 Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for inviting me to a beautiful and very well-designed city as a Designer and software developer. It's very important to be in a place that actually feels enjoyable to be in Could you do me a favor? Could all of you hold up your phones very quickly? The faster you held those up you're more of a cyborg than the others in the audience Looks like you guys are our 30% heavy tech cyborgs and the rest are lower tech cyborgs with the holding of them But in fact we are all cyborgs Every time you look at a computer through your eyes you're interfacing with a piece of technology So it's not terminated or not Robocop. It's in your pockets every single day And here's somebody looking at a screen being a low-tech cyborg David David Hess talks about low-tech cyborgs that you're a sometimes cyborg not all the time not every day not every moment But sometimes when you open up your pocket and look at the device in it So what's a what's a formal definition of cyborg? So here's the first definition of cyborg from a 1960 paper on space travel It's an organism to which an exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new ambient spaces So in plain English that that was used to talk about a person in space Because humans are very strange they like to put external objects on them So they can go and explore the Alps or go underwater where fishes are or go into space Which is an environment that humans technically shouldn't be in but they want to because we're very strange Creatures that like to explore new spaces So let's look at this tool for example So this is a hammer and 3,000 years ago versus today Nothing much has changed in the shape of the hammer If you think of a saber-toothed tiger if he goes along and one day his teeth are broken He can't eat as well anymore, so he's more likely to die But if a caveman suddenly breaks the hammer he can go and make a new hammer So this external evolution has differentiated us from animals So we look that hasn't changed much over time. We use the hammer to extend our fist We use the automobile to extend our capability to run Incredibly quickly and instead of just walking all the time or being a slow land animal But what about computers? This doesn't make any sense in the past 40 or 50 years We have computers the size of a gymnasium and then we have this Tiny phone and nothing about what the shape of this is or what it looks like says what's inside And in fact the interface has changed over time So in in this case the interface was actual physical buttons and you had to press them And if you wanted to change what the button did you would go back and you would you know Actually physically reroute all of the wires and the electricity But suddenly you have this new interface which is liquid the button can be anywhere on the screen you can touch any part of it And so it goes from solid to liquid to air very very heavy very light And then when you just walk somewhere some action will be able to happen But the main difference between these two types of technology the hammer and the machine is that one extends the Capability of the physical self and the other one extends the capability of the mental self So now we're storing our memories outside of ourselves And that's what makes studying cyborgs very interesting today Because yes, we have been a sort of low-tech cyborg with all of our technology But it hasn't extended the mental self in the same way as it is today So Marine McHugh who's a science fiction writer said soon perhaps it will be impossible to tell where machines end and humans begin So a traditional anthropologist goes out to another country and says hmm. How curious these people are how interesting their culture How interesting their tools hmm fascinating and then and then they go you know back and talk to the other anthropologist Wow, did you see this culture? It's it's incredible But that's not as important today as Looking at regular culture and saying hmm how fascinating these people are who around me every day How curious these objects that they carry in their pockets that cry and you have to pick them up and soothe them back to sleep by talking to them And then you have to plug them in at night because they need energy And then you have to replace them when they get old and take care of them and put little clothes on them So that when you drop them they don't get hurt So cyborg anthropology is technically not very new But it is new in a certain way in 1941 there was these things called the Macy meetings Anthropologists and scientists started getting together and they said hmm. What are these things called computers? They're going to be incredibly important in the future and everyone's going to have one and of course everyone said you guys are crazy This is 1941 you know these are used for you know warfare and things like that They said no no we need to start talking about this so they started talking about it And they had a series of meetings on on the future of humans and technology and they said one day This will be important and people will be able to study these Macy meetings and they'll they'll care because they'll have a computer in their pocket but it didn't take until 1992 for people to have those said computers and Start to have the beginnings of the internet and connected devices So at that point cyberg anthropology was was a sub-discipline of anthropology at the American Anthropological Association So that's kind of the history behind the the discipline itself So here's some actual history about about technology and humans So this is Steve Mann and in the 70s and 80s He went to college at MIT and he would walk around campus wearing 80 pounds of computing equipment and The reason he did this Is because he didn't want to he didn't like the idea of somebody going like this over a computer all day He said that's that's very primitive like in the future. We need to be able to wear computers We shouldn't have to conform to computers computers should have to conform to us So he built