The content argues that our modern obsession with speed and efficiency, driven by optimization models, often overlooks the inherent value and human preference for slower, more deliberate processes, leading to a decline in well-being and genuine productivity.
Mind Map
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I thought I'd start off with something
that is of huge use um actually no I'll
start off with a joke uh David Ole used
to tell this joke it dates it and so I
apologize for not updating the gender of the
the
participants but the joke is an old
advertising joke and it's that a
copywriter an art director and an
advertising account man are boarding a
plane to go to a CL
presentation and it's slightly
implausibly they open the overhead
locker and a genie pops
out and the genie says I've been stuck
in that Bloody overhead Locker for 10
years as a reward I've only got three
wishes but I'll give you one each and
the genie turns first to the copywriter
and says what's your wish said I think
I'd like the life and the pro style of
Hemingway I just like to live that life
I'd like to write that way I can't think
of anything better and poof the
copyright disappears turns to the art
director what would you
like it's got to be Picasso you know
think about it the locations the
lifespan the eye the beauty the women
folk I'd like the life of Pablo Picasso
and bof the art director disappears and
so the genie turns to the advertising
account man and says what about you he
says I want those two guys back I've got
an important meeting in two and a half
hours and in that joke there's a kind of
analogy I think for the present day
which is that we've sometimes
allowed the Urgent to actually drown out the
the
important the short-term consideration
drowns out the long-term consideration
but in the process rather like that
account man we may also be ruining it
for everybody
else I'll come to that thought but I'll
start with something which I always
share in my presentations for a very
good reason which I think it might save
somebody's life in the room genuinely so
this shows how extraordinarily subjective
subjective
our perception of time is now you're all
familiar well those of you over 35 who
can afford a car are familiar with the
thing around the outside that that's a
speedometer okay that's denoted in miles
per hour and the thing on the inside is
an interesting thing which is only
really recently been well not invented
but publicized which is a
Pomer now that shows how many minutes of
that speed it takes you to go 10 mil so
assuming you're going 10 miles okay at
10 mil an hour it'll take you an hour so
the Peter shows
60 now most of you would have noticed
something a bit strange about this which
is that whereas the numbers around the
outside are completely regular the
numbers around the inside are absolutely
anything but now the reason I always
share this with people is what it shows
is that actually if you're going 10
miles or 20 mil or 30 mil something in
that order of magnitude okay there's a
really really big time saving to be
gained by going at 30 m hour rather than
20 M hour in fact you'll save a whole 10
minutes okay just by accelerating about
10 m an hour on the other hand if you
Accelerate from 80 to 90 for example or
70 to 80 you basically save a minute now
some of you may have noticed this thing
with your surprise if you've got a GPS
in your car you've noticed that you're
driving on the motor at 60 you realize
you're going to be 5 minutes late for an
appointment so you well it and after
driving it an insanely f fast and
dangerous speed for about 8 minutes you
suddenly realize your arrival time has
only improved by 1
minute this is fascinating because to a
physicist they're exactly the same okay
but when I present the information about
time and distance in a different way
okay your reaction is now completely
different what it effectively says is
you know going quite a bit faster when
you're going slowly is a really big gain
going very fast when you're already
going fast is actually the action of a
[ __ ] basically once you hit a
comfortable 65 or 70 on the road okay
don't bother that's enough it's a waste
of time because the risk you actually
you encounter the risk you incur on
yourself the risk you actually
effectively impose on other people by
going any faster is utterly pointless in
term terms of time
saved that by the way explains why very
highspeed rail is kind of dumb because
for very highs speeded rail to save you
any any time you have to be traveling
the kind of distance where to be honest
you might as well go by plane okay it's
why there isn't really a case for those
super fast
trains so that's a useful application of
just reframing time of looking at it in
a completely different way which as I
said I think might save somebody's life
truly here's a slightly more venal um or mercenary
mercenary
application it fascinates me that all
rail um ticket buying applications
basically assume that you're in a hurry
it's kind of odd right maybe you want to
save money instead this on the top okay
is the ticket from watero to exitus and
Davids now it takes about an hour longer
it's very Scenic okay these are first
class uh tickets I don't that's how I
roll okay in in in in clear Defiance of
