was, at times it was a little dicey. And I remember vividly one time I took out a group of people, and it was a man, while we were in the cave, I was swimming to keep his kayak stable in this cave. Big swells coming through, I probably in retrospect shouldn't have even taken him in, but the point is, I don't do that anymore for multiple reasons, but the point is, that while he was in the cave, and I was busy trying to keep him upright, he pulls out of his life vest, out of the cleavage of his life vest, if you will, he pulls out a cell phone in two plastic bags, and answers a phone call. I don't know what he did that was so important that he had to answer a phone call, but to think that he would put something, like, theoretically his life was at some small level of risk at that moment, and he had to answer a phone call and obviously let go of his paddle and stop listening to me. So he put his life at risk. And if that isn't obvious addiction, I can't think of anything more that is. One other interesting story, a few months ago, Honolulu, the local government, has started a process to make it illegal to use your phone while crossing the street, because even though you might be walking when you have a green light, people will not look at traffic coming and get hit by cars, it happens everywhere, and Honolulu's actually starting to pass legislation to prevent people from looking at their phone and crossing their streets. So we are addicted to smartphones, whether you like it or not. In a 2015 study, Deloitte calculated that the average American checks their phone 46 times a day. 81% of Americans reported checking their phones while dining out in a restaurant. And according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the percentage of drivers visibly manipulating their handheld devices more than quadrupled in the past eight years. There are many reasons to believe that these numbers are even higher today. Many schools now use texting and app-based services to quiz their students, take role and measure student understanding. We check our phones before we brush our teeth, before we eat breakfast, before we make coffee, before we get out of bed, and maybe even before saying good morning to our loved ones. It's literally the first thing we do in the morning and the last thing we do at night. We're addicted to smartphones. I mentioned this data not to scare you or to call for a decrease in phone usage, but as a tool to portray technology's growing role in our daily lives. We're addicted to smartphones, but the question is why? Why are we so attached to our phones? Why do we find ourselves putting our smartphones before our sleep, our safety, and our relationships? How did we let smartphones become such integral parts of our lives? But before we talk anymore about phones, I must point out that the core functionalities of even a basic flip phone, that is a phone and text messaging, these things are inherently addicting. These two basic features alone account for a significant amount of the addictive behavior that smartphones elicit. They follow patterns that easily fall into the skinner's most reinforcing category. It's an important note, yet it doesn't account for all pieces of the puzzle. The technology that we all make is the driver for the majority of smartphone dependency formation. Specifically, apps are in the ideal position to create strong levels of addiction. Each app has the potential to become its own skinner box, making the smartphone a collection of skinner boxes. An app like, so in other words, it isn't like a slot machine in your pocket. It's like all of Las Vegas in your pocket. Each app is its own slot machine. Take for example an app like Twitter. You open Twitter, you post something about your day, and then you close the app, okay? Over the next few days, at random times throughout the day, you get a notification. 10 minutes after posting, one retweet. 25 minutes after that, two likes. Five minutes after that, four more retweets. An hour after that, a friend replies, 10 minutes later, so on. This can go on for days. And then you add that you have at least five more apps just like it, and you get messages from your mother, you get hourly reminders to stand, you get breaking news notifications from CNN, and don't get me started on Lyft's promotions. The list of seemingly random notifications goes on. It's no wonder we can't be away from our phones for more than two minutes. There's one more thing to factor in. The timing on these notifications is not random. Many of the apps that send push notifications are trying to do better than random. Skinner's studies may have identified different types of reinforcement and ranked them by their strength, but he didn't master reinforcement. Mastering reinforcement is a task being taken up by a handful of tech-oriented companies. It's a small field, but it's growing quickly for obvious reasons, and the five employees at a company called Dopamine Labs seem to be leading the race to master human reinforcement. Dopamine Labs created what's called the Dopamine, or sorry, what's called the Reinforcement API. It's designed to make software more addicting. Two neuroeconomics, PhDs from the University of Southern California, are developing this API, and it's available to software engineers today. You can open your computer right now and look at it. The API is designed to help engineers increase the addictiveness of their products by determining if and when an action should elicit a reward. The API experiments with different methodologies to increase the strength of the product's reward schedule. Co-founder and COO Ramsey Brown explained that an effective method for forming habits is occasional bursts or clusters of rewards. Dopamine and other companies like it are studying human response to different reinforcement schedules, tweaking their strategy, and testing it out on large sets of people. Furthermore, these services are learning about unique user habits, providing personalized reinforcement schedules to each individual user. Technology isn't just maximizing the potential for addiction for mankind, but now we can maximize addiction for each individual. That includes you. The ability to create extremely addictive technology has tremendous value. Behaviorists have a coveted role in the tech