50. Thank you!
@lennysan / lenny@localmind.com
Special thanks to Amber Case for inspiration - http://caseorganic.com/
Editor's Notes
\n
Is it just me, or does this look very familiar?\nI thought so.\nNow I’m not saying this is innately bad, especially for us as people in the business of making mobile apps, but is this really what we want?\n
I saw a study recent study showed the average person glances at their cell pone 150 times a day (http://planetsave.com/2012/05/19/cell-phone-addiction-infographic/)\n\nhttp://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-01-18/health/sc-health-0118-cell-phone-20120118_1_internet-addiction-iphone-users-slot-machines\nhttp://www.nbcmiami.com/news/tech/Cell-Phone-Addiction-On-The-Rise-150533745.html\n
- 43% of iphone users would go shoeless for a week than not have their phone that week\n\n
- 68% of people experience phantom vibration syndrome, which I have a feeling you all understand\n
- and how did we get here? and how did this happen? \n
The easy explanation is that it’s a classic addiction:\n- [click] \n- Our phones are like miniature slot machines. \n- every time we check them we pull the handle and hope for something good to come out. Most time it’s nothing interesting, but once in a while when you get a new email, or an instagram like, or a new tweet - you get a small dopamine hit that makes you feel good, and reenforces the habit and addiction.\n\n
It’s basically a skinner box with variable reward scheme. \n- [click]\n- it’s so sadly futile, like this cat. \n\n[For full talk: habit loop]\n
Clearly this is ridiculous, and sad. But I don’t think that addiction is the full answer. I think the more interesting answer is something else, something much more profound, something that one of the speakers here today Amber Case got me thinking about a while ago...\n
- I think the real answer lies in the fact that we’re offloading more and more of ourselves online and becoming dependent on access to that data.\n- What I think is happening is that we’re moving from a purely physical mind that sits in our heads...\n
To a hybrid mind\n
- To something I call mind 2.0\n- Where we become a combination of what’s in our heads, and what’s out in the cloud\n
- And mobile phones are becoming portals to the rest of our mind.\n
- Our brain (the meat-cloud) becomes the tip of the iceberg to the rest of mind sitting in the digital cloud.\n- Every time we check our phones, we’re reconnecting with that piece of our mind.\n
This sounds a bit crazy I know, so let’s take a step back.\n
- What do we store in our minds?\n-- facts, like the capital of California\n-- todos, like getting the milk when we head to the store\n-- our social connections, who we like, who we don’t, what we like and don’t like\n-- what everyone is up to, our memories\n-- our goals, plans, dates and schedules\n-- basic logic and skills that we’ve learned over the years\n-- places we know about, directions\n
- If you think about it, we’re already feeding and offloading a lot of these things to services sitting in the cloud\n- especially things that we don’t need to have in our heads all of the time\n- When was the last time tried to memorize an email address, or created a physical photo album, or felt like you had to remember something that could easily be found online?\n\n
Einstein put it best...\n
- If you’ve ever heard of the productivity method Getting Things Done, there’s a core concept called Mind like water.\n- The basic idea is that your mind can’t function efficiently if it’s cluttered. The less we have on our mind, the more creative our mind is able to be\n- not having to spend resources remembering to buy the milk on the way home allows our minds to function much more effectively, to become more creative, to solve problems in new ways, and basically make us smarter\n
- So in that sense, this Mind 2.0 world leads to a more efficient, creative, and more intelligent you\n- now, what is it that you’re offloading, and what’s this going to lead to?\n
- This is a model for what we store in our heads, what’s called the Wisdom Hierarchy.\n-- Data\n-- information\n-- Knowledge\n-- Wisdom\n- If you look at this, you start to realize that you can break it up into two parts.\n-- That which you need to have in your head at all times, the knowledge and wisdom you’ve accumulated\n-- And that which you can look up when you need it, information and data\n
- This is a model for what we store in our heads, what’s called the Wisdom Hierarchy.\n-- Data\n-- information\n-- Knowledge\n-- Wisdom\n- If you look at this, you start to realize that you can break it up into two parts.\n-- That which you need to have in your head at all times, the knowledge and wisdom you’ve accumulated\n-- And that which you can look up when you need it, information and data\n
