People as technology, technology as people

A talk on the relationship between people and technology, presented at Velocity Amsterdam

Transcript

1. People as technology technology as people
2. An opinion: heavy use of computers alienates us, is a manifest of desperation and lack of “meaningful” human contact.
3. But… most of us treat computers as if they were human.
4. Marta Paciorkowska Likes weird stuff Has twitter: @a_meba Blogs on occasion: https://thatmarta.wordpress.com Owns the command line at Acrolinx GmbH
5. Clifford Nass Was a pretty cool person Worked with other cool researchers Sociologist interested in interactions between humans and computers Wrote The Man Who Lied to His Laptop and What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships
6. THE EXPERIMENTS
7. Multitasking
8. Multithreading: the ability of the CPU to execute multiple processes concurrently, or an execution model that allows one process to have more than one thread. Multitasking: the ability to handle multiple tasks at once
9. “Frequent multitaskers find it very difficult to focus, even when they are pried away from technology. (...) They fail to notice emotional signals in people’s voices, faces and posture.” Clifford Nass, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, p. 12
10. “even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone's productive time” http://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask.aspx
11. Even when frequent multitaskers focus on doing just one thing, the use of their brain is less effective. Details at http://business.time.com/2013/04/17/dont-multitask-your-brain-will-thank-you/
12. Being forced to multitask: is a manifestation of an underlying organizational problem, can be caused by: ➔ too much work, ➔ understaffing, ➔ suboptimal prioritization, ➔ ...
13. Ban laptops on meetings
14. Meeting>Slack* * special conditions apply
15. You speak computer ...but you’re not one
16. Computer = friend, literally
17. The experiment: Two groups of people, Both perform the same task on identical computers, One group fills questionnaire on the tested computer, Other group fills questionnaire on another computer.
18. “users entered more positive responses on the computer that asked about itself than they did on the separate (...) computer.” Clifford Nass, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, p. 7
19. Power to the people
20. Empathy is a strong word
21. Emotional attachment to computers, tools and software makes us more reluctant to change.
22. The opposite team
23. The experiment: Read team, blue team, Color-coded, identical computers, Team members perform tasks, half on “own” computer, half on “rival” computer.
24. Surprise: people rated “their” computers higher than those of the opposite team. Details in Clifford Nass, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop
25. We are the Borg. Your distinctiveness will be added to our own.
26. Ops vs Devs: a false dichotomy that creates identity by exclusion.
27. Critical = smart
28. The experiment: A tutoring computer presented facts and asked how well users knew them, A testing computer ran a quiz checking what participants learned, A grading computer asked to rate the tutoring computer, Half grading computers were positive, the other half - critical.
29. The grading computers that were more critical scored lower on likeability but higher on intelligence. Details in Clifford Nass, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, p. 45-53
30. “Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial.” Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile, http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/01/21/why-does-pessimism-sound-so-smart.aspx
31. Genius assholes have to go
32. THE TAKEAWAY
33. we think we’re like computers, while we actually aren’t, and we think we’re rational when working with computers, while we actually aren’t.
34. Thank you for listening ♥ Catch me on Twitter: @a_meba Find written talk version with links to research on my blog: https://thatmarta.wordpress.com Talk to me!