To guarantee a delightful user experience, set expectations really low.
For many decades, consumer robots failed to gain popularity because people expected humanoid robots to act like K-3PO or Bender or the Fembots. Technologically, this was impossible.
Then Sony came out with Aibo, the robot dog. From a functional perspective, Aibo was no more advanced than the earlier robots on the market. The software often crashed and Aibo would freeze. But Aibo was not held to the same standards as other robots, because it was a dog. People expect dogs to misbehave. The software bugs were seen as features, evidence of personality. The crashes were adorable.
When you look like everyone else, people expect you to act like everyone else. When you look completely different, expectations are reset. Of course, if your product looks like a dog, you attract a completely different set of customers than if your product looks like a humanoid.
In any social hierarchy, professional or personal, there’s an easy metric for identifying the one in charge: communication response time.
When an investor contacts us, we scramble to respond within the day. Within the hour, even. There’s some ill-begotten logic that if we don’t, we’ll be dumped for a better opportunity that might somehow surface in the next 59 minutes.
On the other hand, it’s perfectly acceptable for a VC to wait weeks before replying to our messages. We still take their meetings with open arms.
Silence doesn’t actually equate to no response. The response is heard loud and clear: YOU ARE NOT A PRIORITY. By ignoring someone, you dominate the conversation without saying anything at all.
A Columbia University study correctly identified top-level managers at Enron by calculating average response times from the Enron corporation email archive [1]. Managers will take their sweet time when responding to subordinates. Even the CIA uses this metric to identify leading players when monitoring the communications of terrorist groups.
In an argument, the person who has the last word doesn’t really have the last word. The person who has the last word just makes the last noise. The one who goes silent owns the relationship.
Let’s say you have a lucrative career as a code monkey for Google. The job is okay, things are going well, but maybe life feels a little empty. Maybe you take a week off to do something altruistic, like go to a third-world country to build houses for Habitat for Humanity.
So you spend a few days swinging a hammer, erecting a home for the underprivileged. You come out feeling pretty good about yourself and what you’ve accomplished.
But it was a huge waste of time.
Because you might make $100 an hour as a developer. For $100 an hour, you could have hired a dozen minimum-wage construction workers to build that house. It’s more effective to just do your day job, get paid, and donate some modicum of that to a good cause.
Why would anyone perform unskilled volunteer work? That is the paradox of charitable service.
There is a difference between voluntary work and wage-driven work, however. A corporate officer at a Bay Area collaborative consumption company told of an interesting dynamic he observed when introducing their service to new communities: People began to associate a price tag with resources they previously shared for free. Community members were now customers, not friends.
A driver in San Francisco might ordinarily give her friend a free ride to the airport. Once she realizes that she can make $50 an hour driving people around the city, that ride to the airport is soured by lost revenue.
When you assign a dollar amount to a task, the motivation for performing that task becomes extrinsic. Money sends you to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid: food, shelter, security. No amount of money will buy you family or self-esteem.
Charity work is seen as paradoxical when you only quantify the extrinsic motivators. If intrinsic motivation is taken into account, then the value generated by voluntary labor far exceeds what is gained from a cash donation.
There is a silent but bustling peer-to-peer economy that exists all over the world. Deep beneath the surface of the earth, resources are borrowed and shared through vast networks that have been individually optimized over thousands of years.
A shared community lies under every forest, where intertwined tree roots are covered with a mycorrhizal fungus. The fungal mycelia provide a common medium where carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous can be exchanged between plants [1].
Seedlings, for instance, are pretty hosed as far as photosynthesis goes — They have to fight for sunlight in the shade of their elders. To help young saplings, carbon is transferred through the underground plant-fungus system to provide baby plants with the nutrients they need to grow in the absence of sunlight.
This macronutrient exchange extends beyond plant species. Deciduous trees such as the paper birch shed their leaves in the fall, and then receive carbon supplements from neighboring evergreen Douglas-firs in the winter. The following spring, the deciduous trees grow their leaves back and return nutrients to evergreens because their large leaves produce more sugars than narrow pine needles [2].
One might say that the forest community is not really a conscious economy — the exchange of macronutrients is largely governed by diffusion. Scientifically, it is an ecosystem that evolved over millions of years. The system facilitates an inter-species exchange of resources to increase biodiversity and maximize robustness.
And maybe that’s all the sharing economy really is –a natural process in which excess resources flow to redistribute where needed, because that’s what makes our communities stronger.
Spatial topology of Douglas-fir trees.
References:
1. S. Simard, K. Beiler, M. Bingham, J. Deslippe, L. Philip, F. Teste, Mycorrhizal networks: Mechanisms, ecology and modelling. Fungal Biology Reviews, Volume 26, Issue 1, April 2012, Pages 39-60, ISSN 1749-4613, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fbr.2012.01.001.
Fifteen years ago, Computer Science did not exist as an undergraduate major at Caltech. Electrical Engineering was the most well-funded department at the school thanks to a generous donor named Gordon Moore, who founded a little Silicon Valley startup called Intel.
And now it’s 2014:
Despite an expanding use of electronics in products, the number of people working as electrical engineers in U.S. declined by 10.4% last year.
The decline amounted to a loss of 35,000 jobs and increased the unemployment rate for electrical engineers from 3.4% in 2012 to 4.8% last year, an unusually high rate of job losses for this occupation.