a small Television screen that's what you can see in in his eye and he has antennas because he coated his hair with metallic gel so that he could conduct a signal from from the Wi-Fi hotspot that he created before the traditional internet really existed by Breaking into a building and installing his own personal antenna on top And he went around for a year like this before he made a friend that was a close enough friend That was a close enough friend to also wear 80 pounds of computer He also met his wife during this time during the metallic gel stage She's also a cyborg. I'll demonstrate in a minute He also wrote this paper if you're interested in wearable technology or the little heads up displays He's done it all very early on He was one of the first people to ever do this and he writes a nice Interesting paper very dry. I highly suggest it if you're looking to build any of this stuff because he'll say no This will never work and this will work and I wore this for seven years and this worked really well One of the things he really didn't like is walking around town and seeing pictures that were not his so he said Advertisements that's somebody else's message. Why can't I see my own message on a sign? so he said well, I'm going to make it so that my heads up display can Cancel out a rectangle of advertising and put a white space over it And then I can read my email on the white space while I walk around town So this is his wife saying hey Steve you've gone too far You have to turn left on Bay Street because he went so she's texting him because she can see Him in real time through his his goggles that are taking video all day But one of the other issues is that you can't just have a keyboard while you're walking around That would just look ridiculous. I mean not not as ridiculous as this looks already But it would look even more ridiculous and so Steve Mann has this this twiddler device and this device is great It's a one-handed keyboard so you can walk around town You have a mouse and a keyboard you type up to 60 words a minute so while he was walking around town He would write his dissertation So there'd be a red light. He'd have to wait for the crosswalk sign. He'd write a bit He did walk in the park. He has an idea He'd write a bit of that so he didn't have to go to a computer in order to store a thought It was it was very mobile just just like our mobile phones So this was very exciting now He uses it to edit Wikipedia as he walks around town, which is why there's so many Wikipedia entries from him Here's an example of him blocking out a billboard so he says okay. I don't like this billboard I want to read a research paper on it So he recognizes the rectangle and blocks it out and then reads the paper But he also applied this to the supermarket So he go into the supermarket and he didn't like a brand and he'd hit cancel on the brand and he wouldn't see the brand anymore So we just walk around the supermarket and actually see everything he wanted to buy and oh great He didn't like the waste of time that modern society kept giving him So this is a message a location-based message his wife left him a message It says Steve remember to pick up the 2% milk And so he goes to the store and there's a location-based message in his heads up display and he can see oh great My wife left me a message I I will never forget again because I don't have to bring a list or anything like that So these location-based messages are now possible with with your cell phone, but it took a long time. This was 1995 So over time he said All of this heavy 80 pound equipment is going to get lighter and lighter and lighter all that is solid melts into air So as you can see in 1998 it fit into a pair of glasses in the little twiddler device, which looks kind of cool I mean pretty cool And this is him in present-day system with his his daughter probably teaching her calculus or something He learned to to swim by studying fluid dynamics by the way before he ever got into the pool So his newest device takes video in one eye Processes around the back of the head and processing loop and then feeds that processed video into his other eye through a laser and It's pretty exciting so that's a kind of history of What people have been doing that is now just beginning to be possible today So whenever I look at the future I always try to go 20 or 30 years back in the past to see what was being done on a 500 to a million dollar research budget So let's talk about the present day. So now you have these extensions of your mental self Your phones your computers and they're larger on the inside than they are on the outside Which is just mind-boggling because it doesn't take any time or effort to really store something You can pack in all the information you want and the device doesn't get heavier Which is ludicrous. So these are these magical devices So there's this kind of automatic production of space. You can't see it. It's it's in your computer You don't know how much stuff is in there So this was a project by by Maxter and what they did is they took eight years of digital photos And they said what would happen if you printed all of the digital photos and all the information your computer out on paper What would it look like? What are we carrying around every day and they printed it out and it looked like that So when your computer crashes and you lose all of your files and you feel like you've lost something very heavy You've probably lost this giant piece of material But the other thing that's happening is each of these is a memory and in order to get to that memory You either have to search in your hard drive somewhere or or search somehow On on your computer So we have these our brains are changing. They're not just storing information They're storing how to get to that information So I've been an efficient hopefully an efficient user of my brain and saying well, okay I remember that memory But I need to remember the keyword to get that memory in Google or I need to remember the keyword to get to it My email box