Yesterday Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, announced that Facebook would be showing us more of our friends and family and less news and corporate stuff on our news feed.

For the past few months I’ve been studying social media with fresh eyes since learning more about my addiction to it, and other things.

Here’s one thing I’ve learned: engagement from real people matters a LOT more than engagement from companies. Over on Twitter two accounts are amongst those following me: Salesforce and Marc Benioff.

When Marc retweets me, or likes me, I get an immediate dopamine hit. We all know the feeling when someone big and important retweets us, or likes our post.

What I have recently learned is that if Salesforce’s account retweets me, I still get a dopamine hit but it’s easily 1/10th as much. Why? Well, it just doesn’t seem as big a deal.

What’s funny is it’s actually a lot harder to get a retweet from Salesforce than from Marc Benioff. Oh, and when you get a retweet/like from a corporate account it almost always is focused on that specific corporation, so doesn’t bring anyone nearly as interesting as a feed as when you follow just people.

But here’s the rub. I get the exact same dopamine hit when I get a retweet or a like from my wife, or my best friend. Now, there are other advantages of getting a retweet from someone “famous” beyond just the dopamine hit, but we’ll examine those later. The main thing is that the ability to addict you is much higher if a real person interacts with you than if a brand does.

Zuckerberg knows this. Now my friend Brandon Wirtz says that yesterday’s move also is because Facebook doesn’t have much advertising inventory, so needed to goose the numbers and force more brands to spend money to get the views they seek.

One does not negate the other.

Over on Twitter I’ve spent hundreds of hours in the past three months cleaning up my inbound feeds. One thing I did on my main feed is I unfollowed all accounts done by a committee. So no more following companies, like Salesforce. Only following people.

My feed today is easily 100x more addictive to read than it was just three months ago. It’s not intuitive, but Zuckerberg studies these things in depth.

Two days ago I had dinner with Francine Hardaway, investor out of Phoenix, AZ, and she wondered if Facebook could get to the place where it would make decisions based on what would help people instead of what would addict them. I don’t know that the two can be separated.

After all, I can tell you that seeing baby photos from friends, or wedding announcements, or funeral arrangements, makes our human lives better than seeing ads or news items. But they are more addictive too.

I’ve been studying spirituality recently, in my attempts to become a better human being. I’ve been getting around, talking to people who have happier lives than I do, and I notice that they do a few simple things:

1. Help other people. One, I met, goes to San Quentin and teaches classes there. She says that makes her so happy that the rest of the week can go to hell and she still is glowing.

2. Meditation. Everyone who does it says that this improves their ability to deal with life and centers them.

3. Praying. In rehab we learn about the importance of being less self-centered and by praying to a higher power this brings major benefits against anger and disappointment.

4. Exercise. Brings brain benefits from increased blood circulation, and other benefits. Makes you feel good about yourself too.

5. Organization. People who have organized homes, along with intentional lives (IE, make lists of things to do and goals for yourself) are happier and feel better about themselves.

None of those things comes from social media, with the exception of maybe helping other people. So I’m not sure how Facebook can become better for you until we get VR, where we’ll get exercise and maybe some of the other benefits. So, for 2018 I think Zuckerberg is right to focus on monetization and addiction, even if he calls it something else like an “improved human connection.”

One of my pieces of advice for Twitter would be to provide a “people only” feed. If it did that Twitter would see an increase in usage and addiction.

Regarding the difference between my wife liking a post and Marc Benioff: there is a storytelling difference and an influence difference. If I tell friends at dinner “Benioff liked my post today” and compare it to “Maryam liked my post today” my friends will say “so, she’s your wife” versus “oh, what caught Benioff’s eye?” But neither matters as much to addiction levels to these platforms as the difference between humans and corporate accounts.

from Robert Scoble's Augment Your Life http://ift.tt/2myZCL1

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours talking with Forrest Iandola, cofounder of Deep Scale.ai. He’s one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs I’ve met along my journey. We were in a small group discussion at the Founders Field Day, thrown by Rothenberg Ventures (I snapped this photo afterward, that’s him on the right at the Audi suite at AT&T Park where the San Francisco Giants play).

What does his company do? Make the “brains” that will help decide what your car is seeing. Is it a dog? A child? A cow? A tumbleweed? A stop sign? Stop light? Deep Scale’s systems are one of the companies making artificial intelligence-based systems that decide that.

In Silicon Valley interest continues to be very high in self-driving cars. When I recently had dinner with Apple cofounder Woz, that’s largely what we talked about. He remains skeptical that we’ll get a level five car anytime soon (level 5 is full self-driving, can operate fully without a human involved, Car and Driver has a good description of the levels). At least if we are talking about a car that can do that on literally every road,  like a human can. When technologists get bogged down in edge cases “can your system see the difference between a dog and a child in a blizzard?” then you start seeing that these systems will take decades to perfect to where humans will trust them in all situations.

In fact Iandola validated that and said that the technical problems are quickly being solved but that the real problems are human ones.

Will we trust these systems? Will they behave like humans do? For instance, he pointed out that humans do a lot of weird things on the road. What happens when a car somewhat comes into your lane, he asked the group. With humans we move over, honk the horn, maybe give a one finger salute to let the other driver know to stop looking at his or her phone. Computers have to be programmed in what to do and there humans will argue endlessly.

