WEBVTT 00:00:00.892 --> 00:00:04.180 "Don't talk to strangers." NOTE Paragraph 00:00:04.180 --> 00:00:06.219 You have heard that phrase uttered 00:00:06.219 --> 00:00:10.532 by your friends, family, schools and the media for decades. 00:00:10.532 --> 00:00:13.444 It's a norm. It's a social norm. 00:00:13.444 --> 00:00:15.802 But it's a special kind of social norm, 00:00:15.802 --> 00:00:18.332 because it's a social norm that wants to tell us 00:00:18.332 --> 00:00:22.796 who we can relate to and who we shouldn't relate to. 00:00:22.796 --> 00:00:25.300 "Don't talk to strangers" says, 00:00:25.300 --> 00:00:29.476 "Stay from anyone who's not familiar to you. 00:00:29.476 --> 00:00:31.891 Stick with the people you know. 00:00:31.891 --> 00:00:34.865 Stick with people like you." NOTE Paragraph 00:00:34.865 --> 00:00:37.217 How appealing is that? 00:00:37.217 --> 00:00:40.442 It's not really what we do, is it, when we're at our best? 00:00:40.442 --> 00:00:43.226 When we're at our best, we reach out to people 00:00:43.226 --> 00:00:44.844 who are not like us, 00:00:44.844 --> 00:00:47.711 because when we do that, we learn from people 00:00:47.711 --> 00:00:49.980 who are not like us. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:49.980 --> 00:00:54.081 My phrase for this value of being with "not like us" 00:00:54.081 --> 00:00:55.953 is "strangeness," 00:00:55.953 --> 00:00:59.853 and my point is that in today's digitally intensive world, 00:00:59.853 --> 00:01:03.219 strangers are quite frankly not the point. 00:01:03.219 --> 00:01:05.402 The point that we should be worried about is, 00:01:05.402 --> 00:01:08.289 how much strangeness are we getting? NOTE Paragraph 00:01:08.289 --> 00:01:11.295 Why strangeness? Because our social relations 00:01:11.295 --> 00:01:14.089 are increasingly mediated by data, 00:01:14.089 --> 00:01:18.646 and data turns our social relations into digital relations, 00:01:18.646 --> 00:01:20.995 and that means that our digital relations 00:01:20.995 --> 00:01:24.797 now depend extraordinarily on technology 00:01:24.797 --> 00:01:27.715 to bring to them a sense of robustness, 00:01:27.715 --> 00:01:29.302 a sense of discovery, 00:01:29.302 --> 00:01:32.572 a sense of surprise and unpredictability. 00:01:32.572 --> 00:01:34.339 Why not strangers? 00:01:34.339 --> 00:01:36.633 Because strangers are part of a world 00:01:36.633 --> 00:01:38.898 of really rigid boundaries. 00:01:38.898 --> 00:01:41.850 They belong to a world of people I know 00:01:41.850 --> 00:01:44.364 versus people I don't know, 00:01:44.364 --> 00:01:46.843 and in the context of my digital relations, 00:01:46.843 --> 00:01:50.864 I'm already doing things with people I don't know. 00:01:50.864 --> 00:01:54.082 The question isn't whether or not I know you. 00:01:54.082 --> 00:01:56.586 The question is, what can I do with you? 00:01:56.586 --> 00:01:59.195 What can I learn with you? 00:01:59.195 --> 00:02:03.496 What can we do together that benefits us both? NOTE Paragraph 00:02:03.496 --> 00:02:05.858 I spend a lot of time thinking about 00:02:05.858 --> 00:02:08.618 how the social landscape is changing, 00:02:08.618 --> 00:02:11.090 how new technologies create new constraints 00:02:11.090 --> 00:02:13.880 and new opportunities for people. 00:02:13.880 --> 00:02:16.531 The most important changes facing us today 00:02:16.531 --> 00:02:19.337 have to do with data and what data is doing 00:02:19.337 --> 00:02:21.442 to shape the kinds of digital relations 00:02:21.442 --> 00:02:23.906 that will be possible for us in the future. 00:02:23.906 --> 00:02:26.139 The economies of the future depend on that. 00:02:26.139 --> 00:02:29.058 Our social lives in the future depend on that. 00:02:29.058 --> 00:02:32.090 The threat to worry about isn't strangers. 00:02:32.090 --> 00:02:34.202 The threat to worry about is whether or not 00:02:34.202 --> 00:02:37.194 we're getting our fair share of strangeness. