John Burn-Murdoch

conscientiousness on the rise you know more more time um interacting with people in person more need to to really sort of deliver on on goals um to show up literally um i think could help

I think the particularly tricky thing we've got here is that the very device that is doing a lot of the distracting is the device that is also used to capture what people are doing with their lives.

One of the problems we have is that if you are

out there taking selfies or making your fairly curated instagram grid um you are not doing the input the big in-person deep tie social activities that we're talking about here or at least you're doing less of them and so the main technology the main means through which people get a sense of sort of what the culture is and what other people are doing

It almost excludes by default the much more deep social stuff, right?

That sort of dinner around the table with your mates is probably not on Instagram.

But the selfie or the sort of heavily curated Instagram boyfriend picture, that kind of thing is.

And so...

There feels like something inherent in the way we document our lives at the moment, which just makes it really hard to see the actually really meaningful, deeper stuff.

And so the closest I've got to an answer at the moment on something that might change is,

And this is just really just spitballing.

And I don't think this will necessarily happen.

But just imagine if we did end up pivoting from the current smartphone era to something more like the her earpiece, like right from the sci-fi movie.

So something where you've still got this device that is always on you, you're conversing with it, you can see how AI would be fed into that.

Maybe it's got a tiny camera in it.

But you are spending less time looking down at your phone.

And just life, there's much less sort of interference between that device and a deep connected life.

Now, again, the movie Her is not exactly about deep connection between human beings.

So this might just fail on its own terms.

But I just wonder if something that changes us away from this sort of curated, photo-driven, nose-to-screen world, some subtle change that is not brought about by someone wanting to get rid of smartphones, but just some technological change that makes this a thing.