Another might be “do you break the law?” Anyone who drives on Freeway 280 between San Francisco and Silicon Valley knows the answer: yes. Especially in the number one (left most) lane. There, if there aren’t cops out (use Waze dummy) the traffic will do 80 m.p.h. consistently (the speed limit is 65). Even if there are cops out the traffic will do 73. So does a programmer comply with the social, er, human, rule? Try getting away with THAT at Mercedes Benz.

And if a human overrides the programming, who then takes the insurance risk if there’s a crash?

So where am I going with this? We never should have called these “self driving” cars. Truth is it’ll be decades before these things can handle every edge case and every road in the world that humans can.

Truth is that for most of us for decades these systems will be driver assistants. Yes, they will be able to take over in many cases, particularly on freeways and major streets with traffic, which is where most of the driving in Silicon Valley and San Francisco is done.

DeepScale’s systems, by the way, can already recognize about 100 classes of objects in the streets. Signs. Cars/trucks. Paint. Variety of objects on the road.

Which gives you a clue about what’s coming at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. The cars that will be introduced in 2018 will be level 3, mostly, with some aspects of level 4.

But we oversold these systems to people which did two things: 1. Got them too excited about what they can actually do in the short term. 2. Got them too scared of the future and resistant to these systems due to concerns over hacking, job losses, and dystopian “computers are controlling my life” fears.

Truth is computers are already controlling my life. As I drove to the city yesterday a computer controlled my cruise control. Picked my music on Spotify. And “controlled me” on Waze as it navigated me to the city (it often picks a different route based on traffic conditions.

As I walked around talking with entrepreneurs, investors, and others in the frontier tech world (what we call investors and entrepreneurs who are building mind-blowing new technology companies with blockchain, augmented or virtual reality, or artificial intelligence) I noticed that very few are using the most mind-blowing technology that’s already possible on their mobile phones.

Humans are slow to adopt. Very few of the people I talked with were using Google Assistant (or its uglier and less-capable competitors, Siri, Alexa, Cortana). I drew crowds by demonstrating it and asking it all sorts of questions. One artist was introduced to me and I asked it “can you show me Jesse Hernandez art he does Urban art?” And sure enough it pulled up his art.

Most people, even rich tech-passionate entrepreneurs who live in San Francisco have no idea that you can do all that with your voice and that it’s freaking fast.

Same with cars and visual systems. By calling them self-driving systems we’ve caused needless resistance. In the cars that people will buy next year they won’t be fully self-driving. They might, in some controlled circumstances, like on a well-painted freeway, take over for a few miles, but you’ll always need to be able to take over in a few seconds in case something goes wrong.

Instead we should have explained that these systems make driving more fun. Do you really like driving on a boring freeway? Or in city traffic? Do you really like getting in accidents because you weren’t paying attention? Or because you were pushing the car too hard on a wet road? No one I know answers yes to these questions.

Yeah, in some neighborhoods they might go full autonomous. Eventually, sure, they will do that everywhere (eventually is a long time, I probably won’t be alive to see that day). But until then we should have sold these systems as “making cars more fun and safer to drive” systems.

I can’t wait to have Deep Scale’s brains in my car for just that reason.

But the one that will really work? They will make your car cheaper to drive. Why? Insurance rates will go down if your car has these systems. You’ll ruin fewer rims, pop fewer tires, get better gas milage (these systems can optimize your driving for all that and keep you from making mistakes that can lead to damage).

And in some neighborhoods they even will be able to go fully autonomous which will let an entrepreneur like, say, Elon Musk, build a new kind of membership system (Ford, General Motors, Mercedes, along with Uber and Lyft are working on these systems for just that reason too). When that happens the cost of driving a car, Iandola verified, will go down from about 33 cents per mile to maybe 10 or less. That’s were the disruption lies. But that is years away from happening at scale. In 2018 we shouldn’t focus too much on that but on the fact that these systems make driving more fun and safer.

It will take time for humans to buy into using these technologies for the more disruptive things.

This brings me to another question I keep getting asked “what are you going to do now?” There’s lots of changes in my life underway, but this conversation showed me that I’m still a technology optimist and still love being among the first to understand where bleeding-edge technologists like Iandola are taking their companies. I still need more time to answer that question honestly — I’ll have that figured out by the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January — but it was good to just hang out with amazing entrepreneurs again (this wasn’t the only amazing conversation I was involved in yesterday). Thanks Mike Rothenberg for inviting me, here he is speaking to the group yesterday.

As I walked out I met Surushi Gupta who pitched me on her company, ShareG which is about to release a WiFiCoin, which will let people share their wifi hotspots and profit thanks to blockchain and bitcoin. Another thing stirred in me there that I love helping entrepreneurs like her and Iandola figure out how to get customers and build their businesses. Back to basics I go. I’m looking forward to being at the Consumer Electronics Show again to cover the technology that will change the next decade for humans. The 2020s are looking like a period of intense change for humans. Autonomous cars are just a taste but an incredible one at that. Driving is about to get fun again. Humans are about to get incredible assistants in a bunch of places in their lives.

from Robert Scoble's Augment Your Life http://ift.tt/2jw24zu