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:37.194 --> 00:02:39.786 Now, 20th-century psychologists and sociologists 00:02:39.786 --> 00:02:41.939 were thinking about strangers, 00:02:41.939 --> 00:02:44.676 but they weren't thinking so dynamically about human relations, 00:02:44.676 --> 00:02:46.045 and they were thinking about strangers 00:02:46.045 --> 00:02:48.999 in the context of influencing practices. 00:02:48.999 --> 00:02:51.747 Stanley Milgram from the '60s and '70s, 00:02:51.747 --> 00:02:53.733 the creator of the small-world experiments, 00:02:53.733 --> 00:02:56.687 which became later popularized as six degrees of separation, 00:02:56.687 --> 00:03:00.199 made the point that any two arbitrarily selected people 00:03:00.199 --> 00:03:03.921 were likely connected from between five to seven intermediary steps. 00:03:03.921 --> 00:03:06.951 His point was that strangers are out there. 00:03:06.951 --> 00:03:08.523 We can reach them. There are paths 00:03:08.523 --> 00:03:11.209 that enable us to reach them. 00:03:11.209 --> 00:03:14.978 Mark Granovetter, Stanford sociologist, in 1973 00:03:14.978 --> 00:03:17.776 in his seminal essay "The Strength of Weak Ties," 00:03:17.776 --> 00:03:20.602 made the point that these weak ties 00:03:20.602 --> 00:03:23.089 that are a part of our networks, these strangers, 00:03:23.089 --> 00:03:26.081 are actually more effective at diffusing information to us 00:03:26.081 --> 00:03:30.617 than are our strong ties, the people closest to us. 00:03:30.617 --> 00:03:34.114 He makes an additional indictment of our strong ties 00:03:34.114 --> 00:03:36.743 when he says that these people who are so close to us, 00:03:36.743 --> 00:03:38.676 these strong ties in our lives, 00:03:38.676 --> 00:03:42.103 actually have a homogenizing effect on us. 00:03:42.103 --> 00:03:44.938 They produce sameness. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:44.938 --> 00:03:47.777 My colleagues and I at Intel have spent the last few years 00:03:47.777 --> 00:03:50.393 looking at the ways in which digital platforms 00:03:50.393 --> 00:03:52.264 are reshaping our everyday lives, 00:03:52.264 --> 00:03:54.881 what kinds of new routines are possible. 00:03:54.881 --> 00:03:56.177 We've been looking specifically at the kinds 00:03:56.177 --> 00:03:58.888 of digital platforms that have enabled us 00:03:58.888 --> 00:04:02.023 to take our possessions, those things that used to be 00:04:02.023 --> 00:04:05.145 very restricted to us and to our friends in our houses, 00:04:05.145 --> 00:04:08.967 and to make them available to people we don't know. 00:04:08.967 --> 00:04:11.690 Whether it's our clothes, whether it's our cars, 00:04:11.690 --> 00:04:14.313 whether it's our bikes, whether it's our books or music, 00:04:14.313 --> 00:04:17.306 we are able to take our possessions now 00:04:17.306 --> 00:04:20.737 and make them available to people we've never met. 00:04:20.737 --> 00:04:23.548 And we concluded a very important insight, 00:04:23.548 --> 00:04:25.336 which was that as people's relationships 00:04:25.336 --> 00:04:27.877 to the things in their lives change, 00:04:27.877 --> 00:04:31.321 so do their relations with other people. 00:04:31.321 --> 00:04:32.729 And yet recommendation system 00:04:32.729 --> 00:04:37.004 after recommendation system continues to miss the boat. 00:04:37.004 --> 00:04:39.553 It continues to try to predict what I need 00:04:39.553 --> 00:04:42.793 based on some past characterization of who I am, 00:04:42.793 --> 00:04:45.089 of what I've already done. 00:04:45.089 --> 00:04:47.593 Security technology after security technology 00:04:47.593 --> 00:04:49.769 continues to design data protection 00:04:49.769 --> 00:04:52.174 in terms of threats and attacks, 00:04:52.174 --> 00:04:55.769 keeping me locked into really rigid kinds of relations. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:55.769 --> 00:04:58.265 Categories like "friends" and "family" 00:04:58.265 --> 00:05:00.742 and "contacts" and "colleagues" 00:05:00.742 --> 00:05:04.529 don't tell me anything about my actual relations. 