Amber Case presents the Calm Technology Institute's 81-point certification framework, arguing that human attention operates like a law of nature—distinguishing prefrontal-cortex-demanding 'center' attention from pass-through 'peripheral' attention—and that products (from car buttons to AI interfaces) should be designed and governed accordingly. She traces the framework's lineage to Mark Weiser's 1995 calm technology principles and discusses the legitimacy problem of building certification authority without statutory power, comparing CTI to Underwriter Laboratories and the Good Housekeeping Seal. The session closes with audience discussion, including Venkatesh Rao connecting the talk to Kairos/Chronos time and AI's 'staircase' temporality.
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Transcript
YouTube’s automatic captions, unedited, so names and technical terms are often misheard. Each timestamp opens the video at that moment.
0:01 Great. Okay. Well, hello everyone. My name is Amber Casease and um I am going to talk about attention as natural law.
0:12 I’ll give a bit. Let me just see if there’s anything in the chat I need to care about. Okay, everything is good. Um I’m interested in attention. How much attention it takes people to use a product. And I’ll go through a little primary briefing. Um, some of you in here are already aware of the principles of calm technology and I’ll go semi quick because I’d love to have a little discussion at the end. So it’s my belief and through my research I’ve been interested in the idea that human attention has limits that behave like a law of nature core to the theme of this section of the conference and I believe that products should be built to fit those limits the way that they are fit to built to fit gravity or heat not necessarily built to fit those but that that natural law does govern them and so they cannot be built in any other way. But I believe that sometimes when we make physical and digital products um as designers, we don’t necessarily build them with how our brains naturally work.
1:17 So if we if we build products with the idea that human cognitive architecture has limits um that don’t necessarily negotiate with the product road maps that we have, what would change about how we develop products and services? So, the simple test of this is which buttons are easier to press while you’re driving on the car in the car really quickly on the road. And arguably, the physical buttons here on the right side are a lot easier to press. And the flat screen buttons are a lot harder to press. And the question is why? What’s going on in the brain that’s different between these two experiences? And what I’ve been doing from a neuroscience perspective is actually trying to prove that it’s better to have physical buttons in a car on the road than it is to have a touchcreen for most purposes. Um, and when I’ve been talking with people who are architects and neuroscientists, the simplest way to put it is that as physical humans, we can multitask physically because our back brains have older brains in them that allow us to physically multitask. No, no problem. We can do so many different things at once.
2:31 We can sense heat and sorry, there’s like a little background noise. um we can understand like heat, temperature, texture, all of these things. Um because that older brain um uh and touch can multiplex no problem. Um, so we can do all these things in the car like push a foot pedal, talk to somebody next to us, turn a radio dial without taking our our attention off the road, but we can’t actually mentally multitask in the same way. In our prefrontal cortex, which is newer and more energy intensive, once we take our attention from that, um, it’s hard to get the attention back. There’s been different sets of research that takes that says that during a prefrontal cortex interruption, it can take 23 minutes to get back on track. Um, so the cost of this mental disruption, this visual disruption is actually quite severe, but we don’t necessarily think about it this way. So if we’re taking our attention off the car on the road and looking at our phone, we’re having a big issue in terms of car safety. Um, so again, which buttons are easier to press on the road? The front brain is very active. The back brain is very what we might call pass through. You don’t have to look at all in order to use these buttons. Once you learn where they are, once your hand in your back brain learns where they are, you don’t have to look at them very much again. So, you can just casually glance at them and your fingers are doing the looking because your hands have eyes, too. They’re just a different kind of sensor. So if you hold up your fingertip, you have 240 mechano receptors in this thing. Um, and what that means is that the analogy goes, if you were to take your finger and make it the size of the planet Earth, you would still be able to feel cars underneath your fingertips. The idea is that these are so sensitive and so well calibrated and so well evolved that you can do so much with them. And when we’re designing for glass and you’re pushing [clears throat] these against glass on a touchcreen or foam, you’re missing all of those mechano receptors. There’s absolutely no feedback going back into that backbrain.
4:49 And so all the calming effects of texture and feedback are not there. And we have to engineer all that feedback from a visual perspective. So that’s a big issue. We’re basically in more of a sensory deprivation world than we think because we flatten things. So when we remember things like propriception, nervous system’s ability to sense the position, location, orientation, and movement of your body parts without looking like using uh stick shift. Then we can look at all these other tools that we seem to not have anymore, like the foot pedal for running a car or a sewing machine. And actually, the very first mouse that came out from Doug Engelbart had a foot pedal that we could press. Um, imagine people using a foot pedal to scroll down the page while they’re looking at their phone at a bus stop. That was what the point of that was, that when we’re not even using a foot pedal anymore, we’re missing a limb, a limb of capability and feedback. So, distracted driving is literally a loss of touch. What does this have to do with attention?