world. Tech companies have a significant incentive to study particular psychological methodologies that can increase user engagement and usage. This is easily characterized in that software success today is measured by number of daily users, time spent using the software, et cetera. Software with ad-based revenue relies on users and high usage rates in order to make money. This means that for a significant portion of the software that is being distributed, tactics and changes that increase open rates and time and use are welcome with open arms. It's the logical step to take. It's simple economics. A great example is Snapchat. Snap Inc. is valued at over $15 billion. They have no significant revenue and they have never been profitable. Yeah, great company to invest in. In their March earnings report, after notifying shareholders of a $2.2 billion net loss in Q1, that's more than the whole value of the Domino's Pizza Corporation, Snap's report boasted an operational highlight of an increase in daily active users. Do you get this? A top 400 company on the New York Stock Exchange announces a loss of $2.2 billion, only a hundred million in revenue and then proudly announces an increase in daily users? I apologize if anyone works for Snap. If a company can be valued as highly as Snap, held up almost exclusively by usage numbers, why wouldn't companies be scrambling to increase their user's engagement? Well, they are and it's working. We're at an interesting point in time. Psychology and technology have a strong incentive to be tightly coupled. Tech companies can employ the decades of psychological research to increase their bottom line. From increasing user engagement to increasing click-through rate in sales, technology companies have strong incentives to look to psychology for guidance and advice. While tech companies are benefiting from the field of psychology, there's little evidence of tech companies returning favor. When I first began my studies in psychology and human behavior, I learned about how often people make irrational decisions. I learned of studies that showed how easily humans can be influenced and nudged towards certain decisions, even while feeling that they've been made free choices by themselves. This includes you guys as well. What's interesting is even if you're aware of the psychological tricks that are being done on you, it doesn't prevent the psychological tricks from working on you right then and there. It revealed the malability of human behavior. I wrote a paper about the psychological effects of social media, specifically how scrolling through a feed affects a subject's emotional state. In my research paper, I was specifically interested in the rates of depression between Facebook users who frequently scroll through news feeds and those who don't. I found that this data did not seem to exist. More importantly, I realized the potential value for collecting such data. This is what began my initial interest in the combination of technology and psychology. Sparked by anecdotal evidence, I proposed the question, does a news feed feature increase the rate of depression in social media users? As an aside, I used the term news feed to describe a list of posts or actions by friends on social media platforms. Like any good researcher, by the end of my studies, I found myself with many more questions and no closer to an answer. I found no data on not even a correlation between news feeds and depression. No studies have looked at this correlation. Even if I had found such a correlation, it could have been explained by claiming that the use of news feeds is a coping mechanism or a symptom of the cause of depression. I soon discovered that the whole field of data was sparse at best. There was little research available in the public domain. All I could find was a whole lot of unstudied questions. I discovered that the complexity and the depth to modern software created an ecosystem with great potential for counteracting effects. Surface-level data fails to reveal the smaller moving parts that we have widely differing impacts. For example, social media users as a whole may show no significant difference in depression rates from their controls. But under the surface, you can break social media users into two groups. You have active users and you have passive users. You might fall into one of these categories yourself. An active user is someone who spends the majority of their time creating content. That could mean posting text and photos and frequently sending direct messages to people. Passive users, on the other hand, are people who spend little or no time posting content, but instead scroll through their news feeds and their friends' photos and posts. Active users are the journalists. Passive users are the readers. Now, if you break the users into these two groups, I believe that the two groups would have significantly different rates of depression. Beyond this correlational study, users could have their experience altered to place them into two different experiment groups, one with exclusively passive features, one with exclusively active. This would be an ideal experiment to measure the effects. Unfortunately, we're not studying such detailed behavior. Just this year, one of the first experiments on Facebook usage was published by Tel Aviv University in Israel. A unique scenario allowed for a security company to split their employees into two groups, one that used Facebook and one that was banned from using Facebook. The results revealed that those using Facebook indeed showed a decrease in happiness compared to those that were banned from the platform. The study has been hailed as on the frontier of this type of research, but it didn't investigate different types of usage. There's still a lot more research to be done. But in such an ever-growing and changing field, this type of research is put on the back burner, arguably for good reason. The industry can change in a flash. Furthermore, this type of study is ideally conducted by the tech companies themselves, or us. It's no surprise that the companies would be hesitant to conduct this kind of research. The results could be bad. But Dalton Combs, the founder and CEO of dopamine labs, offered me some consolation. And now, as some tech companies begin to solidify their