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If you were a tabloid editor--
[LAUGHTER]
--what kind of headline would you give your topic?
"Attack of the Killer Apps" [LAUGHTER].
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We think that we are controlling technology, but technology is actually controlling you. I am comparing tech to any other addictive substance, be it tobacco, alcohol. One NYU professor has looked and found that about 41% of adults in America are suffering from addictive behaviours having to do with their phone. Literally we are swiping and unswiping our iPhones 130 times a day. There's a Harvard-trained psychologist that's done some research showing that voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, which are even more persuasive than, say, looking at your phone, can shift people's purchasing decisions and even their voting patterns by up to 80%.
Techidemic, I'm going to coin a new word. I think that this is an epidemic. So if you just look at a standard iPhone here, I can very quickly check my email. I can open up the weather app. I can open up Google Maps. I can open up and buy music on demand. But there is nothing that is transparently easy for me to shut down. And that's the whole point, because technology firms by and large are trying to monetize your attention.
One of the interesting side effects, and possibly quite a profitable side effect of all of this is that certain companies, companies like Apple, for example, or IBM, are starting to see privacy, thoughtfulness, control as a competitive advantage that they can leverage in their own products. So Apple, for example, recently announced some changes to its system and to its handsets that allow you more control over your own settings. This would mean a change in the business model so that companies would no longer be attention merchants, let's say, but they would be facilitators. And I think that as people become more aware of the addictive properties of technology, the companies that do that are going to see their sales increase.
There is a conversation in the US going on right now about whether we should have a kind of a Food and Drug Administration of technology. In Europe, you see a very robust conversation around privacy. And I think the next beat in that will be about control over technology, and we need to take back control.