5:55 If you do something over and over again, the process goes into your backbrain and becomes what feels like intuitive, but you have to do it a few times. And the iPhone and all these new touchscreen devices were sold as intuitive. Um, but they’re not necessarily intuitive because the muscle memory has nowhere to anchor because the surface is completely smooth. So for me, intuitive does not mean easy to use at first. It means easy to use over time. uh like a hammer is easier to use the more you use it, the more it becomes an extension of yourself. We can have lots of Haidiger philosophy and Marshia McLuhan philosophy here, but I think you know most of this that you know we we have an extension of humans in our tools. So I’d like to introduce this term neurogonomics. How it feels to use something. What does it feel like to use a touchscreen at McDonald’s to order food versus what is it like to use a camera that you’ve used over time that you look through not at when you’re using? What does that mean? Um, and so if we look at things from a neuro ergonomics perspective or even a neuroesthetics perspective, what does it feel like to use something could be a nice term for calibrating what kind of attention it requires, how much attention it takes to use. This becomes very interesting when we look at the car example again. One requires perpetual visual scanning from the prefrontal cortex. The other one uses the back brain and propriception. Hooray. Okay, now we have some terminology to say why a touchcreen is harder or more resource intensive to use because that prefrontal cortex runs really hot in a way that the backbrain does not. Hm. Interesting. So if we know that different tools engage different kinds of attention, what does that mean? If one is active and the other one is pass through, it means that invisibility and all these touchcreens is actually the wrong goal.
8:00 When you think about a bike, it might take a long time to use and learn how to use, but once you do it, you never have to learn how to use it again. But feedback is the right goal. What makes a technology disappear is not that it’s actually invisible. It’s that it’s been made to be so responsive and so well matched to human capability that you can stop attending to the visual interface and focus on what you’re trying to do, which is to drive down the road.
8:30 So instead of making everything invisible, what if we made the invisible visible to bring information into the environment so that we can make better decisions? So here’s this rear view window on a car and there’s a little icon that’s a small orange light and it’s placed exactly where driver’s eyes are already directed when considering a lane change and activates when a vehicle enters the blind zone. Interesting. It’s not telling you what to do. It’s giving you information that’s visible to you so that you can make a better decision because it always appears in the same place. Your propriceptive system engages and it adds information to your environment in a calm way. You’re not in the prefrontal cortex here. You’re actually just like the symbolic recognition. It’s like a different part that’s like low resolution. So it’s not requiring all of this parsing that you might have if you were to hear a dialogue of some synthetic voice being like person your blind spot or annoying like a beep or something that you’d have to read. But it adds information to your environment so you can make a better decision.
9:37 So let’s just talk for a minute a little segue into what time is because in a sense attention is related to time and also attention has different qualities of time. What what does that really mean? I I like to look at what the Greeks thought of different kinds of time as. So Kronos time was one of the concepts of time which is more quantitative time spent on tasks. Time spent on fixing some piece of random technology that failed. Oh no, you’re trying to watch a movie and the Roku player says you have to update before you can watch something. That’s not very helpful. [clears throat] It’s this time that’s like more industrial repetitive time. But the other time that I think we were promised when technology came into our lives is that you’d have more time, right? And I think the time that they were talking about, not the time we’re getting more of, is this kyros time, which is the time of watching a sunset or falling in love or being in the moment and not photographing it. It’s the time that people remember more on their deathbed. It’s a special human time that you can only get by being human in the world. So when we compare that to Kronos time, a lot of what our new tech, the way that we design it now is giving us is more Kronos time in my opinion and less Chyros time. So if we go back to this definition of what time could be, I think we’re supposed to be designing systems to give us more Chyros time and to reduce the amount of Kronos time in our lives. Maybe. Let’s just try that on for a second.
11:15 So instead of having more human time, we live in an era of very interruptive technology where Wi-Fi goes out and you’re supposed to make something, but like the API is degraded and like you don’t have enough API calls left and you ran out of tokens, like it’s a mess. And even though everything is so high-tech and tech is cheap, it doesn’t mean it’s high quality. And we need the opposite. We need a calm technology. And that doesn’t mean that the technology needs to be like a yoga ball. We need to be calm where we’re using it. We need to be able to choose what we’re doing and whether we want to do something else. So a calm technologies goal is to ideally minimize the Kronos time that we experience as humans and maximize chyros time. Now, who was talking about this in the beginning? When when I was writing my thesis on the iPhone when it came out in 2007, I was obsessed with the idea that all of these buttons on a traditional phone would were melting into one piece of undifferentiated glass that we would then touch. And I was so interested in the effect of what that glass would have on people’s experience of time and their experience of play and work. So Mark Wiser, this philosopher of Palo Alto at the time, asked, “What happens when technology is cheap enough to be everywhere because it was really expensive at the time?” And he said, “Attention becomes very scarce and technology either works with or against your attention and how it works with you or against you will make or break the future of technology.”