and over time we're all becoming these kind of persistent paleontologists Where we keep digging up old memories instead of looking into our minds and saying hmm I remember that time in that place. What day was it and then you remember you say Hmm, I remember that email that guy sent me and you search for it And so you have this whole geology of history In your email boxes that's stored outside of yourself And you have this very mechanical process of getting it and you're carrying around this with you every day at your external brain And this leads to a kind of social punctuation Say, okay, I'm out and then I need to check in or I need to Remember to write this email to somebody and you punctuate your social experience So you have real life and then you have virtual life in the same part of real life And then you have all these different kind of time zones, right? So there's the time zone of Twitter and the time zone of Facebook and then when somebody sends you a message That's another type of time and it and its own response rate And and so it's called presence light where you're kind of there all the time But you're not always there all the time you're kind of half there and half somewhere else when you're using a device But all of this together if you get too many emails and too many requests and everything's going haywire And there's so much and you feel overloaded that you can call it a panic architecture. It's just ah There's so much information going on So this leads me to some of the prosthetics and their discontents One of the big problems with technology is that if you keep it for too long it turns against you This guy kept his phone for too long and now we laugh at him because he has a ridiculous looking cell phone But one of the issues about about phones is that you do you have to make sure to upgrade or else it will fail And so we're kind of stuck into this cycle of re-invigorating our external selves And also one of the issues is that when the phone was on a landline you could go into your Home and you'd sit there and you'd have your nice phone call And there's a bunch of private space if you close the door But now suddenly you don't have that private space because you're outside on the phone And so you have to temporarily negotiate a private space So you see people outside trying to use their phone and trying to be quiet about it Or you see somebody completely ignoring this and they're talking very loudly and it's very obnoxious So this is this is a proposed solution to that This is actually a real cell phone booth He can collapse it behind his head if he wants to not be on the cell phone anymore So there's a video of him online where he where he walks around town And he's ordering something at a restaurant and he's like, oh, sorry. I have a phone call And whips this over his head is like talking and the woman's like, I can't talk to you anymore But what happens when you upgrade all of your technology this is this is a picture of all of the discarded phones from you know last year's model it's kind of Think of it like trees every year a tree Loses its leafs every season a tree loses its its leafs so it can make room for new leafs And every season we discard our old technology to make room for the new technology Because technology unlike our human hand doesn't last us our entire lives We have to get new external brains as they get faster and faster Unlike just getting one hammer and having that last you a long time So ambient intimacy is is a word used to describe The idea that you can always be in touch with somebody by the click of a button So in the same way as we printed out all of the information from a computer If you were to print out all of the connections that you have in your phone right now that you have the capability of actually You know interacting with our contacting right now would probably look like this You're carrying around this many people in your phone right now that you could potentially connect with You kind of have this ambient intimacy with them where you could text message them or talk to them at any point in time The problem is that when you're in a traffic jam, you're also in the same situation There's a bunch of people next to you. They're having the same experience, but you can't talk to them This is kind of a tragedy of modern industrial society where you're in a traffic jam Everyone's angry, but they can't talk to each other So when the cell phone came about now you can suddenly talk to somebody and feel human in an otherwise Inhuman experience and in this case the cell phone has allowed us to be more human and allows us to actually connect with people in In a situation where humans are kind of on pause in this very technological Containment situation. It's very hard for me to sit in traffic jams. By the way, I end up thinking about all this stuff So what about becoming a cyborg? So now infants are having the second self before they're even born their parents make them a social media account and then tweet for them And then they have to deal with the consequences later It's like baby pictures times 200 Just really strange memories But your second self is not really your second self anymore It's kind of becoming this private this primary self or this kind of extended self So, you know, this this is a self that people can act on and message when you're not even around It's this placeholder of identity But in the same way that when you wake up and you shower and you and you know You make sure that your hair looks okay, and you make sure that you're clothed every day people are learning to Present themselves digitally. So, you know, you wake up and maybe you upload a picture You make sure that this is this is fresh so that your online self needs the same amount of maintenance as your real-life self because it's really not too much different and something interesting is happening with with these kind of Say you live in a tiny little place and you don't have a yard and In real life It could take you three or four years to get a promotion