wpp's Transport policy which is let's
face it drawn up by a bunch of people in
the finance department who never have to
[ __ ] go anywhere okay
um but
um in order to find that vastly cheaper
ticket you actually have to search
waterl to exitus and Davids and type in
Via Salsbury okay unless you do that the
computer the algorithm will not show you
that ticket not because it isn't cheaper
it's a lot cheaper not because it is
nicer it's actually a lot nicer okay you
might even go through a few Tory
constituencies who knows okay
okay but because it's slower there's an
assumption that we want to save time and
this even comes across with a massive r
that briefly surfaced online which is
Google Maps refuses to offer Scenic
Roots because they might be biased okay
so actually it's somehow considered
objective to optimize around short
distances short times even if it Roots
you to an area which is downright
dangerous presumably okay but actually
saying why don't you take a bit more
time and the nice way no no apparently that's
that's
biased and then you get the whole
question of what happens when you give a
load of Engineers a brief and I always
ask the question if you taken the brief
for highp speeded 2 what would happen if
you hadn't given the brief to a lead of
engineering firms who immediately
focused on speed time distance capacity
what have you given the brief to Disney instead
instead
okay they would have said first of all
we're going to rewrite the question the
right question for highpe 2 is how do we
make the train journey between London
and Manchester so enjoyable people feel
stupid going by car that's the right
question okay it's not about time and
speed and distance those things only
obliquely or tangentially actually
correlate with human behavior human
preference Disney there will be asking
the right question why does that
question never get asked because it's an
open-ended question and business people
governments politicians aren't looking
to solve problems they're looking to win
arguments and the way way you win an
argument is you pretend that what should
be an open-ended question with many
possible right answers make it enjoyable
have free booze on the train put Wi-Fi
on the train have a ball pit on the
train for kids which are the Disney
answers those are multiple and involve
subjective decision making and um human
what you might call human judgment okay
you can't win an argument with those
what you do is you pretend this is a
high school maths problem with a single
right answer you solve for the right
answer using High School maths and then
nobody can argue with you because
apparently you haven't made a decision
you've simply followed the data okay
this is a massive problem in decision-
making that we try and close down the
solution space of any problem in order
to arrive at a single right answer which
it's difficult to argue with it's
fundamentally a massive creative
opportunity cost and yet there are
brilliant examples all over the place of
people tweaking time subjectively this
is one of my favorites the Uber map
doesn't change how long you wait for the
taxi it changes the quality of the
weight In Time by reducing uncertainty
actually if you look at human emotions
although humans might say I don't like
waiting for a taxi what what actually
makes them uneasy is the uncertainty of
the arrival and the lack of trust it's
not actually the duration so we're
optimizing for the numerical thing time
speed we're not optimizing for the
emotional state which is dis quiet or
anxiety as you can see advertising you
can Rebrand time there are quite a few
cases of this good things come to those
who wait what was the one downside of
Guinness bartenders hated it because it
took soding ages to pour okay in fact if
you wanted to make bar staff hate you
you just put in a huge order for drinks
and then and crisps and then and and end
up with and pint of Guinness okay and
they think [ __ ] I could have been
pouring that while you're telling me
about the other crap okay take a
weakness turn it into a
strength there's also the whole question
of time that we regard it as a kind of
odity as if it's fungible as if 10 time
10 minutes is the same as one chunk of a 100
100
minutes in human terms this is
absolutely not true I'm not going to
have time to read it now this is a
little paper by um Paul Graham the
founder of why combinator called maker
schedule manager schedule the mere
consciousness of an engagement will
sometimes worry a whole day that's
Charles Dickens in other words if you
try and break up your day into lots of
little chunks of time your productivity
is massive L destroyed even though the
time available is is pretty much
notionally the same one of the worst
mistakes we ever made was we made email
instantaneous we should have built in a
2-hour buffer unless you flagged the
email as time sensitive or urgent why is
that because now everybody has to check
their email every 10 or 15 minutes on
the off chance that someone has sent
them a time sensitive email so the
burden falls on the recipient which
means everybody rather than the sender
which means one person to actually sift
the Urgent messages from the important
but not time sensitive it is literally
been a productivity disaster uh in fact