12:50 and he proposed from what I’ve gathered. Whoa. From what I’ve gathered from his papers, I’ve uh I’ve messed up my window. I’m so sorry. Probably can’t see this anymore. There we go. Um that uh technology should be designed around the natural structure of human attention. There’s a center right here that has a high resolution which demands conscious focus and peripheral attention which is around your head hearing and touch which informs without interrupting you out of your primary focus. He wrote this paper which you can look at on the column tech website. He says what matters is not the technology itself but its relationship to us. And because he wrote this in 1996 it actually you can read it today and it just sounds like today. We have so much philosophy you could read that’s 2,000 years old and we don’t think it’s outdated. Very little tech philosophy that you can read over time that doesn’t seem to change. So I’ll give you a couple principles and then I want to tell you a little bit about what we’ve been working on in terms of a protocol and then uh we’ll open it up for for questions.
13:58 So one of the principles of column tech is that it shouldn’t require all of our attention just some of it and only when necessary. And that’s like a light switch. You don’t notice the light switch in the room, only when you need to use it.
14:13 It’s a pass through technology. Um, one exercise that I would love all of you to go away with is if you learn nothing more from this session, I would love for you to look at the technology in your life and think about how many things are invisible to you because they’re so you’re so used to them. Whether that’s table, chairs, eyeglasses, software that you automatically use because you’re so used to it, so well known by daily use that they’re no longer noticed. Those are successfully designed items. Some of them, not all of them, but I encourage you to see what you cannot see because you’re so used to it. technology should inform and in calm just like that light on the car or a banana peel that tells you what’s going on inside the banana on the outside of the banana. It changes color. You don’t need to open the banana to see the status. It makes what’s invisible visible. U make use of peripheral attention. All that information we have around us.
15:16 Um how can you turn off this TV if there’s no raised dot on the power button? You have to turn the TV around. turn on the light on your camera and turn it off. But on a printer, once you learn these buttons, you can learn them by feel and you don’t have to look anymore. So you can have a conversation while you’re talking to somebody. Um while you’re printing, you can have a conversation while you’re printing. Um this is one of my friends. He had a house where um he had a blind girlfriend and she couldn’t get into the house because it was a touchcreen that was flat. And so she added these raised dots and suddenly she could get into the house. But it turns out that he no longer needed to use his phone light at night to get into his own house. Technology should communicate, but it doesn’t need to speak. You can have color based information, like this is based on colors. You can have street lights that change colors. You can have positive or negative beeps, but it doesn’t need to have a human voice all of the time. This is a weather light bulb attached to the web that changes color based on what the weather will be for the day. So, I was living in Portland, Oregon at the time and it was always blue and then one morning I woke up and it was yellow and I knew it was going to be sunny out. If you want the actual weather, you can look at the the iPad on the wall. But the idea is that you can feel in your peripheral attention while you’re still groggy or sleepy the future just from a color.
16:40 Tech should work even when it fails. An escalator turns into stairs when it breaks. what of our tech can fail gracefully and have redundancy.
16:51 So there’s principles on calmtech.com if you want to look at these more, but mostly I was interested in the last like four years asking why people keep creating annoying technologies that look really good in an ad and feel terrible to use. And I’m talking about things that have bright blue lights that keep you up at night when you turn off your lights, that have no light modes. Um, and I think part of it is that our future that we’re working from for most people is terribly outdated.
17:19 And what that means is that we’re working from something that doesn’t make any sense. So our tech technically is poisoning our time if it’s built incorrectly and it’s invisible. So it’s really hard to say, let’s make a stand for this and how can we design for a future of better human experiences? Um so one of the ideas is that design is governance. Everything we make as designers governs how people can experience the world. And we have responsibility as designers and technologists to make things that allow people more information and more options and some sort of reasonable capability instead of this Harlon Ellison quote from a science fiction novel that I have no mouth but I’m a scream. I have nowhere to go. I have no tech support and I can’t change my product. So I looked at this and I said, I want to make a change. What kind of organizations have made change in the past? I looked at Underwriter Laboratories that came out during the Chicago World’s Fair where every single booth wanted electricity in it. And this one guy was like, ah, we’re going to have a giant fire. Let’s not do that.
18:30 Let’s have a standard, a certification, a series of principles, anything. He made a series of guidelines. Please don’t do this. in your booth and people abided by it and a massive company began that governs almost everything that you plug into the wall with electricity. There’s also the Good Housekeeping Sil Approval that came out during the Victorian times. By that I mean like 1890 that said all of these companies are bringing terrible things into your home. All of them are promising that it’s awesome. When you get it home it’s terrible. We’re going to independently test them and the products we approve. If you don’t like them, we will refund your money out of our own pocket. This predated the FDA in the United States and has led to a lot of change. Hm. Tiny little circle with some text in it. Circle with some text in it. Hm. How about European AP non-toxic? When I was 9 years old, I saw this on a package of clay and I asked my dad, “What is that?” And he said, “Ah, it keeps dangerous stuff out of the clay that you’re using so you can be a kid and have night a nice time.” And I said, “Wow.” So it’s these little tiny marks that can govern.
