Rory Sutherland – Are We Now Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? | Nudgestock 2024

[Music] 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 [Applause] [Music]