um a total catastrophe no one talks
about it it's really odd this is a
fundamental catastrophe of the fact that
people have in fact one of the greatest
ways you can improve your productivity
is just setting your server to only
check for new emails about every 2 to three
three
hours there's an extraordinary case I
mentioned this bias towards time saving
that faster must be better and I've got
to be careful to preserve anonymity here
but someone I know who's a very very
good expert at Transport for London who
does research for them and I'll keep
their gender and identity Secret in case
they don't want this to be known found
out in research that quite a lot of
people quite a lot of the time actually
enjoy commuting they much en they enjoy
the commute home much more than the
commute to work I think if I'm right men
enjoy it a bit more than women that's
cuz I say men a bit like Sky boxes we've
got a standby mode okay you know we like
a bit of staring if you look at Co
fishing 95% male right why is that
because course fishing is basically
staring with equipment okay right but
nonetheless quite a lot of people enjoy
their commute time and there's good
behavioral evidence for this because
economists have noticed that people
actually live a bit further from work
than they optimally should to create a
kind of chronological buffer between
where they work and where they live we
actually like that that decompression
time and so this person announces the
research to the people responsible for
transport modeling at Transport for
London and they say you must never tell
anybody that it's absolutely wrong for
you to say that people might actually
enjoy a train ride but a but it's kind
of true he said maybe it's true but all
our models that justify transport
investment assume that travel time is
always a disutility in other words the
more time you spend in transit the worse
off you are if you come along with FY
ideas suggesting that people may
sometimes prefer slower to faster it
[ __ ] up our whole model so this is
what's happened to the world which is optimization
optimization
models actually Trump human preference
okay the people who actually want to win
the argument with the model effectively
are prepared to ignore human truths in
order to preserve the Integrity of the
artificial model and if you want a
really good book on this the account
unaccountability Machine by Dan Davis uh
which has only just come out is a
fantastic book where people create these
models effectively because if you can
reduce decision making to an algorithm
or a formula or a process or a procedure
okay you avoid the risk of blame
computer says no effectively it's a
whole great principle where
instinctively people love to codify
things and make them numerical and make
them what you might call optimization
problems with a single right answer like
that because if you make that bum
the second you acknowledge any ambiguity
okay you now have to exercise Choice
whereas if you can pretend there's no
ambiguity you haven't made a decision
you can't be blamed you can't be held
responsible what's the first thing you
remove if you want to remove ambiguity
from a model you remove human psychology
because human psychology particularly
around time is massively
ambiguous I think we just spend far too
little time talking about this we've had
an extraordinary change with the
invention of um video conferencing not
so much the invention of it but the
normalization of it virtually no time is
spent discussing how we best use this
technology the assumption is that if we
each use it optimally for ourselves it
will be optimal for the system as a
whole but the great lesson of w Edwards
Deming was if you want to optimize the
system you have to sub optimize the
parts there should be rules about this
it should be concentrated around Friday
whatever it might be I mean I did
actually the marketing director of Zoom
I hate to say this in in 2019 and I I
suggested they focused on Friday thank
Zoom it's Friday create a day around
which this activity and then just as she
was leaving I said of course um what you
really need is a major transport strike
or a small pandemic and I I feel a bit
sick every time I remember saying that
okay but we we're a full service agency
we put her in touch with the Wuhan
Institute of aurology
um anyway we should be thinking about
this a lot it's a complete gamech Cher
for any service business any B2B
business it's a very very significant
technology which like email can be
hugely beneficial if we coordinate it
and catastrophically bad if we leave it
to individual actors but we're making
the same mistake all over again this is
a book I can recommend by the way they
make the point massively about email
they make the point that in algorithm
design there are things called switching
costs every time you switch from one
process to another you basically lose efficiency
efficiency
any kind of use of human time or indeed
Computing time which involves rapid
switching is basically inefficient and
at some in some cases catastrophically
so and yet we're completely blind to
this we're also blind to the possible
downsides of accelerating things
unbelievably in the 19th century when
they finally built a railway to
California people are not making this up