19:41 We didn’t have the word govern when I was nine, but like can change the experience of the world and make it a benefit for someone to comply because people will buy the things with the seals on them. H So I started to think, can I make an institute with some letters. Can I make a certification? Can I make a certification around attention? And can I interview all the people that have made certifications before like lead certified or underwriter laboratories and see what they’ve done and see what they would do differently and ask about governance. Can I break these items into shapes like attention and prefer durability and materials so that we can actually have a ranking system? And can we show companies that they have a opportunity to differentiate their brand with experiences that work with attention? So we can show that people will buy products that are a little bit more ethical and considered. But we can’t use the word ethical. We have to have a certification mark that we embed with information. So we started to certify products and everybody’s come to us. We haven’t done any outreach. Um and the idea is that we have to maintain this living protocol across these rapidly diverging product categories.
21:01 What does that actually mean? It means that we have to make the principles and the 81point framework strong enough that even in changing times they still work. We don’t need to update it all the time because it would cause chaos for our certified companies. So we have three questions. The first one is how do we write a criterion for something like at the edge of the periphery of awareness that a trained evaluator can apply consistently across a physical alarm clock, a a user interface in a hotel room. So what we’ve done is just put these into observable product behaviors and then we distinguish between criteria that can be verified empirically and ones that require a calibrated human judgment. And in getting our trademark in the EU and the UK, we had to do do so much more of this work than getting a trademark in the US because it was how does a third party evaluate if somebody takes you to court over the idea that they thought they should be certified and you know that they shouldn’t. How does a third party come in and verify?
22:04 And then authority. Certification protocols require authority to function. ISO has relationships with national standards bodies. FDA has enforcement power. We don’t have anything So we have to start from somewhere. We can’t just start 100%. We have to grow over time. How do we start without institutional scale? Um we’ll have an education membership. We’ll publish our criteria to people who want it. We have evaluator training. We have handbooks. Okay. But what I was told by someone who wrote a certification that was very successful is that this is the hardest thing to do to be a sustaining certification body because you have to earn trust through time and growth. If you focus on the industry too much, the system gets out of phase because consumers don’t trust you. Focus on the consumers too much and the industry doesn’t find what you’re doing feasible to implement because it’s too expensive. So the only way is through time growth in many years. You want the sign and cosine to be as close to the sign as possible, not out of phase. And so it’s this like dynamical system that you have to keep in balance all of the time and keep recalibrating and keep rebalancing so that things can work out well. And you have to carry this through at least 10 years before it really starts to really change the industry. So in terms of durability, um we’ve started to certify products and we’ve certified about 80 of them. So we have products from all over the world that use different kinds of attention, compress them into different information styles. We have the movie board, which is a um a wooden home automation controller made in Kyoto. We have the air things wave pro which um takes a bunch of information in your environment that’s invisible and makes it visible.
24:00 We have the time timer. We have the uh remarkable tablet. And so we’ve started to put these on our website and what we found is that companies are competing to get a higher rating. And in our higher rating, it’s well, you need to use biodegradable or recyclable materials in your packaging or you need to show that your worker conditions are good or that when the company goes out of business, you can still use the product. So that means that products with a subscription plan don’t usually get certification. Um, so one of the very first software that we’ve certified is the chore wheel. And that was really hard to do because that’s a bit of a different Hello, he’s here. Um, it’s a bit of a different set of variables than just hardware. In a sense, what we discovered is that hardware is a lot easier to certify because it’s physical and you often have industrial designers behind the scenes and there’s physical limits for what you can do in software. People can make bad software very easily. And so this chore wheel which was implemented in a group house actually allowed people to have easy voting, easy visualization, and easy additions to chores. So it’s the first one.
25:19 It’s going to be very slowgoing to give out softwares and a lot faster to give out hardware. We can talk way more about that, but I’m not sure if I have 30 minutes or an hour. So, I’m just going to end here that unless you want to be computing all of the time, a person’s primary attach should not be computing, but being human. And for the resources, we have the column tech institute. We have some books that I wrote. One got turned into Japanese. Hooray. Um, and we have membership where you can get trained in col techch principles if you’re making products so that you can have a lot better a rubric for things that you might not understand like lighting design if you’re making a physical lamp. Um, I don’t know if there’s time for a question or I’m out of time. Um, but I it’s late
26:08 probably take a question or two. I’m actually looking to see if the next speaker is here yet. Uh, Surya Kramer, are you here? I don’t see him in the rooms. Oh, yeah. We can take a few questions while I uh chase him down. So,
26:47 So um uh like there was one point where you talked about um like uh this motivation of trying to see which organizations have the most impact
27:00 long term and went to start to certification uh standards and these little uh circles with letter letters inside that really define uh consumer behavior and basically value. Uh so I’m wondering what other kinds of things like that media of that sort uh other than certifications uh do have that effect and what kind of organizations that maintains them do you think are
27:30 yeah great question there’s a book that just came out called what is government and it talks a lot about this um and what I’ve noticed is that either you have an enforcable standard like the federal drug administ ation which can be defunded the environmental protection agency. I’m American so I’m giving this perspective um the standards bodies and I haven’t found a lot more. If other people have ideas, please let me know because that’s what I ended up looking into. Um uh and it’s a great question.
28:06 So I got a thin slice. Uh Mike, I think your hand was up first.