- This is a model for what we store in our heads, what’s called the Wisdom Hierarchy.\n-- Data\n-- information\n-- Knowledge\n-- Wisdom\n- If you look at this, you start to realize that you can break it up into two parts.\n-- That which you need to have in your head at all times, the knowledge and wisdom you’ve accumulated\n-- And that which you can look up when you need it, information and data\n
- This is a model for what we store in our heads, what’s called the Wisdom Hierarchy.\n-- Data\n-- information\n-- Knowledge\n-- Wisdom\n- If you look at this, you start to realize that you can break it up into two parts.\n-- That which you need to have in your head at all times, the knowledge and wisdom you’ve accumulated\n-- And that which you can look up when you need it, information and data\n
- This is a model for what we store in our heads, what’s called the Wisdom Hierarchy.\n-- Data\n-- information\n-- Knowledge\n-- Wisdom\n- If you look at this, you start to realize that you can break it up into two parts.\n-- That which you need to have in your head at all times, the knowledge and wisdom you’ve accumulated\n-- And that which you can look up when you need it, information and data\n
- This is a model for what we store in our heads, what’s called the Wisdom Hierarchy.\n-- Data\n-- information\n-- Knowledge\n-- Wisdom\n- If you look at this, you start to realize that you can break it up into two parts.\n-- That which you need to have in your head at all times, the knowledge and wisdom you’ve accumulated\n-- And that which you can look up when you need it, information and data\n
- And that second set is basically ripe for offloading, data and information that you can leave someplace else until you need it\n
And that’s what it feels like is what’s happening.\n\n
- We don’t have to remember specific facts, we don’t have to remember directions, we don’t have to remember specific places anymore\n
- We don’t have to remember specific facts, we don’t have to remember directions, we don’t have to remember specific places anymore\n
- We don’t have to remember specific facts, we don’t have to remember directions, we don’t have to remember specific places anymore\n
Sergey Brin pretty much saw this coming, and is pretty much making it a reality\n
What else can we do if we have a part of our mind sitting in a cloud, able to operate in parallel to our physical mind? Well, it’s actually already happening...\n
When we want to go out, we rely on algorithms that use data we’ve fed into the cloud using our past experience stored online to decide what we’ll like\n
When we want to go out, we rely on algorithms that use data we’ve fed into the cloud using our past experience stored online to decide what we’ll like\n
When we want to go out, we rely on algorithms that use data we’ve fed into the cloud using our past experience stored online to decide what we’ll like\n
When we try to figure out what to buy, we’ve got services pointing us to the things we don’t even know we want yet based on our behavior in the past\n
How do we decide who we want to meet? This same data is being used to find potential friends for us\n
Same thing for dating\n
And figuring out which books we should read\n
And movies we should watch\n
Just this month someone sent me this article about a system MIT students developed that recognizes when you’re multi-tasking and offloads one of those tasks to a computer for you automatically\n
It’s pretty wild right?\n
We’ve talked about some of the advantages to this -- becoming more intelligent and creative people, but there are definitely some dangers too\n
One obvious danger -- if you get disconnected from this external piece of your mind, it’s basically like you’ve lost a part of your mind. You’ll feel sick, maybe even a bit insane. \n\n
So...all this being said...now what?\nThere are two ways to go...\n
You can either resist this trend and disconnect, stop putting things online and rely only on what fits in your head. I’ve met a lot of people recently that specifically resist getting a smart phone to avoid this kind of problem.\n
Or we can embrace it, lean into it, and leverage it as much as possible. I side with this approach.\n* I think this is simply a part of the natural evolution of our species, using technology we’ve created to make us more intelligent, more fit, and more productive.\n
Over 2000 years ago when writing was initially becoming commonplace in Greece, Socrates was extremely worried that we’d cease to exercise our memory and become forgetful...the same exact concerns we have today.\n
I think this little guy growing up is going to end up being smarter, more creative, and more productive than any of us here today thanks to this mind 2.0 trend. And I think that’s probably a good thing.\n
