One Change to Fix Tech
Put a Friendly Bot Between You and the Evil Bots
Movies like The Social Dilemma and commentators like Tim Wu, Shoshanna Zuboff, and Tristan Harris have shown that the phones, apps and websites we use are doing collateral damage to our mental, physical and financial health.
They tell a strong story about the harms of our current tech, but their story about how to fix it is a lot weaker. I’m proposing a radical new kind of solution. Small, scrappy companies are already building the first pieces. It’s just crazy enough to work.
The World Is a User Interface
I interact with 100+ user interfaces (UI’s) every day. Every piece of technology I touch or see, is an interface with a computer at one end and a human (me) at the other. Someone designed everything I look at or click.
Whoever designs the user interface gets the behavior they design for. That’s the dirty little secret that explains everything. That’s what 50 years of research in behavioral economics has taught us.
The designer of a shopping website designs everything to lead you to buy. The designer of a content website designs each page to get you to click on it. That means an advertisement will load, and they get paid. Did you just get an impulse to check your favorite social media site, and then spend 20 minutes there? They designed their UI to produce both of those behaviors.
It’s not really about software. The world is a user interface, too. When I walk into my grocery store, they put fresh fruits and dairy at opposite ends of the store so I will have to walk through the middle. They put the most profitable items at eye-level and put the better values on the bottom shelf. They’re getting the behavior they design for, too.
So I use more than a hundred user interfaces every day, each one designed to drive my behavior in one direction or another. None of them are designed to make my goals and objectives happen. In fact, they’re designed against me. They’re designed to consume all my time, attention, and money.
Is it any wonder people feel they don’t have any time, money or attention left?
Whose Goals Are Achieved?
On January 1, most Americans list out their New Year’s resolutions. We want to exercise more, eat healthier, save more money. Spend more time with friends and family, and less time in front of our screens. Sleep better and have more energy. Learn a new skill, or make a new friend.
By February 1, most people have abandoned their resolutions. We don’t achieve our goals. But guess who achieves theirs? The people who design the user interfaces that we spend 11+ hours a day using.
Whoever controls your environment controls most of your behavior. And today, our waking environment is our smartphones, tablets and laptops. Believing that it doesn’t affect you is like a coal miner believing a little dust can’t hurt you.
Who wants you to pick up your phone when you wake up — before anything else? Who wants you to sit on the couch with a screen in your face? Who wants you to spend 20 minutes of work time on internet distraction? When you’re out at lunch, who wants you pay attention to your phone and not your friend across the table? The people who design the software behind those screens.
Many UI designers don’t care what behavior they’re driving. They are simply selling the behavior their customers ask for. When I search Google for a plumber in Memphis, Google auctions off the right to put an advertisement at the top of the search results. If I click on the ad, Google gets paid.
Think about this from the plumber’s perspective. He is paying Google to make people click a button. A plumber pays Google to change my behavior. In fact, it works better if I believe that I’m not influenced by UI design and advertising.
The Futility of Current Proposals
There’s no lack of ideas for fixing Tech. The problem is, most of them can’t possibly work.
If an App or website makes its money from advertisers, they have to design the UI to make you sit still and consume more advertisements. If a shopping website makes its money from selling you more stuff, they have to design the UI to sell you more stuff you don’t need.
Asking tech companies and tech workers to change their behavior when the underlying incentives have not changed is futile. Asking consumers to make different choices doesn’t work, either. Consumers are operating in the same UI environment that drives the same bad choices.
Let’s talk about a different kind of solution that can work.
What an Assistant Does
Top leaders in every field have one thing in common — a smart, empowered Assistant who stands between them and a world that’s trying to get their attention and change their behavior.
Imagine all the people who want to get Elon Musk’s attention. To sell him something. To ask for a job or a partnership. To waste his time with some idea that’s not worth the Powerpoint it’s not printed on. There’s only one of him, and there’s a billion people who want to capture his attention and change his behavior to suit their purposes.
That’s where Mary Beth Brown comes in. According to Ashlee Vance’s biography, she was the one keeping Elon’s time and attention on the rails. How did Elon build Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity at the same time? By having the important things on his desk and on his schedule — and having someone to defend him from everything else.
You Need a Robot Assistant
Having a human assistant is not a scalable solution. It just shifts the problem from one person to another. Having a robot assistant — a piece of software running on your device or in the Cloud — is the scalable solution. It’s how you fight fire with fire.
Most of the actors trying to capture your attention are actually robots themselves. Robo-calls, robo-texts, and spam. Websites and Apps designed to keep me clicking and scrolling. These are all interfaces with a robot on one end and a human on the other.
What if you didn’t have to use 100 bad UI’s offered by Big Tech? What if you work with your Robot Assistant, who stands between you and everyone that’s trying to capture your time, attention and money? The future is not about one human using 100 manipulative UI’s. It’s about the human deciding to retreat behind an intelligent agent who deals with a hostile outside world.
You interact with your Robot Assistant, who’s programmed to help you hit your goals and objectives. You’re using a safe UI that is trying to get your milestones achieved.
Pay No Attention To The Man Behind the Curtain
Unfortunately, virtual assistants from Big Tech are not on your side.
Alexa is not trying to do Mary Beth Brown’s job. She wants you to buy more stuff from Amazon Basics. Cortana is not trying to help you get ahead at work. She wants to make sure you see Microsoft’s search engine advertisements instead of Google’s.