28:12 Uh yeah. Um well a great great talk actually I’m and I’m I’m very impressed by creating an institute. Um I guess my I guess my question was you there there there’s lots of people in the technology world who are would are anti-com particularly social the purpose of social media or a lot of it is to stir people up. That’s how they that’s how they get their engagement and and money. So, do you and you I know you work mostly with hardware, not software, but you must have had some thoughts about how your design philosophy fits into the social media world.
28:48 Yeah, great question. Hilariously, behind the scenes, there’s been a lot of um software companies that have had me work with them and car dashboard companies. And I’ve noticed that um I think it’s over reported that software um or like a recurring revenue model, like a recurring like subscription model or adbased companies are actually super sustainable in a way. They’re meant to amplify investor value so you can have an acquisition and that if you look at a lot of really good middle-ass companies in like Germany, you can have them run multigenerationally and and provide really good value to customers. But once a company goes public, they have to work with their investors. Like Underwriter Laboratories just went public and I don’t I’m worried about trusting them with certification now because their incentives are different. So when I talk with companies, I say a lot of times you don’t need to get investment in order to like be forced into ads or acquisition.
29:51 But those companies are are so hugely um reported on that I think we have to tell some different stories for people to say, “Oh, I could make something useful. I could make a sustainable piece of software for a group house, for instance, that like is actively useful and open source or, you know, like doesn’t have to be so crazy.” um it’s just hard to find those examples because they’re often they don’t need to advertise to people um in the same way. That’s a really short answer of what I could have answered a little bit better, but that’s a great question. Uh
30:24 yeah, thank you Amber. This was a really great talk. I didn’t know about this. I knew about the symbol, but I didn’t know that it was you behind it. So very exciting to see and meet you. Um so my question was on the um maybe I’ll explore the website on how you do this but I was curious on how we measure and calming thing um and I was trying to draw some parallels uh from awareness/meditation which leads to clarity which leads to a like a improved signal to noise ratio in the brain. Um so there are papers which I can maybe link here but I was just thinking is there a way where we are like measuring this in incoming thing and then uh having the protocol work or is it something based on a broad set of principles
31:15 um yes uh I want to be able to prove this more um and my friend uh Nanda is um a neuroscientist and architect that has a lab that’s working on this so we could actually measure the activity across different parts of the brain when you use different aspects. What’s interesting is that a lot of this research has been done on tactility and it just hasn’t been put together and so a lot of it is just review the literature, find the gap in what hasn’t been covered which is very small and then put it together in like some sort of document. So before this I was on a call where I’ve pitched a book on this where I can actually delve delve into the research properly um [laughter] and um be able to publish it as as some some compendium that people can actually like read through as a story backrain uh front brain type information but then show the science behind like what’s actually going on in the different parts of your brain because now I do have access to resources and a lot of neuroscientists friends who you know have written their dissertation on like senesthesia and architecture you know where we can actually show it and it’s very very new that we can even talk about it this way. There was like a Yahoo news article that finally talked about like your brain has two parts or something. It’s it’s some arbitrary like thing that we say to make a new framing so we can have a discussion, right? But it’s but it’s also like super crucial that we could then finally prove to to someone um that this is better. Um
32:53 I was just thinking like if I have like a framework as you’re saying that once we frame that clarity is like when I have a better signal to noise ratio calming is something like two variables then it’ll be easy to then control the levers and then very easy for the common public to also even before I look at the certification I can say hey is this technology um having these two parameters or not.
33:16 Correct. Correct. Yeah. And one of the ways to do that would be an even friendlier symbol that’s like, you know, when you go to a restaurant in New York City, it has a A B C D E, you know, or your Energy Star rating of your fridge.
33:29 So you can make a decision based on like those are calm tech those rating systems because it gives you a compression of all that testing and then the public has to trust it.
33:39 Um, but making it even easier on that scale makes it super excellent. So um so yeah um
33:48 Amber if you have more slides that you’d like to talk through you can actually go ahead. Looks like we have a no show. So this slot is empty. So yeah.
33:55 Um by the way uh Fenites uh I read your book Tempo a long time ago when I was like managing a team and it helped me out and you’re one of my big heroes. So it’s really cool that you’ve put this on and I’m thrilled to be able to talk with you. Just wanted to say that. So thanks Um, okay. I have more slides. This is a secret slide. How do you build an AI system that’s calm dun hot topic? Um, I wrote this uh post for design wine wh i ne called the bicycle and the algorithm, how AI gets it wrong. And it’s about front brain backbrain. And so, how would you live alongside a system versus just talk to it? Um, I’m working on this article right now about how much frontal cortex action you have to have in order to make something. So, I’ve been redoing all of my stuff with Claude by making it make um, Python scripts that generate static HTML. Um, okay, great. But I’ll spend like three days doing three months of work and I’ll just feel super exhausted and I’ll be like, is there a different way to work with these systems because they’re super front brain? Um, so can you put it in the corner of a room? Can you have a light that tells you when something’s happened? Can you have it change a light when it’s done, when it’s thinking, when it’s uncertain? Can you visualize that in your environment? Because our brains are used to things in our environment, not in this like very low resolution screen that’s like super small in front of us. Um, and so like what kind of peripheral globe could you have that you can glance at? Um, again, this is like this didn’t require any AI, but it just changes color based on what the weather will be. What other information could you embed into a system like this that could inform without overburdening? I know that some people when when I had a startup um we had all of our scripts running on our different servers and we actually visualized all of them so that we could see which one were taking too long. Um we had like a team of six and five million users and so we were like we had to be very lean and um whenever we saw a script that was really crazy um it was really stressful and then we would rewrite the script but we could see it immediately. We could see the system struggle with the weight of its action.
