The Ethics of AI: We are becoming more and more reliant on Artificial Intelligence, mostly because it keeps getting better more quickly than anything else. More and more, we’re relying on AI systems to make important decisions like who to hire at work or who to release from prison, even when these models may have strongly ingrained biases based on the training data. And as self driving cars become more of a reality, we will continue to become more reliant on machines. This brings up an interesting ethical question on self driving cars in specific — in an accident that can not be avoided, how does the car prioritize the life of the driver and passengers vs. others? How many injuries would need to be avoided of the car to prioritize the bystanders over the driver. Mercedes has already come up with a statement on this question “You could sacrifice the car. You could, but then the people you’ve saved initially, you don’t know what happens to them after that in situations that are often very complex, so you save the ones you know you can save. If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car.” Whether or not it’s the right answer, people will want their self driving cars to do everything possible to save their own lives.
Note: Right after I posted this, Google Contributor completely changed so this is no longer possible.
The Idea in 150 words:
When I’m surfing the web I want to get something done — but ads want me to do something else (like buy something). I can’t get upset at the ads because that’s their job
My attention is a valuable and scarce resource that marketers want to purchase. Essentially I am paying for content with my attention
Paying for content with micropayments might be a solution but that just takes the ads away — getting people to “pay for nothing” (or the elimination of something) is a hard value proposition
I figured out how to use micropayments to replace Google Display ads with my To Do list. Building on an idea Matt Cutts had on his blog, I used Google Contributor and Remember The Milk to substitute advertisements with my To Do list
Now I have my To Do list follows me around the Internet. It’s just like a persistent targeted ad that won’t leave me alone. It’s Awesome!
We’re in an attention economy right now. Time is our most valuable resource. As Randy Pausch of Last Lecture fame said in his Time Management Lecture, “Americans are great at managing their money, but significantly worse at managing their time.” Which means that most Americans would rather pay for their content with their time (free with ads) than their money.
Why Are Ads So Annoying?
Because it’s their job. An advertisement’s job is to change behavior and convince people to buy something. This can be in increasing awareness, interest or desire in the product. However it’s being done, it takes me away from my task and thinking about the product.
Sometimes my goals are in line with the advertisers. If I’m looking for cool toys for my kids, a suggestion for a similar product from Amazon or an ad from Google could be incredibly powerful. Unfortunately, many advertisements are low quality and look more like the ads in the back of old comic book magazines.
What most web advertisements feel like the ads in the back of comic books
Fixing the Problem
A Page Starts by Looking Like This
The Page Without Alteration
Option 1: Eliminating Ads
In order to avoid these annoying ads, many people have switched to ad blockers — essentially taking the content but avoiding paying for it with their attention. This doesn’t work long term as the ad supported sites will be starved by revenue.
A better model is micropayments. Instead of advertisers paying for each page view, the consumer would pay for it. These models are very hard to put together, requiring both the consumer and the website to buy in.
Ad Blocker
Option 2: Replacing Ads with Something Else
One of the most promising micropayments platforms is Google Contributor. Google Contributor allows consumers to “buy back” their ads from Google. This allows Google to leverage its massive relationships with websites. Matt Cutts has a great description of Google Contributor on his blog, but the key points are:
1. You support the sites you visit
2. You see fewer ads
3. (And this is the cool part) you get to decide what to show in that ad space instead of ads
Google Contributor still feels like a bit of an experiment at this point. The main reason is that there’s nothing that people are really replacing their ads with of value. Right now Contributor defaults to a “Thank You” message that’s blank with other options like pictures of cats. People don’t seem to like the absence of paying for things very much — it feels too much like paying to be bored. Even though there’s a huge amount of value in actually being bored.
