are help they’re here to help illustrate
how a piece of technology in your pocket
today is gonna improve your quality of
life I see a show of hands of how many
people have a cell phone with them today
that’s what I thought big changes and
little changes are coming and these
pennies and your cell phone are about to
surprise and delight you in ways you
can’t begin to imagine with as much
privacy as you want they’re going to
improve your quality of life and help
you have better experiences let’s start
there when you hear the term quality of
life you may picture a sandy beach I
decided to look up a conventional
definition and Wikipedia tells us there
are six standard indicators or patterns
that are used to define and measure
quality of life wealth and employment
the built environment physical and
mental health education recreation and
leisure and social belonging to words
are not on that list technology and
experience experience is an
in-the-moment thing whereas quality of
life seems to be more measured across a
period of time and then aggregate of
those six things so you might think of
quality of life as the climate you’re
living in at any given point in time and
the experiences you’re having or more
like the weather in that climate at that
time it may be obvious to you that
technology would not be on this list
today we often think of technology is
more like an addiction that’s more in
control of us than we are of it we think
of it as helping us have have become
more efficient get that most recent
email sports score use it for a driving
application but when you think about
optimizing and already too busy life it
becomes more like becoming the best at
too busy rather than actually improving
our quality of life so when it takes us
one minute to do something that used to
take us 10 and we get back those 9
minutes do we use those nine minutes for
recreation leisure time not usually
but technology is already starting to
offer improvements to our quality of
life through one fundamental change in
the way we interact with it what it can
capture how much it can capture and the
patterns that will emerge some of those
patterns you’ll choose to act on some of
them you’ll ignore some of the patterns
will reveal that you have a relationship
with people that you don’t know that you
have relationships with today that will
be really exciting and that’ll take
things in the opposite direction of some
of those not so social phases that we
see in coffee shops and airports looking
down at their technology today this is a
Wordle of this TED talk
the bigger the word the more frequently
I’m saying it see how big patterns and
privacy are patterns have been around
forever reycarts while wrote a book
called how to create a mind and in it he
describes that the human brain has over
300 million pattern recognition circuits
300 million is a lot but all of those
pattern recognition circuits missed a
pattern in baseball for over a hundred
years Moneyball is a book and a movie
that describes how baseball for a
hundred years used batting average as
the statistic that they use to pick and
pay players in 1977 a guy named Bill
James uncovered a pattern he realized
his statistic called on-base percentage
which combines batting average and walks
is a more consistent indicator of
whether a player will help a team win a
baseball game even more amazing it took
25 years before anybody would do
anything about it
in 2002 Billy being the manager of
Oakland’s baseball team a team that at
the time was famous for losing baseball
games had his back against the wall had
a tiny budget compared with the mighty
New York Yankees decided to apply this
pattern using technology and the way he
picked his baseball players people
thought he was bat crazy but it worked
they won they won a lot and that really
changed Billy Beane’s quality of life
but it caused a lot of people to look in
the mirror and wonder if they were
missing a pattern if they were using the
right statistic to make the decisions
I’d like to talk in threes
I just talked about quality of life
technology and experiences now I’m gonna
talk about what was known what is known
and what you will know about yourself in
the future a lot of information can be
collected about us in a lot of different
ways of categorizing it and I like my
friend Joe Whiteman’s way of
categorizing information he calls the
abcdes I’ve added F and G a is for
attitude are we happy or grumpy B is for
our behaviors what are we doing
C is for context where are we doing it d
for demographics age gender zip code
kinds of information efore environment
is it sunny or rainy fi added four facts
biometric information like pulse and
heart rate and G for goal why do we
choose to enter an experience is it the
best price is it speed of service is it
it wasn’t that long ago that not that
much was known about us many of us
remember the Sunday newspapers we get
and we throat on the kitchen table and
out would spill all the advertising
inserts a clear indication that the
marketers who paid for those ads didn’t
know anything particularly special about
us because everybody in the same city
gets the same advertising in asserts
that’s partly because back in those days
it was hard to know much about us
there wasn’t any internet data to
collect there wasn’t much in the way of
credit card information to collect and
categorize us but today it’s different
today we might be out on a website
looking at a pair of shoes that we’re
thinking about buying and then hop over