36:20 Um, you could give it a tiny vocabulary for interrupting you. Like, I noticed something, but then you always decide if you want more. The same with this. I can decide if I want more information by looking at the iPad on the wall. I’m going to shift to my frontal cortex to read that information, but I’m not using my frontal cortex um when I’m uh when I’m actually, you know, there like um because I’m feeling it. Um Oh, that’s it. I had more but um I’m not done with that. I was just working on that. So that was the the bonus slides. Um yeah, but I’ve been thinking about that in different ways because it’s, you know, it’s difficult um trying to think about how much our mechanical affordances in the past were so well tuned to our bodies, like just using a piano or like a drum. it takes a long time to learn but like then it’s quite matched um and how we can’t really let’s say master for lack of a better term like slack because it keeps changing you [laughter] know is always moving around so that that’s all I have to say about that more questions I don’t want to I’m up next after this block I don’t want to start too early in case somebody joins uh for my talk. So we have uh
37:48 uh 19 minutes uh and I think this is a topic well worth uh getting into. I I’ll comment a little bit on u
37:55 the time site. So yeah all this tangible stuff com technology I was at u xerox research after this com technology era. I was at xerox uh 2006 to 11 but I did have some back and forth with park so met some of those people. Uh so that thread really I think is super important. Um um and I see people try to do it with AI too. There was that little AI assistanty thing then the pin that failed really badly. uh but it’s the other thread I want to pick on the time thread and like you said I’ve written a book on time uh tempo and I actually did a talk um entirely about the Kronos Skyros uh uh dichotomy several years back and I had a graph which I’ll dig it up and share if I can but about how over the century Kronos kind of like ascended and Chyros kind of went into recession and my thesis is that we’re actually overdue for like a re revival of uh chyros. Uh but the point I wanted to pick at is time is actually one of the aspects of AI that’s extremely weak because AIs by themselves are very atmporal. They kind of live in if you were at Sachin’s talk early in the morning, he was talking about archival time versus carnival time, right? So uh trained models live in this little time warp of whatever the training epoch was and they periodically get updated. So time moves like a staircase for them. Uh and then there’s everything else we do.
39:33 And my next talk actually gets into that since it’s about rag bots. And rag bots are trying to bring back u sort of like real time. But time is one of those things that is really really hard to make uh tangible, right? Like it’s how do you make time proprioceptive? How do you like I remember there’s this anecdote about um uh Marcus Aurelius I think where he had a servant follow him around and kind of like whack him with a stick every so often to remind him that life was hard or something. That’s an example of tactile propriceptive time.
40:08 So don’t want to turn this into a little um you know comment rather than a question even though at protocol institute we like comments rather than questions. Um, but yeah, I mean, I’m curious to hear your thoughts about how do you make time perception, especially in the AI age, more tangible, like your like, you know, knobbyby little toasters and things like that.
40:31 Yeah, that’s fascinating. Um, I find that like I’ve been visiting Japan a lot, so it’s, you know, there these little repetition things like stir the natto fermented soybeans 100 times. And when you do it, you’re in this meditative space that your body is moving in this way and then you get to eat something nice, you know. Um, I have to let somebody into my room. It’s It’s 10 p.m. So, just a second to see my lift Indian room for a second.
41:13 Yeah, just gonna have to wait. Um, and I think there’s this this issue um where like when I was a kid, I was super obsessed with time and I was really upset that time was going by too quickly. So, I tried to split my perception of time. So, each day was 3 days long. And um and I think it’s it’s kind of the same where if you chop up the perception of time like going a different route constantly all over the place, you know, instead of the same route every day, it’s almost like when you get in your car and you automatically or like the Japanese perspective of like doing a specific motion to get yourself in the body. Um it’s really interesting. And I think there was there was one other situation where um at this design school I’ve been teaching at this week, I took everyone on a meditation walk where we couldn’t talk to each other at all. And so we got out of the frontal cortex and it took 20 minutes. And then we all became kid-likeelves and started to notice every single thing in our environments.
42:18 And it was like a method by Pauline Oliveros um where it’s this deep listening walk and everybody came back and I had to make graphic designs based on this but it was like these little tricks to get people to experience time differently and I’m really interested in like artists and musicians do this really well but I think technologists have a lot more difficulty in doing it and the interfaces that we use especially AI and scrolling get you into this disassociative period of time.
