 All right, I'm going to give you a short talk on a subject that I'm interested in called column technology. And the idea behind column technology is that a lot of these big tech conferences say that we'll have many devices in the future. And what I like to ask when I see these quotes is that do we really need more devices? If the original promise of technology was to give us more time and the more tech we keep adding on, the less time we seem to have, then what is the right way to add technology to our lives? Is it necessarily good to have more and more and more tech? Are we even going to have the right amount of natural resources to get to 50 billion or a trillion devices? Not to mention that you have to mine cobalt and all of these rare minerals to make some of these technologies. So I ask, does this sound good? Let's consider the original goal of technology to give us more time. The Greeks had two concepts of time. One is Kairos time and one is Kronos time. Kronos time is the kind of industrial time where we're sitting there doing the same meeting from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. with a specific idea of what we need to be doing. Kairos time is like the time of falling in love or watching a child's first steps or having lunch with somebody or dinner with somebody, losing track of time, watching a sunset. When we have time getting interrupted by this kind of punctuated sociality of our phones, mostly robotic alerts. We get out of that human Kairos time and we go into structured Kronos time. And if we have lives that put us on pause and have us act more robotic, we lose the creativity and the purpose of life. So if we consider already some of the technologies that are out there, there's the kind of smart watch that replicates what's on our phones, which may or may not be good. We have the smart fridge, which tells us when the bananas have gone bad, which is not necessary because bananas change color when they go bad. When you put it all together, you get what I like to call the dystopian kitchen in the future. Everything is screaming at you in a different programming language. It's not necessarily supported or maintained. It goes away. It gets hacked. It takes more bandwidth than streaming Game of Thrones on Netflix. So we have this era of interruptive technology. Battery life can fail. Connectivity can fail. We need a kind of calm technology. And calm technology was something that came out in the 80s and 90s at Xerox Park. Mark Weiser and John Sealy Brown, along with a lot of other people, including anthropologists and artists, decided that they would have this art and anthropology to counter the one dimensionality that technology can bring to the world. And because of that, they said, at some point, we will have devices that outnumber humans. Many devices will share each of us instead of us sharing, many of us sharing one device. And at that point, the scarce resource won't be technology. It will be our attention. And how technology makes or breaks our attention, works with or doesn't work with our attention, will make or break that technology. They were really ahead of their time. Mark Weiser died. I learned that he died. I got upset. I made a website called Comtech.com. I found a bunch of their early research papers, which talk about the technology's social responsibilities in a connected age. All of the things that we're dealing with right now have been written about in the 80s and 90s. And it's still true today. They're written in a totally accessible format. And they had some tips on designing calm technology, because we don't have lots of time. I'll go through it fairly quickly. But the idea is that technology shouldn't be requiring all of our attention, just some of it, and only when necessary. We shouldn't be distracted constantly by it. The whole point is that we work alongside it, not it doing something for us. A tea kettle tells you when it's ready. You don't have to stare at it. You don't have to Bluetooth into it. It just uses your peripheral attention. Empowering your peripheral attention means that you can be attuned to more things, but you don't have to take your primary attention away. You can have a haptic buzz. You can have a sound. You can have a light. And if you don't know whether somebody has a sensory need or difference, allowing someone to change the notification style is super crucial. I had an employee that had an insulin pump and it beeped, but he couldn't hear it at loud concerts and he would miss filling the insulin pump. The insulin pump company would not allow him to change the notification style. And he had to set his own alarm on his phone with a buzzer to refill the insulin pump. We are no longer making technology for the world of desktop computers. We're making technology that is in our lives every day. And if we do it poorly and we're close enough to it, it's a matter of life or death. So how it integrates with us, how it works alongside us, is really the future of design. This is a silly sensor it buzzes you when you're slouching. Technology should inform and calm. This is a light that my old co-founder and I made. It just changes color based on the weather that's going to happen for the day. So this particular morning it was bright and sunny, so the light bulb was yellow. This is, the idea is that you don't have the kind of Microsoft idea of the perfect person in the condo with the San Francisco accent that's understood for the first time and the only time they have to say something to the AI, because it's been programmed in the native language that the San Francisco, there's a specific accent that's been programmed into these voice recognition systems. And so if you have any slight