Standard Google Contributor
Option 3: Replacing Ads with Something Useful (My Favorite One – This is Where Things Get Really Cool)
As I said before, the purpose of advertising is to get you to change your behavior. But instead of letting the ads change my behavior to buy things, why don’t we use ads to focus me on what I want to do. Wouldn’t it be great to have your “To Do” list follow you around the internet instead of ads. These work for 2 reasons:
Advertisements are great at following you around the web and interrupting you. Instead of interrupting you to buy things, you get your To Do list — reminding you of what you need to get done
To Do lists can be context sensitive (e.g., when you’re at your computer, these are the things that you’d like to do)
Google Contributor With My To Do List!
What I’ve Learned:
While this is just a small prototype, there’s a lot of things I learned from it:
It’s quite useful. I’ve only been using this for a few weeks but it really does get me laser focused on my To Do List — especially when I’m mindlessly surfing the web
There are a few issues with using Google Contributor for this purpose but net-net for $5 a month to get less distracted by extraneous things AND actually let me focus on the things I want to get done — that’s HUGE. All this while contributing to the media that I want to thrive.
How I Set It Up
Note that Google Contributor no longer works this way so this is here for more historical reasons.
Detailed Instructions for Connect Google Contributor to Remember The Milk:
Create a custom list inside RTM for your Google Ads
Create a List
Log in to m.rememberthemilk.com from your web browser to set the cookie to access your URL. Note: You will not be able to log into Remember The Milk from inside a Contributor window — this seems to be a security feature to avoid capturing data from an ad.
Find the URL of your To Do list by going to m.rememberthemilk.com and displaying your To Do list
· Point the Google Contributor custom URL to the Remember The Milk list
· Now your To Do list follows you around the web!
Some Further Improvements
Some sites like the New York Times get a very high CPM and have pretty good ads. You can eliminate contributor contributions by clicking on the + sign…
Finding the right To Do list is difficult. Remember The Milk is pretty good at this but there might be better ones. m.rememberthemilk.com doesn’t seem to follow a drag and drop prioritization, so you’ll need to move items up and down in your list using the “prioritization” flag. This is particularly important because most ads will only show between 2 and 5 list items.
The trickiest thing is finding a To Do list that will display nicely in the ad space. m.rememberthemilk does a nice job by using very little room on the top and no navigation. To get this really right, you’d likely have to call and API for RTM and do a custom display.
Ideally, it would be good to customize the way that the To Do list displays based on the display size (e.g., if the space is too small, don’t try to display the To Do List).
I only need to see my To Do list once per page. If I have more than one ad on a page, I might want to have an inspirational quote in the other ad space.
We spend a lot of time running from place to place trying to get things done. It’s worth it to take a minute every so often to rebalance in the middle of the day. One Moment Meditation is a fun silly app to help do that. I also heard some good advice from Only Human on WNYC. They advise that before doing something important, like picking up the kids or going into an important meeting, take three minutes of silence to emotionally transition and prepare — you’ll get a lot more out of the experience. And remember that picking up the kids is actually an important experience.
Earlier this year I was working on our online banking platform and kept thinking about the question, “Will we need people in the finance function in the future or will it all be done by computers?”
I’ve come to the conclusion that people will be around for a long time. Humans and computers can do a lot more together then they can alone. J. C. R, Licklider (the founder of the internet) discussed this concept a long time ago in a paper called Man-Computer Symbiosis. Essentially machines do the grunt work, allowing humans to focus on things that are more important. Today humans work together alongside computers almost constantly. Think about driving to dinner by using the computerized maps and GPS on your phone. Or making a call on that phone (another computer). Or even driving the car that is stuffed with tiny computers to help with steering and measure your tire pressure.
The End of Human/Computer Chess? In 1997 the IBM computer Deep Blue beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov. This was the first time that the best computer in the world beat the best human in the world. Most of the world considered this the end of human/computer chess. Computers would continue to get better each year much faster than people — leaving human players in the dust.
But A New Type of Competition Emerged: The website Playchess.com held a “Freestyle” competition in 2005. People could compete in teams and use computers. Traditionally the use of computers by human players would be considered cheating. There was substantial prize money offered which enticed many of the world’s greatest grandmasters and IBM’s newest supercomputer “Hydra” to enter.