people actually said imagine how much
Leisure we'll have if we can get to San
Francisco in 2 and 1 half days rather
than 2 weeks they actually imagined that
your clients wouldn't know that the
railway existed so you could pretend
you'd gone by ship spend 10 days playing
golf and then turn up by train
unfortunately that information actually
became widely known and you were
expected to turn up in two days and this
leads to a problem I think which which
bevil's many many Technologies and many
behaviors it starts as an option it then
becomes an obligation and we welcome the
technology at first because it presents
us with a choice and then suddenly
everybody else has to adopt the
technology and we suddenly realize we're
worse off than we were when we started
you can see that with things like four
in five motorists want to get rid of
parking apps that's not because parking
apps were bad necessarily it's because
they went from being an option to being
an obligation to a point where people
were installing them in kind of basement
car parks where you had no chance of a
mobile signal and that's the kind of
thing that happened
and it's worth remembering that when
behaviors become
Universal they affect everybody this is
a shot of a concert okay now you could
argue that this urge to photograph
everything prevents people from being in
the moment and you could say naively
well that's an individual choice if you
want to watch the concert watch the
concert and if you want to film the
concert film the concert but there's a
problem there because even if if you
don't want to film the concert the
behavior of everybody around you is
basically [ __ ] up the concert and the
weirder thing when I researched this
more is the people it most ruins the
concert for are actually the performers
who say we used to be performing to a
live crowd now it basically feels as if
we're just doing something to be sucked
into people's telephones it doesn't feel
the same to perform anymore because of
this Behavior so when one person does
something fine it's an option it's
something that somebody does when these
things become more widespread they morph
from being alternative options to
basically being social norms conventions
from which you have no
escape and there's a great book about
this by a German sociologist called harm
Rosa whose work is really about social
acceleration that effectively he he
dates this back to the Industrial
Revolution that the acceleration of
things has in a way made us miserable
because our choices are no longer
sufficiently limited that we feel we can
accomplish everything we want that
essentially we've created an
acceleration and an explosion of Choice
which will permanently leave us feeling
fundamentally unsatisfied or under
optimized it's a very very interesting
thing to read about actually no
coincidence I think that they chose the
front cover of the book Turner's rail um
Reign them and speed which is of course
a painting the hair is basically being
moaned down by the train or running in
front of the train which is basically a
painting exactly about that issue now I
don't think you can also by the way I
searched for the picture this and
unfortunately for about the next two
days I just got ads for magga
merchandise so there you go um I don't
think anybody who's alert to advertising
slogans can fail to notice that there's
something retrospective in all of these
slogans okay make America great again
suggests actually a return to the Past
Take Back Control again is a past
referential phrase I've got a vague soft
spot for it although I shouldn't for the
alternative for a Deutch land who have a
slogan Germany but normal okay I think
you'd be toned deaf to the population I
have to say that is quite good actually
okay you'd have to be tone deaf to the
population not to realize there is some
source of disqui with the pace of change
or the extent to which it is being
imposed without asking people on the
assumption that it's inevitable and I
would argue if we look at this scarf
model a massive acceleration of things
combined with an automation of things
combined with a kind of what you might
call I suppose what Dan Davis might call unaccountability
unaccountability
syns basically makes us miserable
because it diminishes our status because
we can't actually make any decisions we
have to refer to something else it it
totally destroys our sense of certainty
it it reduces autonomy it reduces the
human interactive reciprocal nature of
relationships by effectively
streamlining everything to the point of
being impersonal and I think it also
massively attacks
fairness but the point about time which
fascinates me is I often say that the
opposite of a good idea can be another
good idea I mentioned that Guinness
thing you can turn the slow pow of a
Guinness into a virtue you can take a
long train journey and you can turn it
into a benefit you go on that train from
watero and pack a hamper actually it's a
day out rather than a tedious Journey
the great thing about the human brain is
it can process the same thing in two
different ways a mathematic IAL model
can never cope with that so every
mathematical model concerned with time
every algorithm will assume that faster
is better and as they mentioned with for
example sex there are certain things you