to a new site and up pops an ad for that
exact same pair of shoes it’s a little
creepy the first time it happens until
you realize it doesn’t really mean
they’ve learned anything specific about
us per se other than we might be
but how would you like to be the dad who
was the last one to find out his teenage
see his daughter is a teenager was a
member of their loyalty program and one
day she went into target and she bought
four things hand sanitizer
dietary supplements fragrance free
lotion and a large volume of cotton
balls those four things were enough for
target to pinpoint the pattern and be
confident that she was pregnant not just
that because of the large volume of
cotton balls they were able to pinpoint
her due date and that informed the
timing of when they would send her
advertisements sometimes we’re looking
for one pattern a much more surprising
and unexpected pattern emerges that
takes us to viagra viagra is a drug that
was designed for hypertension and you
may be aware that ads today for Viagra
don’t mention hypertension that’s
because in clinical trials when a drug
is being tested they’re looking for two
things does the drug do what it was
designed to do and if it emerges with
some side effects that are bad that will
derail the drug trial if they find a
side effect that’s surprising and
unexpected that is even better than what
the drug was originally designed to do
they sometimes will repurpose the drug
and that’s what happened with Viagra in
the drug trial that they used for with
3,000 people which is a typical size of
a drug trial target had the four pieces
of information drug trials have 3,000
pieces of information Rogaine is another
example of a drug trial that went the
same way as Viagra where Rogaine was was
intended to be for blood pressure today
Rogaine as you may know is marketed
solely come to combat baldness when you
go from four pieces of information to
3,000 that’s a big jump just as going
from transaction information to
experience information is also a big
jump imagine what you could do if you
had thirty thousand pieces of
information about one customer that’s
I’m not talking about Disneyland the
300-acre spot in California I’m talking
about Disneyworld over 30,000 acres near
Orlando they had a customer satisfaction
problem people in the Orlando Heat in
long lines unable to make reservations
for restaurants or attractions and
people were having having bad
experiences and Disney didn’t know who
was having a bad experiences a little
bit like the Sunday newspaper example I
mentioned they had no idea who was
having the good experience and who was
having a bad experience but they solved
the problem they created an online
portal that allowed people to pre-plan
their experiences including restaurants
and attractions usually four days or
more and then they system something
called a bracelet called a Magic Band
the Magic Band is worn by customers as
they go through Disney World to enter
the park and and redeem their restaurant
reservations and attraction reservations
the band also emits a signal about once
a second so Disney can see whether
you’re ahead or behind in your planned
experiences they can see if you’re
having a bad experiences in in the
moment help you recover from that bad
experiment experience immediately it’s
magical because it’s Disney of course
they’ve done all the things to avoid
being creepy about tracking people and
help ensure the privacy of their
information because they said that the
band emits a signal about once a second
over the course of an eight-hour day
that’s 30,000 signals a day 30,000
pieces of information they collect about
location of their customer every day
that’s a huge amount of information now
that might not sound like it has
anything to do with you or your day to
day experiences because most of us don’t
go to Disney World every day thankfully
but a lot of us use something every day
that tracks us in the same way our
driving applications we enter our
destination that’s our plan and it tells
us turn-by-turn directions for where
when we’re going to get there whether
they’re hidden police cars accidents and
it reroutes us I Drive every day I use
my driving application every day not
because I need turn-by-turn directions
anymore because they know where I’m
going I need to know what time I’m going
to get there or if I’m going to be late
but every day it gives me the exact same
directions I start to feel like Bill
Marie in the movie Groundhog Day after a
while where every day is the exact same
day over and over again I’m surprised it
doesn’t learn my patterns but I know how
to get from my house to the highway but
every day it tells me the same eight
turns that I have to take to get from my
house to the highway but I know that
soon it will learn and it will know my
patterns and behaviors and that will
make it a lot more exciting and
interesting for me a lot of people also
use fitness trackers these days that
people tell me that they have to get
their 10,000 steps I have a lot of
friends that say that those fitness
trackers have changed their behaviors
that they’ll do everything they can to
get their 10,000 steps and that some of
them have even lost weight but it’s the
same sort of Groundhog story where it’s
not learning their patterns they’re not
really learning anything new about
themselves that’s actionable or
interesting so that’s what was known
about us what’s known about us today I’m
gonna talk a little bit more about