00:05:04.529 --> 00:05:06.773 A more effective way to think about my relations 00:05:06.773 --> 00:05:09.465 might be in terms of closeness and distance, 00:05:09.465 --> 00:05:13.285 where at any given point in time, with any single person, 00:05:13.285 --> 00:05:16.776 I am both close and distant from that individual, 00:05:16.776 --> 00:05:21.284 all as a function of what I need to do right now. 00:05:21.284 --> 00:05:23.922 People aren't close or distant. 00:05:23.922 --> 00:05:26.983 People are always a combination of the two, 00:05:26.983 --> 00:05:30.703 and that combination is constantly changing. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:30.703 --> 00:05:33.143 What if technologies could intervene 00:05:33.143 --> 00:05:37.120 to disrupt the balance of certain kinds of relationships? 00:05:37.120 --> 00:05:39.081 What if technologies could intervene 00:05:39.081 --> 00:05:43.492 to help me find the person that I need right now? 00:05:43.492 --> 00:05:45.916 Strangeness is that calibration 00:05:45.916 --> 00:05:48.135 of closeness and distance 00:05:48.135 --> 00:05:52.038 that enables me to find the people that I need right now, 00:05:52.038 --> 00:05:55.028 that enables me to find the sources of intimacy, 00:05:55.028 --> 00:05:59.676 of discovery, and of inspiration that I need right now. 00:05:59.676 --> 00:06:01.985 Strangeness is not about meeting strangers. 00:06:01.985 --> 00:06:04.180 It simply makes the point that we need 00:06:04.180 --> 00:06:07.462 to disrupt our zones of familiarity. 00:06:07.462 --> 00:06:11.119 So jogging those zones of familiarity is one way to think about strangeness, 00:06:11.119 --> 00:06:13.823 and it's a problem faced not just by individuals today, 00:06:13.823 --> 00:06:16.053 but also by organizations, 00:06:16.053 --> 00:06:20.576 organizations that are trying to embrace massively new opportunities. 00:06:20.576 --> 00:06:22.682 Whether you're a political party 00:06:22.682 --> 00:06:25.550 insisting to your detriment on a very rigid notion 00:06:25.550 --> 00:06:27.938 of who belongs and who does not, 00:06:27.938 --> 00:06:29.431 whether you're the government 00:06:29.431 --> 00:06:32.129 protecting social institutions like marriage 00:06:32.129 --> 00:06:36.022 and restricting access of those institutions to the few, 00:06:36.022 --> 00:06:38.430 whether you're a teenager in her bedroom 00:06:38.430 --> 00:06:41.618 who's trying to jostle her relations with her parents, 00:06:41.618 --> 00:06:44.780 strangeness is a way to think about how we pave the way 00:06:44.780 --> 00:06:47.254 to new kinds of relations. 00:06:47.254 --> 00:06:50.612 We have to change the norms. 00:06:50.612 --> 00:06:53.642 We have to change the norms in order to enable 00:06:53.642 --> 00:06:55.580 new kinds of technologies 00:06:55.580 --> 00:06:58.369 as a basis for new kinds of businesses. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:58.369 --> 00:07:02.102 What interesting questions lie ahead for us 00:07:02.102 --> 00:07:04.773 in this world of no strangers? 00:07:04.773 --> 00:07:08.579 How might we think differently about our relations with people? 00:07:08.579 --> 00:07:11.700 How might we think differently about our relations 00:07:11.700 --> 00:07:13.792 with distributed groups of people? 00:07:13.792 --> 00:07:18.233 How might we think differently about our relations with technologies, 00:07:18.233 --> 00:07:21.239 things that effectively become social participants 00:07:21.239 --> 00:07:23.313 in their own right? 00:07:23.313 --> 00:07:27.126 The range of digital relations is extraordinary. 00:07:27.126 --> 00:07:31.683 In the context of this broad range of digital relations, 00:07:31.683 --> 00:07:34.657 safely seeking strangeness might very well be 00:07:34.657 --> 00:07:36.928 a new basis for that innovation. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:36.928 --> 00:07:38.398 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:38.398 --> 00:07:43.291 (Applause)