A Surprise Winner: As it turns out, grandmasters with laptops could easily beat Hydra and the other supercomputers. But the overall winner was a pair of amateur players with 3 laptops. These were neither the best players, nor the best machines, but they had the best process. As Kasparov writes, “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”
Another example is the company Palantir — a software startup that helps “good guys” (e.g., governments, banks) catch “bad guys” (e.g., terrorists, fraudsters). Most people attack this problem from the perspective of “How can we get computers to find the bad guys?” Palantir takes man-computer symbiosis point of view by providing a tool that makes the good guys much better at their job.
Considering how pervasive computers are to the very fabric of our lives, thinking though the model of Man-Computer Symbiosis is critical to both building the best machines and also deploying and training people most effectively.
I’ve always enjoyed first person accounts of the beginning of the computer age. What was it like to be there? How did people view new technologies before they became part of our everyday lives? I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite magazine articles that capture that feeling. My previous blog post on The First Computer Interface captures that sentiment and here are 5 more. Most of the articles are on Kevin Kelly’s list of Best Magazine Articles Ever (with the exception of Inside The Deal That Made Bill Gates $350,000,000). Here are five articles about the beginning of…
Silicon Valley (The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce by Tom Wolfe, Esquire Magazine, December 1983) Robert Noyce founded two of the most important startups in Silicon Valley — Intel and its predecessor Fairchild Semiconductor. Tom Wolfe (yes, that Tom Wolfe) wrote about Noyce exporting the Midwestern Congregationalist ethic to create the modern culture of Silicon Valley. Noyce believed in a strict meritocracy. Wolfe writes “Noyce’s idea was that every employee should feel that he could go as far and as fast in this industry as his talent would take him…. When they first moved into the building, Noyce worked at an old, scratched, secondhand metal desk. As the company expanded, Noyce kept the same desk, and new stenographers, just hired, were given desks that were not only newer but bigger and better than his.” At the same time that Noyce was founding Silicon Valley, another set of small town Midwesterners were sending men into space. After the success of the Apollo 11 mission, NASA’s administrator, Tom Paine, happened to remark in conversation: “This was the triumph of the squares.” This may have been the first reference to geeks conquering the earth (and space).
Hacking (Secrets of the Little Blue Box by Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire, 10/1971) The original hackers were called “phone phreaks.” These were kids who figured out a weakness in the AT&T telephone system that they could exploit. By putting a 2600 hertz tone to their mouthpiece, they could trick the phone company into giving them free calls. The most famous of the phone phreaks was John Draper (aka Captain Crunch) who discovered that a whistle given away in the children’s cereal gave off the magic tone. He also taught Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak how to phone phreak. The phone hackers exemplified the original hacker ethic — to explore a giant system to see how it worked. Of course, like modern hackers, some got a little carried away by the exploration. By the end of the article Rosenbaum writes a little bit about many of the phone phreaks started getting into computer hacking — which was quite a feat in 1971. There was a great documentary on the history of hacking from Captain Crunch to Steve Wozniak to Kevin Mitnick that does a great “where are they now” of hacking.
Video Games (Spacewar by Stewart Brand, Rolling Stone, 11/7/1972) Stewart Brand wrote a fantastic piece on Spacewar — the world’s first video game. Spacewar was written before anyone had thought about putting graphics on a computer. Its hardware didn’t even have a multiply or divide function. Brand talks about the computer geeks at Stanford and MIT who were writing the first computer programs meant to be used by other people (as opposed to writing programs to solve a specific numeric problem.) One of the most entertaining program names was a word processing system called “Expensive Typewriter.” At the time, the intranet only had 20 computers but people were starting to understand that if it took hold, this would be the transformation of the news and recording industries. As a side note, there is computer code at the end of the article — probably the only time code was ever published in Rolling Stone magazine.