place in the majority of people's lives, I expect that studies like this will begin. Combs told me about his vision. He sees the future of software in a bright light. Combs and I see this addicting technology as an opportunity to provide tremendous value to users. People often look for easy ways to alter their own behavior. From snake oil to modern medicine, man has searched for ways to alter their own behavior for centuries. We look for weight loss pills, aphrodisiacs, antidepressants, stimulants, and many more tricks to improve ourselves, to get more out of our day. Many of these results can be achieved through changes to one's behaviors and actions. But making these changes is hard. We don't do them. That's why you set a weight loss goal every month. You don't, your weight's the same, but because all you have to do is eat less or exercise more, but we don't do it. It's hard. Many of these results can be achieved through changes to your behavior, but making it is hard. It takes significant willpower to change your habits alone, but we have just unveiled that the power technology has over man. Combs' vision is one where we can use technology to alter behavioral patterns. Users should be able to turn on the addictiveness of a product, turn it up or down depending on their personal goals. I envision a world where technology is the solution we use to help our personal problems. It provides guidance and direction on the path to self-improvement. This is already beginning to happen. We have apps that help us counter calories, exercise more, sleep better, limit our tech usage, organize our lives, manage our mental health, track our vitals and diseases, spend less, invest better, drive safer, care for our loved ones, et cetera. These self-improvement aids manifest themselves as both standalone software and features on software that serves a variety of purposes. Providing users with the ability to tailor their experience is an imperative step in the journey to creating ethical software. We owe it to our users to put them in control of their lives. The true value and power in software is its ability to serve as a tool that improves our lives. That's how we got addicted in the first place. That's why you went and bought your smartphone because it made your life better. People should feel better after using technology. With the increase in the strength of technology's effect on man, the importance of focusing on ethics increases in turn. It's not uncommon to have an initial aversion to this idea. It's normal to look at this as a poor financial decision or unnecessary risk. Michael, you may be asking yourself, why would I make the sacrifice for a greater good? Why should I be the one to take the risk that might not be as lucrative as sticking to our current ways? To these questions, I say look back in history. There are countless examples of companies and industries that were averse to such business decisions. Flexibility and the ability to pivot with the industry is what has led small startups to beat out major companies. The focus on adding value to the lives of users trumps the focus of maximizing profits in the current quarter. In 2006, General Motors released a statement claiming that the electric car was far from viable as a commercial success. Tesla, a young unheard of company at the time, was staring at a market that the big players wouldn't touch. Instead of joining the successful gas car companies, the founder of Tesla saw a product that consumers would want. Tesla took the chance, made an electric car, and now the 14-year-old company is worth more than the 110-year-old General Motors. Look at Apple, one of the biggest players in tech. They have made countless decisions that initially the public rejected. Yet, it's proven successful and its users tend to like it. They take away the CD drive and at first we complain. Eventually, most of us don't mind. They change the power cord and at first we complain, but then eventually we don't mind, et cetera. You get the idea. Apple doesn't give people what they want. They make things that people didn't know they wanted. So let's make technology that helps people in ways they didn't know was possible. Henry Ford is sometimes credited with the fitting quote, if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. It's actually not true that he said it, but anyway. If we are the creators, we have to become, we have the power to change the future of technology and we can define what that future becomes. Not every engineer in this room has the power to make such a change. Some of us work for companies that don't give engineers the freedom to decide on the feature set for their product. This is where another opportunity arises. We must fill the hole in the data. I believe that every product has a strong incentive to collect some data. I don't care if you make a flappy bird clone, I think there's tremendous value in collecting user analytics. At a bare minimum, you should know where your users spend the majority of their time in your product and what features they do and don't use. On top of this, I believe that the more data we collect of our user's behavior, the better we can serve our users and improve the software that we make for them. I think this aggregate user data should then be shared on the public domain. By making the usage trends available to all, you provide the opportunity for others to stand on your shoulders and potentially add significant value to the world. By simply sharing the data we collect, we have the potential to spark novel ideas and innovations that are unimaginable today. There is no limit to the benefit we can have. Few people hold as much power as we do. We have the ability to create products that can be made available to more than billions, to made available to billions of people all over the world. Most users take our software with them everywhere they go. It's accessible on the internet. No time in history have customers been so accessible to their creators. Well, it may feel that the market is saturated with technology. I believe we're on the cutting edge of innovation. We can set the standards for future software. We are in the position to change the course of history, together we have the power and responsibility to create tools that further advance mankind. Thank you.