The most important feature of a Robot Assistant is the customer it serves. Mary Beth Brown was paid by Elon’s companies, not by the people who wanted to get on Elon’s calendar and sell him things.
If you want a robot assistant to drive your objectives and protect you from the UI’s that are running your life today, you’re going to have to pay for it with a monthly subscription. You have to become the customer.
A Robot Assistant Starts with Communications
Imagine that when a robo-call comes in, it’s not you that answers. The robocall bot doesn’t get to capture a human’s attention and write to the human’s short-term memory. Your Robot Assistant answers the phone, determines it’s dealing with a robo-call, and hangs up.
When an email comes in, it’s automatically put into an “Archive” folder unless it relates to a contact in your list, or a conversation you’re having with a real person. Same thing for your text messages.
Since most communications today are robots trying to get the attention of humans, every communication has to prove it’s real and important to get your attention.
When someone wants to meet you or connect with you, your assistant finds out who they are and what they want to talk with you about. Your assistant makes a decision on whether they get access to you, based on their reputation in contacting others. You get to rate the person afterward, so their reputation accuracy goes up over time.
A Robot Assistant Expands to Scheduling
Imagine setting up your calendar and priorities with a Robot Assistant. You say you want to go running 3 times a week, for 30 minutes. You want to call your brother at least once a week. You want to get a babysitter and take your spouse out for a date night twice a month.
Now, imagine your Robot Assistant prompts and guides you to get these things on your calendar. Prompts you when they come up. Helps you to re-schedule if you can’t do them at the original time. Keeps score for you, on how you’re doing relative to your goals.
Imagine getting a suggestion like this: “You haven’t talked with your brother this week, and it looks he’s available. Why don’t I place the call right now?” Or, “The first thing on your schedule is to go running. I’ll hold your calls and emails for you until you get back.”
In other words, imagine if the same level of technology and behavior science that’s currently used to distract you was deployed to help you to spend more time on your priorities. You might achieve your goals, and the advertisers might not achieve theirs.
Content and Shopping
Let’s say I want to spend 10 minutes a day seeing what my friends are up to on social media, and another 10 minutes a day getting a summary of the news that other people will expect me to know about. It doesn’t make sense for me to hop on Facebook or the News websites. They are designed to make sure I can’t limit my time to 10 minutes.
This is where my Robot Assistant comes in. It makes all the sense in the world for me to send my Assistant out to get me a prioritized list of news and updates, and repackage it into a summary. When the allotted time expires, then *poof*, so does the news screen.
Shopping is much the same story. If I’m looking to buy 1 thing, should I go out to store or website that is designed to sell me 3 more things? The right move is to delegate my shopping to an Assistant that knows my needs, preferences and budget.
There’s a strong interaction between these two features. If I’m not spending 11 hours a day consuming media, then I’m not going to know the brands of the most reliable plumber or the most fashionable shoes. I’m skipping all the advertising and I’m not really informed about the market.
But it doesn’t matter. I’m not the one shopping anymore. As a human, I might not be much of a rational shopper. But my Robot Assistant can be.
Plaid For Everything
The fintech unicorn Plaid pioneered the model that will power the Robot Assistants of the near future. Banks all over America had online banking websites, but they were clunky and hard to use. It was another case of a bad UI.
Plaid decided to change that, in an astonishingly brute-force way. Plaid would collect the user’s bank account login and account information, and then its technology would use the bank’s website and interfaces as if it were the user. From the bank perspective, it looked like the user was logging in and completing various tasks.
Plaid offered developers a better way forward. They could create the great UI’s that customers wanted, and then send Plaid out as their agent, to work with the clunky bank interfaces and get the job done. It was just like sending your Assistant to the bank to make a deposit, transfer money, or set up an auto-pay.
You might think banks would revolt and leave Plaid for dead. In fact, the opposite happened. As Plaid developed a bigger and more valuable user base, banks started creating interfaces just for Plaid. So Plaid did not have to scrape and hack a bank website designed for humans to use — it could get things done on a clean and efficient robot-to-robot basis.
The Plaid model is how the first Robot Assistants will work. They will act as your assistant on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, and other websites. They will perform tasks and get information for you, then report it back to you in a UI that’s designed to serve your goals.
In the long term, the tech giants will put up API’s for the Robot Assistants to use, with monthly payments going from the Robot Assistant companies to the tech and content companies to replace the advertising revenue that’s lost.
It’s a fair system that creates a race to the top. The consumer pays one vendor (the Robot Assistant) who manages contracts with vendors in Search, Social, Content and other areas. If you’ve been waiting 20 years for micro-payments from consumers to search engines and content providers — sorry, that’s not going to happen. This is how consumers are finally going to pay for search and content.
The Most Valuable Company
Any company that can place itself between the consumer and those that actually provide goods and services becomes incredibly valuable. It’s the business model that drives every big internet company out there.
How do you find a plumber? Most people use Google, who sits between consumers and the services they buy. How do you find a new kid’s toy? Search Amazon, who sits between you and the Marketplace seller that stocks and sells the toy. Need a ride? Uber sits between you and the person who will drive you to the destination.
The Robot Assistant is the ultimate expression of this strategy. Build a trustworthy user interface and soon it’s the only one people want to use. If successful, it can become the most valuable company of all.
The Robot Assistant model is our best chance to fix everything that’s wrong with tech today, by placing a friendly bot between you and all the evil bots. The tech giants’ manipulation to extract people’s time, attention, and money is rendered irrelevant, since you don’t interact with them anymore.