privacy now and then I’m going to talk
about what’s coming so privacy is a huge
issue always has been always will be the
good news is that we’ve already got some
standards to protect our privacy those
standards come about in the form of
things like that driving application
where we willingly accept to give up our
location information in an exchange we
expect to get something back that’s the
deal that’s struck all of these
applications that are asking us to give
up some information about ourselves
whether it’s location or context or
demographics or whatever it is we expect
something in return that’s the big win
for us that the standards already been
established that’s for us to accept
giving something up we expect something
in return so anything that comes after
that we’ll have to adhere to that
standard so as this information is being
collected in large volumes big companies
of course are taking notice a lot of
companies now are hiring data scientists
which is a fancy name for statisticians
they’re also hiring a lot of economists
the New York Times reported that as of
September 2016 amazon.com had 34 job
openings for economists 34 openings just
so I mentioned Disney has the 30,000
pieces of information a bucket load of
information literally I also mentioned
the biometric information that we might
be able to collect your heart beats
sixty to a hundred times a minute over
the course of a day that can
over a hundred thousand heartbeats a day
so then if you add other things like
environment and demographic and context
data it can very quickly become a
hundred and fifty thousand pieces of
information about you every day that’s
five of these buckets full of pennies
every day the good news is you control
it you’re in charge you decide how and
when to use it the patterns are going to
emerge some of the patterns you can’t
see
speaking of patterns you can’t see DNA
revealed that roses are related to
stinging nettles those are the kinds of
patterns that are gonna start to emerge
where you’re gonna see not only a
pattern about yourself you’re gonna it’s
gonna reveal that you have a
relationship to somebody else that you
never knew existed the next pattern I
want to talk about involves Microsoft a
little bit behind here Microsoft makes
operating software system and operating
system software sometimes that software
crashes when it crashes it goes into
error mode and and one day Microsoft
collected the error logs of all the
computers on campus and they noticed
that the error logs had an error at the
exact same time every day which didn’t
make any sense to them because people
are working on different things somebody
decided to go into the the world of
environment information notice that
solar flares are something that affect
the earth it hits the Earth’s surface
that humans don’t detect solar flares
but the silicon chip on a computer can
feel and it’s enough to cause the
computer to go into error mode they
would never have figured out the cause
of the pattern if they hadn’t gone to
environment information now that
particular pattern wasn’t actionable to
by Microsoft it wasn’t particularly
helpful but those are the kinds of
patterns are gonna emerge that we can
see and decide if we’re gonna do
something about or ignore that’s what’s
gonna be so exciting about all of this
information that we’re gonna be
collecting about ourselves all right so
I talked about Disney I’ve talked about
Microsoft I’ve talked about roses and
nettles and the hundred and fifty
thousand pieces of information that
we’re gonna be collecting about
ourselves so what how’s that gonna
affect us what’s gonna change what’s
gonna blow our minds well the first
thing that’s going to happen is things
like driving applications are going to
be smarter about making recommendations
about our patterns the obvious one is
it’ll notice that if we left work 15
minutes earlier every day last week it
would have shaved 40% off of our drive
time or something like that
then it will start to collect biometric
information and notice that maybe our
heart rates elevated and we’re stressed
out and it will suggest a lower stress
route as an option it might notice that
it’s gonna rain or snow tomorrow and
suggest that you work from home that’ll
all be really helpful
the really Wow stuff starts to come when
you look at these hundred and fifty
thousand pieces of information every day
and start to discover the nettles for
your rose you start just figure out
something that’s equivalent to the solar
flare some environmental thing that’s a
pattern for you and you’ll find out not
only that you have that pattern you’ll
be able to find out if somebody else
shares that pattern you’ll share the
information anonymously probably at
first because you can but once you start
to see those patterns you’ll be able to
find out not only that the person has
the pattern but maybe that person is
ahead of you in the pattern and you’ll
be able to see what’s coming good or bad
what’s gonna happen to you next because
they’re ahead of you in what’s gonna
happen with that pattern it comes back
to Moneyball a little bit where they
spotted a pattern in what it takes to
win baseball games that eluded them for
a hundred years but it took him 25 years
to do anything about it
the good news about all this is we
collect all of this information about
you the 150,000 pennies you’re gonna be
able to see the patterns about your
pennies and you won’t have to wait 25
years to do anything about it thank you
very much [Applause]