42:57 Uh there was a paper that uh one of our researchers did in the first summer protocols here um Saffron Huang called control and the consciousness of time uh where she talks a lot about like early time cultures soon after the invention of the clock and she mentions um one kind of clock that really stuck in my head which is traditional Chinese incense clocks. So these are very clever and they kind of like have basically normal incense but in like clever patterns where um you can for example change the smell that comes from the incense after particular times. So they burn for specific periods but also they burn with specific smells. Um so that strikes me as an interesting kind of uh uh it’s not visual. It’s not purely conceptual. It’s not yet propriceptive. You can’t touch it, but smell is I think as close as you might possibly get to propreceptive uh time perhaps. So there was that. Um and I wanted to share one thing. I found the graphic I was mentioning. So I might as well share that.
44:01 Yeah, this was my slide from my talk on chyros versus Kronos. And for people who are interested in this u there’s a wonderful um essay by Virginia Wolf called um what is it mr.
44:16 Bennett and Mrs. Brown. So this was an u speech that she turned into a book sometime around like 1916 or 20. So it’s one of the founding documents of modernist literature and it kind of tracks this moment in time when the very exterior Kronos style time of say the Dickens uh era of literature kind of flipped and interiority became a big thing in literature. uh stream of consciousness which was one of the things the modernists invented but that was almost like the fact that literary culture took it up was a sign that it was going um into recession in the broader world and one of the signs you see is if you read Virginia Wolf’s classic book Mrs. Doway you’ll notice that most of the book follows her train of thought as she goes through her day but it keeps getting interrupted by the uh tolling of Big Ben. So the story is set in London. So like every so often Big Ben will told and kind of like snap the narrative back from Chyros to Kronos. So that’s kind of a interesting marker. But yeah, I made this graph or this talk several years ago and the blue curve is basically Kronos ascendant as we got better and better about like modify or measuring time in precise technological ways. And then sort of the vibe based chairos time kind of like went into recession even though like you know emotionally the century was uh very tumultuous right like we had a couple of world wars lots of like wipe based things like you know cold war is a very wy chairos kind of like sense of time.
45:52 Um but but this I think is uh maybe um I think Amber was suggesting in her talk um this might conflict that narrative a little bit. I feel like Chyros is actually coming back in the last decade with uh what we were calling like you know wipe based media and so forth. But anyway, this was my um little graph here. But yeah, more questions. We have 10 more minutes to discuss this topic. More thoughts on uh calm technology and things that don’t interrupt.
46:27 This is amazing to interrupt you. No. Um but uh uh I was in a like a Japanese temple and we were doing this like um smell workshop where we were smelling different things and getting into our sense of smell and it was all about refining that sense of smell and being in the moment. And then I remember I had a I had an old boss who was a very quantified self type of person. And I said, “How do you do memory?” And a lot of people do it with like soundtracks and CDs that takes them back. but he had a perfume uh refrigerator where he would decorate his time with specific perfumes and then he could relive those moments by opening up the fridge and re reliving that time. And um so your comment about smell is uh was really interesting um as like a propreception of of time. Um
47:17 I think music serves a similar function. So, we talked earlier about handwashing in one of the earlier morning talks and the idea of singing Happy Birthday as a way to time 20 seconds to make sure you’re washing your hands long enough. That’s um kind of like yeah, musicality is as close as you can get to propreception in some ways. So, maybe that’s another thing. But yeah, AI definitely is one of the hardest cases for time.
47:50 Yeah, the staircase model that you that you analogized was a really nice one for that. Yeah. And and also I find it very interesting because I’ll often use old models of Claude that are more expressive and creative that would be more dangerous when they’re more powerful. So they’ve, you know, deceased those models. And so with that, I have less creativity um you know in in some ways but more power in other ways. But if I’m relying on those for specific things and those go away, it’s like an augmentation that I’m missing.
48:24 Um that might actually be the measure of time we’re looking for. Right? So models have a kind of teroir like uh wines or something, right? So you can think of like, you know, oh, I’m nostalgic for Chad GPD 30 or whichever one that people thought used to write well. I sometimes I’m not sentimental that way. So I basically use whatever the latest model my LLM throws at me, but I know people who are very picky and go back to the model that has at least some vibes of the time they want. So yeah, it’s archival time, but with enough of a sentimental signature that maybe there is a temporality there. It’s just not fine grained enough. Like AI can’t count the minutes, but it can count the months, maybe something like that. So, it’s almost like seasons.
49:12 There’s there’s a kind of clock that I think people actually make out of flowers. So, flowers that bloom at different seasons. And uh forget where I saw this. This actually exists somewhere, but it’s also I think on it might be a discorld design fiction.
49:35 All right, few more minutes. Anybody else got um questions?