Microsoft (Inside The Deal That Made Bill Gates $350,000,000, Bro Uttal, Fortune, 7/21/1984) You don’t hear much about Bill Gates these days — a man who seems focused on his privacy. The Guardian published an interview with Gates this summer where the most interesting tidbit was that his children liked to tease him by singing the song Billionaire by Bruno Mars. But Microsoft was a very different company in 1984, when a 30 year old Bill Gates invited Fortune Magazine to spend five months with him while they went through their IPO. This is one of the few journalistic tales of an IPO ever written. The editor’s note reads “I doubt that a story like this has been published before or is likely to be done again.” It’s amazing to see an early Microsoft where Bill Gates used part of the $1.6 million cash he made on the offering to pay off a $150,000 mortgage. He also decided to keep the stock’s initial IPO value below $500MM which he felt was uncomfortably high. But the most interesting insight that Uttal has into the young Gates is that he was “something of a ladies’ man and a fiendishly fast driver who has racked up speeding tickets even in the sluggish Mercedes diesel he bought to restrain himself.”
Blogging: (You’ve Got Blog, Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, 11/13/2000) When I first read this article in 2000, I was introduced me to many things “Blog” including the word “Blog” and “Blogger” as well as some of the original bloggers: Evhead, Megnut and Kottke.org. Kottke.org is still one of my favorite blogs after a decade. Like many start ups, Blogger was a side project that was written over a weekend. Pyra (their parent company) was supposed to be making project management software. It’s interesting to see how early bloggers were the mavericks of modern social networking (though some ideas like putting themselves on webcams 24/7 have thankfully gone away). Blogs made it easier for “regular” people to post — and Social Networking makes it even easier. Facebook in many ways is just the extension of that — allowing everyone to have their own webpage.
As an added bonus, it’s worth reading the book Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson. Po gives a wonderful history on what it was like to be part of the Silicon Valley tech boom of the late 90’s. Po’s book was so compelling that it pulled many newcomers to the Valley. He felt slightly bad about this after the bust and started apologizing.
In 2010 we saw the release of the iPad along with the announcement of the Chromebook. I clearly remember my original thoughts on both. I thought the Chromebook was genius. In fact, I’d practically built one myself the previous year. My wife had insisted that her computer was too slow even though she had a pretty fast machine that wasn’t even 2 years old. So after trying a number of solutions, I settled on bringing out a laptop from 2003 and not loading anything on it other than Google Chrome. It was blazingly fast at browsing the web. I thought that many other people would love to buy an optimized version of this machine (my grandparents for instance.) The Chromebook would boot up immediately and have everything needed for an optimal web experience. For the iPad I had almost the exact opposite reaction. I remember listening to an Engadget podcast that asked Who really wants a giant iPhone and I heartily agreed. Case closed. But how did things turn out? The iPad turned out to be a transformative device — completely creating the category of the mass market tablet. Apple sold over 15 million first generation iPads and had 96% market share until Q4 of 2010. What I hadn’t realized at the time was that companies have been trying to make a great tablet computer for years but no had been successful at it. An interesting side effect of Apple creating the tablet market was that there is now no need for the Chromebook. Why would anyone buy a PC just to browse the web when an iPad does that so spectacularly. I suspect that Chomebooks might still have a role in businesses — especially when you can lease one for $20/month. An optimized Chromebook would go well with Google Apps if your company were totally committed to the platform.
But the iPad has allowed others to transform the product landscape. One product that comes to mind are online news readers. RSS readers is a great technology but have a number of failings. They feel more like email readers with unread messages more than a newspaper. But look at the iPad’s best take on the newsreader: Flipboard. There are some really great talks online by Evan Doll, one of Flipboard’s founders that talk about what makes Flipboard a great news reader. You can find them at iTunesU in the lectures Designing for the iPad (which was given before Flipboard and the iPad itself were released) and Designing Flipboard. Evan talks about some key things that make Flipboard great:
Creating something beautiful that combines design and editorial (like a great magazine)
Preventing information overload (an issue of Time Magazine doesn’t overwhelm and scare you like your Facebook News Feed might)
Leverage the personal nature of social media to create a magazine personalized magazine
After spending time with Flipboard you realize why Flipboard is a fundamentally different (and better) way of consuming online news.