shouldn't try to accelerate okay 3.25
minutes that's my personal best okay
that's not a good idea all right um and
I owe this to a very valuable insight to
my colleague Colin nimic very brilliant
copyright WR at ogelby who said in New
York people speak fast in the American
South they speak slowly both of them are
a form of politeness understood in a
different way in New York you speak
quickly because you respect the value of
the other person's time and you don't
want to take up too much of it in the
South you speak slowly because you want
to respect the person by showing how
much of your own time you're prepared to
give to
them there are two behaviors which
depending on cultural context are
intended to attain the same end while
being completely opposite and I think
human psychology is absolutely packed
full of these things a kind of Union of
opposites if you read um for example um
the book influenc by Robert Shalini what
you realize is that actually many things
are successfully sold by opposites
everybody has one of these so it must be
good or not many people have one of
these so it must be good okay you can
achieve the same emotional effect with
an opposite thing there are two great
ways to check into a hotel one of them
is totally automated where you walk
straight to the room and use your phone
to unlock the door the other one is
where someone takes you up to the room
and makes you a cup of tea okay they're
both great check-in experiences they're completely
completely
opposite and so we got to understand
that what's daed is that sometimes as an
option self-checkouts are great okay as
an obligation they're they're bad
because sometimes the time spent in in
the process is where the value comes
from the value of something depends on
it being done slowly because the value
is in the journey not necessarily the
destination you can see this because
people on a Saturday love nothing better
than to shop in the most inefficient way
possible okay that's basically what a
farmer's market is okay it's basically
let's take a test go and reverse
everything okay you've got to go to
seven different places to buy anything
uh you got to have a chat with everybody
you buy something from okay it's
basically the mirror image but we enjoy
them both depending on the context
Starbucks actually forced people they
said stop making two drinks at once
you're in fact sorry you're only allowed
to make two drinks at once they actually
deliberately slowed down the process
because they realized that the the
parallel processing the batch processing
of coffee was destroying the experience
for the consumer because they didn't
feel they were getting a handmade coffee
they just felt they were part of a kind
of forest production line and they
deliberately slowed the process down now
that's contrary to my own retirement
idea which is to found a chain of Cy
shops for Railway stations called flat
white or [ __ ] off okay and the plan
behind this is I like this craft
experience okay in the High Street but
if I've got to catch the 647 I don't
want to be queuing behind some tosser
who wants to make an iced based drink
okay right so the whole point of this is
you tap your credit card you pick up the
flat white and if you ask for anything
else well I think the name is
self-explanatory okay now we actually
see this problem of time in the whole
economy this is William Ball's model of
cost disease which is we have a crazy
world this basically explains the whole
world since about 1920 where
manufactured goods where you can enjoy
extraordinary efficiencies of production
you can compress the time and effort
required to make something have
massively reduced in cost and service
have massively which are time dependent
have become more and more
expensive that actually explains if you
think there's a hell of a lot weird with
the world that was completely different
when you were a kid like the fact that a
television is almost an Impulse buy but
you agonize about getting child care all
right if you think the world's weird
when basically in 1920 it was the other
way around Agatha Christie had three
servants but in her early life but
couldn't dream of being able to afford a car
car
okay that's what's basically been
happening but when it comes to selling
some things you've got to sell slow when
I bought one of these cooker Taps which
absolutely brilliant by the way okay now
yeah I know you're spending 800 quid on
a kettle I get the logic my wife used to
work in procurement she came up with all
this bowy crap okay the fact is it's
Miracle it's brilliant you get boiling
water straight out of a tab they
actually gave me a 30-minute sales
demonstration to my family over Zoom
from their showroom in Manchester now
that's expensive
compared to say some programmatic
advertising but that's how long it takes
to sell that product what I think we're
doing in advertising is we're starting
to Define our Target audiences not as
the people who could potentially buy our
product but as those people who are
prepared to engage with us in at high
speed in lowcost media okay now I think
there's a fundamental correlation
between in some ways the expense of a
medium okay the amount time and effort
that gets invested into an act of
persuasion and how persuasive it is I