to get the feeling of accomplishment But if you go into Farmville everything you touch has a reward 200 points 300 points And you end up getting entangled in this web of social obligations But the rewards are faster and because the rewards are faster online. It becomes very addicting And there's all this space that you can own and you kind of you know This this game has a kind of godlike view where you're you're God and you can You know create all these things that you wouldn't be able to in real life So you see these kind of addicting architectures start to show up And another thing is is watching database games happen So when force core first came out they said add in the venue and you'll get five points So everyone says oh, I want five points all add in all these venues But really it was a data entry game everyone who used force core was effectively the employee of four square entering in Database codes for all the different locations that were in the system and then people could play the game after all the cards have been made In the same way Facebook is kind of like a spreadsheet And so it's kind of this spreadsheet game where oh look what happened in cell a2 or cell b3. Oh, that's fascinating or You know you upload a picture and it goes to d3 and then somebody is subscribed to cell d3 So they get very excited about it And there's these other things that happen like you get a plus one friend or plus one follower or plus one like and those are tied Into you know your psychology and you feel that you feel this connection as if somebody laughed at your joke in real life And if you don't get a response it feels very Strange that that no one's out there listening and and I see people who are very concerned with that There was this one woman and her daughter was very worried to go on Facebook So she said what if you go on Facebook as the family dog And so she went and created an account as the family dog And then she went to all of her relatives walls and started barking and trying to play with them and One day the relatives who were probably pretty sick of getting arf arf whoop whoop on their walls said well We're not going to comment on this So she didn't get a comment on it one day and she ran to her mom She said mom no one commented on my post on Facebook and then her mom says well, that's okay But it was so terrifying for her you know this expectation of the social response that people have and So this plus one in this like in this comment have become a sort of social grooming the same way that you would hug someone in real life Maybe you could comment on them or or like or or have a response So it's very similar and and they're all tied into these psychological and physiological effects You feel a sense of being a sense of interaction during that time Does anyone remember these tomogaches? Okay, I hear a mumbling of yes great So the funny thing about these you have three buttons you feed the creature it beeps in class you get it taken away Oh, no, my creature has died. Oh, you know But these are kind of these training wills because if you look at how somebody uses a phone now You feed somebody through text messages, but there's real people on the other side Instead of these creatures and maybe there's 50 of them on the other side And so you're feeding them and taking care of your friends through text messages and and interaction So it's very similar to this except the creature on the other side is real And they're an actual friend that you have that you want to meet in real life And if the teacher takes the phone away, it's the same disruption in class So in an analog backyard you go outside you you are you know physically interacting with the Environment you're you're trying out your muscles and trying to see how strong you are or how fast you can run and it's very physical and mental But now the the new backyard is you try to see how far you can go on a website or or how much you can antagonize somebody or Or how much you can interact with somebody and and how far you can go and it's a very mental Situations it's very psychological and cognitive And you're interacting with people that don't necessarily have to be in the same room as you are the same country And there are no real borders that the borders are more along the lines of which website you're on those are the new borders You know Facebook is one type of geography of people and and reddit is another type of geography of people And some of them have wars with each other, which is kind of interesting to watch and I went to the the four square support forums and this person was very upset she said help help There's just verbally abusive user and I found a bunch of these Situations where there were these girls who were teenagers and they would go and open up venues that say Ashley sucks And then they would put tips on all the venues around town Ashley's a meanie Ashley's a jerk And then Ashley would walk around town and check in on four square and get these tips about how mean and rotten She was and it was this virtual reality bullying And I thought well, you know teenagers are really mean to each other in general But now they are they have new interfaces to be mean to each other on and so they can't just go home They have all these these troubles that they have to deal with on these virtual spaces So I'm going to talk about the future Mark Weiser was a researcher at park in the 70s and 80s and he had this idea of calm technology The idea was that the technology would be there when you needed it and it would go away when you didn't it wouldn't be in Your face it will be very well designed and be there right then kind of how Steve man said well I want to have my email with me when I need it and then I can just walk through reality Without having all this you know grossness on my face So the idea behind calm technology is that it's just there the interface is invisible and sometimes it shows up when you need that information the other thing is improved interfaces interface design and and the idea of design and aesthetics