49:44 Yeah, I ra I raised my hand. Ben Cadesh. Um I uh this conversation around you know how we can imprint on like little gosslings on the first uh model that we mess around with is part of what I’m interested in but also what I’ve been observing since you know nine months now is people are very shy to show their work sh you know show what they’re um how it looks when they’re when they’re doing this um it feels like it’s it’s it’s so new why wouldn’t we share willy-nilly really, hey, look what I found kind of thing when I’m seeing the the the reverse. And it’s not quite a time question, but I feel like it all it all blends in together. If either of you want to pick up on on that, the comment that you said in the beginning about impr imprinting like golings on the first model that you see, it just stuck with me as like that it’s it It kind of is like that for some people. Um I’ve been studying also not necessarily people wanting to share or being unsure about sharing their experience like their process but um the for a long time virtual boyfriends and girlfriends have kind of always been around. Um, and there’s a science fiction story that I read from the ‘7s that was a French science fiction story that somehow had been translated into English about a guy falling in love with his car and then the car has a software update and like the personality is gone. And it’s like it’s like a mild form of that like is it is it a friend? Is it not what happens, you know, when when this piece is lost and that like you can put so much personal information into it. But that’s that’s more of a commentish than a and like a thank you for sharing that because that made me think of a couple other things.
51:50 Yeah, they I don’t want to anthropomorphize whatever model I’m messing around with, but I like I remember when Opus 48 came out and was like, “Oh my god, this is really this is really rocking.” But I you know, I’ve moved on. [laughter] Um, but I I want to um in your world, Amber, I I really am curious. Are people willing to to work in public? So, uh, the backstory is a lot of people may know Net Elias. So, almost two years ago, he did a internet famous kid. He did a workshop where one night a week for four weeks, I watched him crash around in cursor. This is right at the beginning of this time. And, you know, I’m big on mirror neurons and you know, monkey see monkey do. And it felt like just four times watching him, I got it. So, uh, in a visceral kind of way, like, oh, this this is how you do it. But at the time, you really couldn’t get an app over the end zone. You know, you could get it 70% or 80% of the way there. Go ahead.
52:46 Yeah. What you’re saying like finally connected some dots for me, which is like that was what you would do when you’re an artisan in a craft studio. You’re watching somebody else do the thing in real time, working in public,
53:00 but it’s a small public. And then through experiencing the doing you learn. Like for instance, I was terrible at cooking. Never wanted to learn how to cook. I dated somebody who was really good at cooking. I had never watched him. I was in the room with him while I cooked doing something else. And then when I first tried to cook after that, bam, I could cook. I could cook anything. And it was that, you know, I was ambiently there. It’s not the same as like watching Bob Ross all of the time. But it’s like if you really want to do a thing and someone’s like doing their process or talking through it or even like how do we learn how to ride a bike? You don’t necessarily watch a YouTube video. You’re there with someone who’s riding a bike and you like figure it out. You know, it’s like a there’s some things like even like Snapchat, I noticed that people didn’t learn it without someone showing them or like people would buy a camera and you would always have an artisan that for for some of the best photographers, I saw a photographer give a talk and it was like you learn the photography through being in study of someone else. And I think that like being in public and working in public is almost a version of that model that not necessarily we would learn how we are now, but we might go back to that model as things are more complex or take more time to learn that we would be in like the the like PNY the younger Pney the elder painting studio. Well, I come from a a Taichi tradition and in that context it was really clear there are lots of things where you can practice for 10 years and you’re still a beginner like the body changes much of the body changes slowly but there are other things where the nervous system itself can change on a dime. So now I will bring time back into it. So, you know, watching when is watching someone like boom, like you’re you you ambiently got your cooking. That wasn’t quite on a dime, but maybe it feels that way because there was kind of a magical piece to it.
Daniel Kronovet presents 'Chores as Complex Coordination,' introducing 'regenerative labor' as a concept distinct from maintenance or care work, and detailing Chore Wheel, a Slack-based protocol suite (chores, hearts, things) built on Elinor Ostrom's commons-governance principles plus four digital-era additions: no privileged roles, simple inputs, humans-for-sensing/machines-for-bookkeeping, and continuous asynchronous participation. Drawing on his Los Angeles co-living house Sage House as a real-world case study, he argues that separating task definition from task performance (akin to double-entry bookkeeping) allows a fixed, continuously-replenished point economy to turn dish-washing and trash duty into a system of social computation that generates social capital alongside physical upkeep.
Nicholas Fett traces the history of market neutrality from 1889 Oklahoma land runs and Adam Smith's moral sentiments through Keynes, the Mont Pelerin Society, and into crypto, arguing that protocols designed to be neutral (Bitcoin's decentralization, Ethereum's 'crops' ethos) inevitably get captured by economic incentives like mining and block-builder centralization. He uses the 'tunnel' and 'one more lane' analogies to argue that building for neutral principles without a defined societal goal leads to outcomes divorced from original intentions, and that protocol designers must instead encode explicit purpose rather than chase an unattainable neutral equilibrium.
Yuhan Liu (Princeton PhD student, presenting work with Varun Nagaraj Rao, Sohyeon Hwang, Janet Vertesi, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández) presents OpenCourier, a protocol-based alternative to centralized delivery platforms like DoorDash and Uber Eats, built after mapping 495 'indie' delivery platforms that share homogenous but siloed software. The architecture uses registries, app-instance layers, and instance-requester communication (inspired by ActivityPub/Fediverse) to let independently-run courier instances interoperate, giving workers like a hypothetical 'Bob' the ability to move across platforms with portable reputation data while enforcing transparency requirements such as mandatory deactivation reasons.