A web for the person you wish you were
As we move into a new year two things are customary: best wishes and resolutions. I’m going to be the nerd in the room and combine both. I wish that you keep your resolutions.
It’s a fairly safe wish to make, unless you tried to game the system by listing the exact opposite of what you wanted to achieve.
The sad truth is that resolutions are hard. No matter which strategy you rely on to reach your goal, it hinges on a single point of failure that we all share: a brain. A brain that will eventually choose a late morning in bed rather than early gym.
A brain that will convince you that missing the gym three days in a row means you’re a failure and you should just give up on your dream of being fit.
A web for your weak brain
Today’s web is optimized precisely for that brain. Under the pretense of “maximizing engagement” every web service exposes you to the links you’re most likely to click. It’s as if the web’s ultimate goal was to trigger every dopamine generator in your body. It promises Ten things people with strong brains do, number four will blow your mind!
Hint: number four is not following clickbait.
And if you ever train yourself not to click on such links, the web evolves on to the next drug. The current flavor seems to be badly cropped images that cut through a key element of the picture, inviting you to click to discover the missing funny, sexy or cute part.
Measuring happiness
Let’s go back a couple of years, when we all used Google to search for the information we wanted to see. How did Google become so good at placing the best result on top?
Like your brain, Google has some form of dopamine: it’s happy when you are… But since Google is a cold-hearted robot it needs to measure your happiness.
It does so by taking hints from your behavior.
What do you click on? How long do you stay on that page? Do you come back and edit your search query? Google takes every hint it gets, from its millions of users, and tries to design an experience that makes everyone happier.
And Google is not the only one doing this: Facebook, Snapchat and literally every web service rely on similar tricks.
That was all good and nice in the early days of the web, when pages were not actively designed to trigger each of your cravings. However, things have changed significantly since then and we’re beginning to see the limitations of these happiness-measuring robots.
Like genies from the legend, they are taking our wishes too literally. If I could have a small chat with Facebook these days here’s what I’d tell it: “Sure I clicked on this link, sure I spent an hour browsing pictures of the worst wedding cakes ever, but, looking back, I wish I had spent that time reading a book instead.”
The person you wish you were
Like Facebook, my best friend knows I love cake, but she also knows I want to cut down on sugar. Will she bake a chocolate cake for my birthday? Maybe, maybe not… She’ll make an enlightened decision based on how well I’ve been at keeping that resolution and how likely I am to regret eating cake the next morning.
She can do that because she doesn’t only know how I behave in front of a chocolate cake, she talks to me frequently enough to know how proud I am of what I do.
We all know our brain is weak, and in moments of strength we’re all able to reflect on this weakness. We can talk about what makes us proud as well as the behaviors we’d like to change. We do this on our own, we do this among good friends… But we never really do it with the tech giants that provide us with our beloved online services.
Focus on the user and all else will follow
Most of the criticisms we read about tech giants seems to start from the premise that their intentions are bad. That they care so much about money they will do everything they can to make you “engage” more and in the process they’ll reap the benefits of your clicks.
Having worked at Google during five years I can tell you this is not my experience. Google believes that if they focus on the user all else will follow, and I found this core value reflected all around me: in the engineers, the PMs, the VPs and all the way to the top. I’m pretty sure Facebook is driven by a similar philosophy.
In fact, I’m convinced that thinking any other way is a direct ticket to failure in the tech world and that’s one of the reason I’m so proud of being a part of it.
Less policing, more empowerment
If one starts with the idea that the tech giants intentions are bad, the solution for cutting down on “online sugar” will tend to take one of the following forms:
- Ask that users police themselves by cutting down on online time altogether, or;
- Request that the tech giants police themselves by dropping some links that are believed to be universally bad.
Both of these solutions could work in theory, but none are optimal. Some of the interactions I’ve had on Facebook have pushed me to become a better person, so I don’t really want to stop using it. On the other hand, after a long day of hard work I might be totally fine winding down by browsing a collection of bad wedding cakes, so I don’t want Facebook to get rid of these links altogether. The fact is that, like baking a chocolate cake for my birthday, it’s hard call. I want my online services to make an enlightened decision as to what should go on my stream or not.
If, on the other hand, you start with the idea that the tech giants really care about making their users happy, you can arrive to a totally different solution. One that empowers both the user and the service provider.
Something I call compassionate artificial intelligence.
Towards compassionate artificial intelligence
The problem with our cold-hearted robots is that they never have the opportunity to learn more about the person we wish we were, because we never talk to them outside of our goal-oriented interactions.
Therefore, the first step is to design user interfaces that let us have conversations that start with “I wish I had…” Such conversations cannot take place in the middle of an interaction. After I just wolfed down a huge piece of cake is rarely a good time to start thinking rationally about my behavior.
Instead, we need to design systems that let us have conversations in moments of strength, when we’re able to reflect rationally on the ways in which we’ve been weak.
A proposal for such a system would be a compassionate artificial intelligence. A simple conversational interface that you could access every night before going to bed. In this space, your personal compassionate assistant could summarize how you spent your day online (and maybe offline) and ask you how you feel about the different actions you’ve taken.
Some nights it could be a short conversation, focusing on the stuff it strongly suspects you regret or are happy with.
Some nights it could be a long-winded conversation, diving into your aspirations: the fact that you’d like to spend more time reading, or that you wish you’d start playing an instrument.
Such a system could be a natural extension of existing to-do applications, making them more intelligent and aspirational in the process.
Letting an online service know about your deeper aspirations might sound scary at first, but if you think about everything this service already knows about you, then it’s easy to see that such conversations would only allow you to tip the scale back towards a truer version of who you really are. In this way it becomes clear that a compassionate artificial intelligence is the missing link. It’s the tool that would make it possible to enlist the tech giants as trusted allies in the pursuit of our greater goals.
Tuning every dial
In this post I’ve focused on links we regret clicking, but these are only the tip of the iceberg. There is a myriad of mechanisms online services rely on to capture our attention: playing a ding sound, increasing a red notification counter, letting us know how many people liked our picture, notifying us that a friend is typing an answer, etc.
In fact, there are so many such techniques that timewellspent.io is keeping a collection of them as warnings to product designers.
Yet if we start from the perspective that online services are focusing on the user, and if we build a compassionate artificial intelligence that gives them more visibility into our aspirations, then all these dreaded mechanisms could suddenly become tools that help us reach our greater goals. The ding sound could play only when your long lost friend wants to have the conversation you’ve been waiting for. The notification counter could stay hidden until you decide you’re ready to wind down… And posts could be ranked not based on how likely you are to click them, but on how likely you are to be genuinely happy about that click.
All of this must be made possible not through countless controls and switches deep in a settings menu, but through a simple new way of looking at our online world: a web optimized not for who we are, but for the persons we wish to become.