and Something that's actually useful and and reasonable to interact with is going to be the most important thing now that we have mature Technology that can actually work in all these different places So this is an example of what I consider horrible design You take an element from the real world like a book page and you put it into a physical interface And what happens people try to turn the page and go it's much worse than real life and then and then they kind of they finally get the page over and then Sometimes the code breaks and it snaps back and you're like oh, I hate this interface But you really want to read Alice in Wonderland on your book You just bought a $500 iPad and you don't want to let it go to waste So what what I like to look at is these superhuman interfaces if you had a book made out of a flip board It would be a giant Rolodex Which you would never be able to carry around because the pages start from the middle and they go and and you just touch them once and they turn and The way in which the information is presented turns you into a superhuman instead of being Afraid and weirded out by technology you feel like you have some power over it this this interface empowers The person and makes them feel good and turns them into a superhuman So any website or our device or interface that that empowers somebody is a good interface But it's very hard to design because most people say oh Let's just take the elements of the real world and just translate them over instead of saying one of the unique capabilities of this new platform and how can we use them to make something that's Physically impossible and yet wonderful to use so another thing is We built this game called map attack where you turn the entire city into a game of risk And you have all these little coins that you collect with different number values And we wanted to do it as an experiment to see what it would be like to run around and play in the real world in real Time and it feels kind of like a superhuman game because you're able to see where everybody is and what team they're on and what Kind of coin that they've eaten and so people run around and grab these virtual coins and their mobile phone becomes their map So they look at their phone and then they run all over the place and halfway through playing this game We debuted at Stanford University earlier this year Everybody was running Extremely fast and trying to get these coins before everybody else and trying to get the 50-pointer and we realized that The landscape started to look more vibrant and we had more energy and there were these adrenaline rushes And we realized that we'd each run maybe three or four miles without even noticing it and we're exhausted But it was all in the real world and it was the first time most of us had Computed without having to be on a computer and it was this very different feeling And I definitely want to see more of those feelings. They're just very hard to program right now So the idea is that your your phone will become this kind of remote control for reality That it will turn you into this this kind of superhuman that you know the world is very small You can now stand on one side of it Whisper something and be heard on the other and so these these devices will be able to you know do things that are a little bit Better so that instead of humans being on pause Technology takes care of that part and I think that for a very long period of time people have blamed themselves when they can't use Technology they've said oh, I'm bad at technology, but for a long time. It's been technology. That's been bad at humans Because it hasn't been able to be correctly designed because it hasn't been made for humans because programming a machine is not The same as talking to a human There's a completely different language and so until and it's starting to happen technology is designed for humans You don't get to blame yourselves for being bad at technology because you aren't so so everyone's off the hook If you've ever thought you're bad at technology So in reality the best technology is invisible it just gets out of the way and connects people So the idea is the world that's no longer this with 80 pounds of equipment But this where everybody is computing But they don't really notice that there's a bunch of people at the end of map attack after their team one and they all have computers And they're all computing right now, but but no one can really tell So the idea is that all that is sold Nelson air dissolves and we have a very nice reality Hopefully so thank you very much Thank you Thank you. What a great Presentation and you know the first question that comes to my mind is actually what is steve man doing now? What is steve man doing now? So steve man follows me on Twitter. Oh, which is just ridiculous because I look up to this guy I looked at what he's doing and He's making musical instruments that work in water. He's making you musical instruments for all states of matter So he has plasma instruments He has instruments that you can play by connecting them to your brain and using your brain waves to play them And then he has just regular instruments So he had this orchestra at a swimming pool where half the people were underwater playing instruments And then the other half were sitting half submerged in water with these giant electrodes attach their heads playing music He seems to be like some kind of Steve Jobs, but not commercially interesting. Is that right? Yes, not not commercially interesting or maybe not commercially interested interested. Yeah, that's that's right Somebody went up to it They created a conference on wearable technology the first one I think it was 2001 or something and they had steve man keynote and steve man key noted and then they said you know Have you thought of designing these things for regular people and he said no this works just fine He's very pragmatic he has a book called cyborg and it's beautiful and it's so logic It's very Vulcan really it's it's it's it's very fun. But yeah, he's not