accent at all, you end up repeating yourself a lot. Instead, this just gives you information. You walk into the kitchen bleary eyed and you understand what the weather's going to be. How do we amplify the best of what tech can do and the best of what humanity can do? Humanity is good at curation, empathy, understanding. Also, humanity is mean, but there's a whole range to this humanity. Technology is very good at going through lots and lots of data and presenting that to us. So with Google, it's not, I'm feeling lucky and it's the exact result. It's getting you there so that you can choose what result you want. We have a lot of technology that likes to speak in a human voice. And when technology speaks in a human voice, we think that we can speak back to it at that same resolution. But if you look at how these things are programmed and how they actually are understanding things, they're very bizarre looking and they don't make a lot of sense. What I really like is the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. When it's done, it goes dun-dun-dun-dun, and when it's stuck, it goes dun-dun. It's universal, it's emotional, it's tonal. But it also has a backup light so that even if you can't hear, you can see. This is using multiple senses to get the point across. And I really appreciate this kind of design. Also, the vacuum isn't very good. It doesn't get corners at all. But people love it so much that they're cats right around on it in YouTube videos. It's based on a trilobite prehistoric filter feeding creature. This is great design borrowing from nature. There's this idea that R2-D2 and C-3PO, C-3PO knows two million languages. He's fluent, two million languages. But he's annoying in every single one of those languages. R2-D2 might know one BP language and light language, but he's adorable in that one language. If you're building something, make it adorable in one universal language like Pixar films. If you need speech, maybe you're doing something wrong. The right amount of tech is the minimum to solve the problem. If you're doing something and overbuilding it, every single feature you do needs to be supported, maintained, updated, decommissioned, you need to hire and fire people for whatever obscure language that you decided to build something in because that period of time for six months was the coolest language. I really like COBOL. How many things run on COBOL today? A lot of things run on COBOL today. It's an ancient programming language, but it was made to be fault-tolerant so that we could run it with airlines and ATMs. The problem with COBOL is that it's so good that people have been hired back after 40 years to fix some of the COBOL code. And they're finding code that they program when they were 21. And they're finding the same comments that they left their future self. Tech should work even when it fails. When an escalator breaks, it turns into stairs. What on your phone can work without a network? Can you stream music while you're on airplane mode? Can you get driving directions or not? The question is, we're not in a perfect Wi-Fi zone. And when we're in a reality that's disrupted, how do we gracefully degrade that technology so that it still works with our lives instead of against our lives? Not that many people live in a perfect world. And the thing is, there is no such thing as a perfect world. Utopia means non-place. It's an ironic look at a future that doesn't exist. If our lights were as bad as our Wi-Fi connection, we would be very upset. Everything would be going out. Yet the beginning of electricity with General Electric and all these electrical companies was to get electricity to be so stable that these big electric companies could sell the first killer apps, which were actual physical appliances. There was this effort to electrify everybody from upper class to lower class. And now, there's a class-based issue for whether you have good Wi-Fi or not. It's even hard to have Wi-Fi in here. Why don't we have technology that is as calm as a light switch? We always have you can basically tap the wall if it's dark and you can turn on the light. And I think it's really important to think how do we make stuff that resilient? Light switches have been around for a long time. They'll continue to be around. What tech are we using today, other than a nice comb or a pair of shoes or any of these things or glasses? Is anything that you have on you right now going to exist in 40 years? Stephanie has a spoon. That will probably, yeah, that's good. Can you hold it up? Yeah, it's a foldable spoon. Did you know that people used to bring their own silverware plates and cups to parties? And that was what you did. Everybody just had their own stuff. Not anymore. So if good design allows you to accomplish your goals in the least amount of moves, then calm technology allows you to do things with the least amount of mental cost. Because, as Markweiser and others believed a person's primary task, unless you want to be computing all the time and you enjoy programming, but a person's primary task shouldn't be computing. It should be being human. And the scarcest resource is not going to be technology. It will be our attention. I wrote a book on this because I was upset that nobody remembered. And I think it was Sheldon Renon in the front row who told me about calm tech to begin with. And then I realized that sound is another part of the equation. And often it's undesigned. So I wrote a book on design with sound to make sound work better in your life. So it's no more of these microwave beeps at horrible frequencies and going into hospitals and hearing 10,000 alerts. There's a bunch of principles on Comtech.com. And I'm out of time. So thank you very much.