think there's a costly signaling system
at work and I think our drive to
efficiency in advertising is actually self-defeating
self-defeating
now let me just then explain very
briefly my concern very quickly with um
well actually I'll give you this example
here these people had triplets they
wanted to buy a house in Chesterfield
they wrote a handwritten letter to 15
people who had a house they'd like to
buy but which wasn't on the market
Market or 25 people it might have be
okay about eight people responded okay
five people I think invited them round
and they had offers from four of those
people now be mind none of those people
had their house on the market right when
you think about it that's pretty weird
Okay a life decision as momentous as do
we want to sell our house no okay is
changed by a handwritten letter that's
an extraordinary Act of persuasion
that's an extraordinary kind of nudge
it's an extraordinary kind of stimulus
and I think it works precisely because
of the effort they invested in the
communication I I genuinely think the
weight of that communication was driven
by the fact that it was actually
handwritten now here's my point okay
I'll end on this because I know they're
panicking now
okay most of you if you were students
wrote essays or something like that as
undergraduates as students right fairly
confident to say that nobody's actually
kept them right nobody's reread them in
fact the essays you wrote are totally
worthless okay of course okay however I
realize I'm showing my age by showing a
handwritten essay here whereas of course
you young people get your parents to
title for you um no anyway but
um the value wasn't in the essay the
actual end product is
worthless okay what's valuable is the
effort you had to put in to produce the
essay now what AI essays do is they
shortcut from the request to the
delivery of the finished good and by
pass the very part of the journey which
is actually valuable which is the time
and effort you invest in constructing
the essay in the first place the essay
is worthless okay you'll never go and
reread it and if you do you're
embarrassed what was valuable about that
essay was the effort required to produce
it now what I think will happen in AI
advertising if you're not careful is
actually the valuable part of
advertising is to some extent the
process of producing it not the
advertising itself because it forces you
to ask questions about a business which
people mostly never get around to asking
what do we stand for what what's our
function who who do we appeal to who's
our target audience how do we present
ourselves how do we differentiate
ourselves how do we make ourselves look
different and feel valuable to the
people who encounter us
okay Jerry bulmore was said if you're a
B2B client with no Media budget you
should still produce an advertising
campaign even if you never run it
because the process of producing the ad
may actually be more important than the
ad itself rather like the process of
writing the essay is actually more
valuable than the finished
product I think what we'll find
ourselves doing is there are things in
life which you want to telescope and
compress and accelerate and streamline
and make more efficient and there are
things where the value is precisely in
the inefficiency in the time spent in
the pain endured in the effort you have
to invest that's actually where the
value comes from and I don't think we're
going to differentiate between those
things because I think like the guy at
Transport for London the automatic
assumption is going to be that faster is
better and we need to understand when
actually we need to deploy slow so I'll
end actually with a very weird question
what does slow AI look like we've
automatically assumed that the way we
react with it and the way we interact
with it is
instantaneous are we sure that's right
would it be interesting to be able to
say to an AI look over the next three or
four months can you just give me some
ideas about holidays in Greece okay do
we want to make that de ision
immediately I don't think we do I think
we want to see things refine things
consider things I think we want to mull
them over I think we want to discuss
them so the vital question is the
general assumption which is driven by
these optimization models is always that
faster is better that email has to
arrive instantaneously you know that the
more you communicate the better it is
and every Communication channel should
be instantaneous I think along with I
think helmet Rosa I think there are
things we need to deliberately and
consciously slow down for our own sanity
and actually for our own productivity
but at the moment if we don't ask that
question about what those things are I
think we'll just get things terribly
terribly wrong so thank you very much indeed
indeed [Applause]
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معظم النصوص تصبح جاهزة في أقل من 5 ثوانٍ
نسخ بنقرة واحدة125+ لغةالبحث في المحتوىالانتقال إلى الطوابع الزمنية
الصق رابط YouTube
أدخل رابط أي فيديو YouTube للحصول على نصه الكامل
نموذج استخراج النص
معظم النصوص تصبح جاهزة في أقل من 5 ثوانٍ
احصل على إضافة Chrome
احصل على النصوص فوراً دون مغادرة YouTube. ثبّت إضافة Chrome للوصول بنقرة واحدة إلى نص أي فيديو مباشرةً من صفحة المشاهدة.