interested in So it is really wonderful also and those you know these times where you always your first thought is how to make money on something I mean, this is a truly creative person. I was just wondering when I listened to you and When you when you show that picture of those people from 1941 who said that you know very soon people will have computers and nobody believed in them and and many things happened and and here we've talked mostly about Cell phones which are in many ways computers But so I mean did you ever think of what let's say if we sat down like those people here now and think of what We might be using in 50 years. Do you have any idea at all? You know, I think this is probably one of the closest conferences to the Macy meetings Because everyone in the room is interested in technology in the future and nobody's thinking I mean people are thinking okay What's happening right now, but people are very interested in creating it and developing it You know, I don't see Well, okay if we talked about wearable computing and like computer vision that would be awesome That's another industry that's lagged for many years because they the devices and the components have been cheap enough to really put In you know in front of your glasses. Yeah, so we could probably talk about that Or we could talk about the the philosophical underpinnings or something like that But I think there's a lot of that already being talked about so in a way This is very similar to those those Macy meetings and there's a whole part of the world that probably doesn't care Maybe it's the same. There's just more people to talk about it Now I would like to leave the the questions to the floor. Do we have microphones? There's somebody Yeah, out there, please introduce yourself and and also where you've Represent hi, I'm Martin Berg am a sociologist from good old here in Malmo I thank you first of all for a very interesting presentation indeed and it's quite fascinating to see this sort of historic account of You know gadgets But you know the good old Anthropologist and Clifford Goetz once called for a thick description and I think something is missing in your presentation that I would like you to elaborate a bit on because you said that The best technology know in the end the best technology is invisible And I think it's important not I mean important to note that technology is not neutral in any sense And and in the same way as the the best technology is in Invisible it's also the case that the best way of exercising power or hegemony is also to make it invisible And and there are a lot of questions here that I need to think that we need to touch upon questions of capitalism questions of power and Questions of well hegemony basically and I would like you to perhaps elaborate a bit on that Okay, let's see First off a book is an invisible interface when you're really into it a good book writer Make something that you dissolve into and then you don't even notice that the book is there So technically that's an example of an invisible But you talk about power and consumption and hegemony and and all these very political concepts So in a certain sense I worry that there will be a future in which there's a bunch of people who are a higher social Class who have access to the tools to create software to the ability to consume things to the ability to communicate with each Other to the fastest internet and then on the bottom There's this very low resolution capacity of action and interaction and that when a bunch of this Kind of matures, you know some country can say oh, I'll shut off this sector or I'll shut off this and because people are so Intertwined with the technology and used to it. They won't make any alternative methods of communication They'll be stuck by the own system that they Bought into so yes, there's a very negative Idea of where it could go wrong and I think in the world There's no there's kind of an equal amount of good and bad and I think that technology itself is Technology it's kind of an evolutionary thing it evolves because we purchase it And it changes shape over time But it's really how there will be these very positive implications and there will be equally negative implications It just depends there's this entire spectrum and it's happened this way since the beginning of time We have industrial revolution and a bunch of people die and they get sick and they haven't perfected Pasteurization or anything and then a bunch of people end up having a longer lifetime So in the same way with this new technology, you know Maybe some people will get lots of back problems because they're sitting over a computer And some people will able be able to you know in their Midwestern town actually connect with people who care about the same things They do Regardless of geography so I think overall it's you know, it's really there's this wide spectrum It's not good or bad, but there are good and bad examples that will happen and all of them will happen Over the course of time when we engage with technology. Hopefully that's a little helpful. Thank you more questions over there Hi, my name is Martin Rueghfeldt. I work for a company called expert maker You talk about a Shift where you moving knowledge and and intelligence into machines that sort of outside of yourself Where do you see that stopping where it's the end line? I mean people talk about the singularity people talk about Where we sort of live in a virtual world and stuff like that. Okay, thanks so the question so I want to attack the singularity part of that because I Just wrote a post about how we've had a singularity technically a few times a micro singularity The World Cup was a singularity Everybody knew it was going on they were all able to communicate about it the earthquake in Haiti was a singularity the Michael Jackson's death was another type Of micro singularity where our ability to communicate was fast enough that we had a kind of global consciousness moment for the majority of Connected citizens so I consider that you know, we don't have