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"Don't talk to strangers."

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You have heard that phrase uttered

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by your friends, family, schools and the media for decades.

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It's a norm. It's a social norm.

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But it's a special kind of social norm,

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because it's a social norm that wants to tell us

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who we can relate to and who we shouldn't relate to.

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"Don't talk to strangers" says,

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"Stay from anyone who's not familiar to you.

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Stick with the people you know.

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Stick with people like you."

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How appealing is that?

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It's not really what we do, is it, when we're at our best?

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When we're at our best, we reach out to people

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who are not like us,

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because when we do that, we learn from people

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who are not like us.

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My phrase for this value of being with "not like us"

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is "strangeness,"

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and my point is that in today's digitally intensive world,

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strangers are quite frankly not the point.

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The point that we should be worried about is,

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how much strangeness are we getting?

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Why strangeness? Because our social relations

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are increasingly mediated by data,

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and data turns our social relations into digital relations,

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and that means that our digital relations

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now depend extraordinarily on technology

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to bring to them a sense of robustness,

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a sense of discovery,

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a sense of surprise and unpredictability.

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Why not strangers?

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Because strangers are part of a world

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of really rigid boundaries.

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They belong to a world of people I know

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versus people I don't know,

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and in the context of my digital relations,

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I'm already doing things with people I don't know.

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The question isn't whether or not I know you.

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The question is, what can I do with you?

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What can I learn with you?

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What can we do together that benefits us both?

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I spend a lot of time thinking about

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how the social landscape is changing,

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how new technologies create new constraints

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and new opportunities for people.

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The most important changes facing us today

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have to do with data and what data is doing

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to shape the kinds of digital relations

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that will be possible for us in the future.

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The economies of the future depend on that.

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Our social lives in the future depend on that.

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The threat to worry about isn't strangers.

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The threat to worry about is whether or not

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we're getting our fair share of strangeness.

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Now, 20th-century psychologists and sociologists

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were thinking about strangers,

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but they weren't thinking so dynamically about human relations,

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and they were thinking about strangers

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in the context of influencing practices.

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Stanley Milgram from the '60s and '70s,

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the creator of the small-world experiments,

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which became later popularized as six degrees of separation,

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made the point that any two arbitrarily selected people

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were likely connected from between five to seven intermediary steps.

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His point was that strangers are out there.

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We can reach them. There are paths

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that enable us to reach them.

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Mark Granovetter, Stanford sociologist, in 1973

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in his seminal essay "The Strength of Weak Ties,"

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made the point that these weak ties

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that are a part of our networks, these strangers,

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are actually more effective at diffusing information to us

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than are our strong ties, the people closest to us.

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He makes an additional indictment of our strong ties

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when he says that these people who are so close to us,

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these strong ties in our lives,

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actually have a homogenizing effect on us.

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They produce sameness.

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My colleagues and I at Intel have spent the last few years

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looking at the ways in which digital platforms

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are reshaping our everyday lives,

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what kinds of new routines are possible.

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We've been looking specifically at the kinds

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of digital platforms that have enabled us

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to take our possessions, those things that used to be

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very restricted to us and to our friends in our houses,

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and to make them available to people we don't know.

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Whether it's our clothes, whether it's our cars,

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whether it's our bikes, whether it's our books or music,

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we are able to take our possessions now

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and make them available to people we've never met.

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And we concluded a very important insight,

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which was that as people's relationships

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to the things in their lives change,

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so do their relations with other people.

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And yet recommendation system

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after recommendation system continues to miss the boat.

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It continues to try to predict what I need

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based on some past characterization of who I am,

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of what I've already done.

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Security technology after security technology

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continues to design data protection

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in terms of threats and attacks,

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keeping me locked into really rigid kinds of relations.

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Categories like "friends" and "family"

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and "contacts" and "colleagues"

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don't tell me anything about my actual relations.

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A more effective way to think about my relations

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might be in terms of closeness and distance,

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where at any given point in time, with any single person,

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I am both close and distant from that individual,

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all as a function of what I need to do right now.

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People aren't close or distant.

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People are always a combination of the two,

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and that combination is constantly changing.

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What if technologies could intervene

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to disrupt the balance of certain kinds of relationships?

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What if technologies could intervene

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to help me find the person that I need right now?

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Strangeness is that calibration

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of closeness and distance

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that enables me to find the people that I need right now,

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that enables me to find the sources of intimacy,

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of discovery, and of inspiration that I need right now.

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Strangeness is not about meeting strangers.

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It simply makes the point that we need

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to disrupt our zones of familiarity.

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So jogging those zones of familiarity is one way to think about strangeness,

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and it's a problem faced not just by individuals today,

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but also by organizations,

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organizations that are trying to embrace massively new opportunities.

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Whether you're a political party

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insisting to your detriment on a very rigid notion

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of who belongs and who does not,

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whether you're the government

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protecting social institutions like marriage

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and restricting access of those institutions to the few,

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whether you're a teenager in her bedroom

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who's trying to jostle her relations with her parents,

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strangeness is a way to think about how we pave the way

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to new kinds of relations.

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We have to change the norms.

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We have to change the norms in order to enable

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new kinds of technologies

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as a basis for new kinds of businesses.

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What interesting questions lie ahead for us

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in this world of no strangers?

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How might we think differently about our relations with people?

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How might we think differently about our relations

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with distributed groups of people?

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How might we think differently about our relations with technologies,

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things that effectively become social participants

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in their own right?

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The range of digital relations is extraordinary.

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In the context of this broad range of digital relations,

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safely seeking strangeness might very well be

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a new basis for that innovation.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)