them all the time We have them every once in a while with an event and and that ends up you know being this This is kind of like the entire earth has the same weather pattern for one day And everyone can kind of have something in common to talk about before they go back and into their other channels In terms of the information Externalizing I have no idea where it will stop In a way, it just seems like it's going into databases Compressing itself and that you know you get one stream of very specific data Say four-square data and then over here you have another very specific stream of data like biology And then you have another one about weather patterns And when you put all of them together and connect them laterally you get this very rich interconnected database where you're able to have computations on all three systems at once and you can Basically amplify the power of that externalized Information and I don't know where it will stop or if it's bad or good for people or if suddenly the internet goes away And no one has stored anything in their brains anymore because they've offloaded everything that would be a good science fiction book to write But but if you have an idea is please tell me after the session because I'd love to know your opinion on On that and where that ends There's the question over here Hi Benjamin job from plus it's now really thanks for it's all very very insightful I have feeling that you're leaning more on the utopian side of cyber anthropology than the dystopian side I'd like to ask you what do you feel more most excited about in the developments of a cyber organic stuff? Thanks, I lean on that optimistic side because if I came up here and gave you a dystopian speech She would be very depressed And right after lunch you don't need to get depressed you need to be uplifted because you just ate and your bodies are trying to Weigh you down with chemical processes What am I most excited about I'm excited about that that I can go home and my house greets me and turns on the lights for me because it notices that There's a GPS circle around my house and my phone knows that I'm going into the GPS circle I'm excited about real-world gaming where you can play with people that you don't even know and run around and and have Exercise and be unleashed from the chains of sitting down in front of a computer I'm just excited about kind of playing with the technology and having fun with it Which is which is in a way a very privileged type of idea that you have to have access to the technology and have access to the methods of creating the technology in order to play with it But that's the thing I'm most excited about the thing. I'm least excited about is The ease at which you can get addicted to consuming Information and how it makes your brain feel over time. We've had you know We have these stomachs that tell us when we're full which is very convenient so we don't overeat But our brains are not yet Configured to tell us when we're full if we've read 400 RSS feeds and 10 emails and we've been on the internet all day on one of those sites It says related reading read more and we've read more you might also like this article Okay, and then you go and Wikipedia and you go down this black hole in three hours later Now only do you feel really bad in your brain? Like you know, you've eaten like 20 bacon sandwiches, but you do feel just just Crabby in a sort of way and I think that hopefully we'll get that idea in our head that okay, we need to stop Or else we'll have a bunch of addicted people walking around and that's always going to happen no matter what time period there will always be addicted People susceptible to overconsumption. That's just an entire demographic of humans in general But I hope it doesn't increase by the ease at which you can consume information So that hopefully that's a dystopic perspective to help even out the utopian side Anybody yes, yeah Hi, my name is Joachim formal. I'm from a company called Ericsson You've been talking about humans artifacts and how we relate to The physical things around us and at the same time we can see that many of the things we have now are kind of Instanciations if you want or it's the data inside of them, which is actually the thing How do you think that will affect our relation to objects? so there used to be In order to do something like you went on a regular tiny calculator You'd have to have really a gymnasium or one of these rooms full of computers and then they started to say Oh, we can fit all of this into a into a calculator And it was like yeah a calculator and then they tried to make the smallest calculator Which is like this big and no one was able to use it and they said hmm So that's when you know the actual liquid interface to start to show up where it doesn't you know You have the phone as a remote control for these little tiny chips So you could have chips in your body that that regulate your blood flow or you could have you know Your mood you have a little thing attached your head You know like a soft sticker and then all of these things are talking to each other Through the centralized database of your phone and that sends up to a server and gets processed and then come back to your phone And then suddenly you can see all these analytics Where it's about little tiny nodes Connecting through this very powerful computer that you're holding in your hand and that that that interface is a handheld visualization and kind of operating system for your life If it's if it's done well So I think of it like you have a bunch of invisible information stored in servers where you can't even seed them And then your interface to it is this phone and then you have a bunch of little Interfaces that that just connect to the phone and then that's your visual apparatus with large enough touch targets You can actually act on it. I guess that's where I see it going That's kind of the 1970s ubiquitous computing type idea without chips everywhere. I just Well, I guess you'd have to have chips everywhere But smaller ones without interfaces where you just have one good interface and tiny little pieces of technology Yeah, we have we have time. That's the fantastic thing because Amber didn't spend her 45 minutes So, I mean take the opportunity. I saw some other arms raised here and there or you can all just go and Have an early break Okay Wait a microphone is coming Hi, I'm Dave Asprey I'm giving one of the talks this afternoon about living a hyper connected life And I noticed almost everything you talked about there was very observational and passive I'm actually going to be wearing electrodes on my head during my talk That are running a current over my brain while I talk excellent and I'm a little concerned that both in the quantified self-movement and in most of the things I see here It's very much like I'm just gonna look at all these things But just looking at them and not doing anything with the data particularly doing anything in a real time to feed it back in and affect Your bio biological systems seems wasteful So is that something that you talk about in other speeches or are you veering away from that in your research? Ah? So thanks So there's another speech all about location-based technologies and getting lots of data where I show Maps of me and my co-founder Aaron who's somewhere in the audience here Where he has been tracking his location at five second intervals for about three years now And I've been tracking a lot of what I've been doing and then visualizing it So I visualize every time I edit a wiki or every time I edit a website or every time I you know check into a place So there's all these visualizations So I'm kind of doing all this data streams But that's an entire other speech with a lot of different diagrams and graphs and different topics where it's very much the applied Type of thing like what if you made a button that's invisible and when you walked into it an action happened somewhere else? Like an actual invisible interface and you had you know GPS going on your phone in a GPS circle So and also there's this quantified self meet-up That I go to in Portland, Oregon where we have a bunch of people come in with our different devices that track Information and we talk about the different ways to visualize them and it's it's very exciting In a way there there are In some ways it's okay. I'm gonna track everything. I do cool But then there's another way where you can actually figure out if you track yourself every day via GPS over a year You can find out what's the most optimum time to leave to get to work on time? Is it 845 is it 842 and you can say oh, it's always 842 except for Mondays I don't know why and then you can always leave it 842 in the morning and go so in order You know if you if you track what you're doing then you can find these patterns in your life I use the sims to run a simulation of a very small floor plan to optimize the happiness of two people in a space Because you can see what's wrong with you over it You know three times the speed right so I realized that there was a chair in the way and that you know The simulation of myself and my partner were You know kind of annoyed over this chair and we realized it was because it was too close to this You know other piece of furniture, so it's like okay in real life. I'm going to move the chair And I moved it and everything was happy But we wouldn't have been able to see it unless we played it in three times the speed So it was a kind of quantified self take yourself out put in this space run a simulation Debug real reality, right? So so I'm very interested quantified self and actually applying it I just wish I could compress space and time and make a talk that's twice as long and just crazy involved And then I'd show that other side of the data, but thanks for bringing that up Let's say the last question now Anybody else I know in Sweden I I live and work in Italy and every time there's a question and answer session There will be a 100 people who want to talk and the question is much longer than and the question is usually ends Don't you agree on that? So that the speaker gets a yes or no But in Sweden people are mostly a little bit more shy and also sit there and what I would like to but maybe I don't know Maybe it's a stupid question Who is thinking like that right now raise a hand? Okay, I saw would you like would you like to to actually Say it out loud Because I I also have a very stupid question and that I feel like Expressing if you let me No, no, there's one good It's kind of a personal question to you Amber I'm a mother and I wonder when you were a kid What did you want to become? Okay, that's a good question So it started when I was four or three and a half Four probably my dad would sit me down and he would read me the bedtime story, right? But the bedtime story was called the evolution of consciousness Every night this is how the brain stores memories This is why the Neanderthal brain didn't really pan out that well. Hey dad. How do how would I store this memory in it? Oh, well, that's you know and he draw these diagrams and Then he'd you know, he'd be like here's space and time and you can fold space and time over in order to get to points quicker And I said, oh, I really want to bend space and time when I grow So, um So I had insomnia every night of course because it's like You get this story at 8 p.m. And then it takes till midnight because you're like well I'm watching my brain fall asleep and now I'm watching it store a memory and I wonder what REM sleep is Can I watch my brain actively dreaming while I'm still conscious? Can I lay there and and wait for my senses to shut down? And then ten, you know go into conscious REM so I'd wait there and I'd be like wow my The vestibular sense in my brain just turned off which which negotiates whether I'm standing up or not And I feel like I'm falling. Oh, this is right before I enter into a dream. Oh, this is great And then I tried to tell this to kids at school and they really did not get it No, no, thank you so much. Thank you very much fun and very cute