The Future of Human Behavior | Eric Hunter

We're going to talk about the future human behavior. And more specifically with the future human behavior, we're going to talk about technology integrating with human behavior with the focus on perspectives. Now, for those that have read Kurt Vonnegut, he wrote about the concept of getting unstuck in time. So we're going to get unstuck in time together as we explore human behavior. And to start, taking a look at what you see right here, the goal of this is in the south of Crete. And when I took this shot, I was thinking, I want to be able to capture a moment where it almost seems like reality seems to come down into a single space. Do you know what I mean? Reality seems to come down to a single point in time. And I was looking at the blurred outlines with that, but I didn't realize that it would be more than just one of those musing moments. It'd be rather prescient, because it was just a couple of weeks later that I got news that my sister has cancer. Now, I was with my wife. We're celebrating our anniversary. We're in Italy. And when I pick up that phone call, that news, Eric, I have cancer, that brings all the periphery into a single point in time. But like Kurt Vonnegut, we're going to leave that moment for right now. And we're going to start exploring together. Start with music. 1,000 years ago, I was a jazz performance major. And the thing with music, if you ever want to challenge a musician, have him play a ballad. Now, oftentimes, you wouldn't necessarily think of that, because a lot of musicians will play fast when they're showing off. But if you really want to see what a musician can do, have him play with space. It's a challenge for a musician. It's scary. And it's something that we're going to explore a little bit here. When I was in Hong Kong giving a presentation a few years back, I heard this piano music. Once I was done, I walked out into the lobby. And it's around midnight, Thelonious Monk. And I walk up to see who's playing. And I see the gentleman over here. And he's playing. Now, he and I could not speak the same language. But while he was playing, I could understand exactly what he was trying to say. There's a thought leadership exercise I like to do called, let's go to Mars. And the idea behind it came when I was presenting in Portugal. And I sat down with the speakers. And we're all there together. And it's a dinner before the presentation. And I asked them, I said, you know, if you were in charge of picking an expedition to Mars, who would you pick? And how would you do it? And I want to ask you the same question. Think about it right now. Who would you pick? And how would you do it? And at first, it seems like it would be absurdly simple, right? Well, one, you've got to be able to breathe. You've got to be able to make sure that the spacecraft's working. And when you're going out into space, everybody stays alive. Duh, right? Think about it a little bit further. Think about your family going on a spaceship, going out to Mars. Are you and your colleagues and members of your community going out? Is it going to be successful? What about the personalities involved? What about the music between the individuals? And what I'm talking about is we all know an individual that we work with or that's in our community that we go to school with where perhaps while they're being measured, as we measure aspects now, it won't quite turn into data that we read. But on the other hand, you know without that individual, it's not going to be successful. And that's where this concept comes with. And as you take it a little bit further, think about how the craft would go and then how it would be designed. Now, when thinking about this, I'll give an example. I used to work in high tech a long, long time ago. And it was a sea of cubicles. This could be all cubicles here, right? And so we're just walking along through these cubicles. It was half a mile from six buildings to another one. And then you have to go back. It's another half a mile, right? And as you're looking around, what's your immediate environment? Now, when we're talking about human behavior and what motivates human behavior and how we look around, I think the high tech industries learn from them. They're starting to put together campuses where creativity is inspired in different areas, different environments. And so we're going to explore some of those concepts here. One of them is that we both shape and are shaped by a reality. We both shape and are shaped by a reality. Everybody see that? What it means is that your own perspective shape your viewpoints on other things. And that may sound really redundant. Like, Eric, give me a break. I already know that. But it's something, I think, that we take for granted when we're leading others, working with others, and we think about human behavior. Another is that business leaders are shaped by the directional paths, but they're also shaped by their immediate environments. It takes this concept of our surroundings and it brings it into the decisions that we make. As an example for me, my immediate environment typically consists of global travel. If I'm not on planes, trains, or automobiles, two weeks out of every month, I'm having a light month. And that environmental reality shapes my perspective on reality. I'm more comfortable within the cities when I travel, because when I'm at home, I come out, I live in the city, and my backyard or the streets out there, we all tend to gravitate towards what's relative to us. And so as we start looking forward in shaping human behavior and patterns and how we end up integrating things like artificial intelligence and virtual reality and augmented reality, augmented reality and virtual reality thrive off of this duality. It thrives off the duality that we have our own personal perspective in addition to which organization we might be working with that we're going to be integrating with this and taking a look at it and looking through these realities. The reality shapes to us. Eight years ago, I had a stroke. And having a stroke, it's interesting. One, it made me quite interested in the brain, right? And in doing that, one of the elements of the brain I'm really attracted to and curious by is what happens from the age of 0 to 6 as language is just exploding inside of us, right? And you might say, well, what do you mean? I mean, people can hardly talk during that time. But that's when the brain is firing in so many different areas. And it's moving at an explosive area. But when you've had a stroke, in some cases, when you end up trying to speak, what you're thinking of doesn't come out, hence the image behind you. It's kind of like a desert. Right now, I'm not having to think about what's coming out. But you can't necessarily trust what comes out within that type of an environment as far as a stroke and having things cut back inside. So when we start to integrate things like augmented and virtual reality and try to bring them into natural human behavior, it's kind of like this image here. You're working with the desert at first, because if you've got buildup and growth around it. And the thing is, is it's human nature. When we try to then interact within an environment and it isn't just natural to us, we struggle. And we tend to put it down and not want to do it. Folks that end up working with technology and try to roll out technology struggle with this all the time. Behavioral adapting technology in tune with human behavior, what we do, technology companies tend to pattern the delivery around it. But I want to challenge people to think about something. Think about the current capture that we work with, data capture. Think of your laptops, your computers. What's it based off of? It's based off of us doing this kind of stuff, right? That's typewriter technology. Why do we still do it? When we think about our phones, you've got your phone in front of you and you're moving around like this, you see people walking like this, right? And in doing that, what are we doing? Why do we do that? Well, because it's behavioral adapting technology and the technology companies behind it have found that it's easy for us to adapt to. You fill the desert with it, quite easy. But with augmented reality and virtual reality, we're looking at adding all different types of elements. When I'm talking about music, I'm actually gonna think about what is it that we, what can we add to these environments that we feel, that we hear, that we sense, not just what we see around us. And that's what makes these elements exciting to work with. And part of the tune with human behavior in this environment is thinking about, okay, if we're gonna try looking at these technologies, building a strategy to design, put them out, and even think about how people are gonna be working with them, what's the path forward? What do we do? And there's some different approaches. And I'll give an example as we bring in some of the behavioral adapting AI concepts with this. So you go back years, right? And Kasparov ends up losing to IBM. IBM beats a supercomputer. Kasparov, chess champion in the world, loses. Then you go forward in time and Google's team, DeepMind, beats the Go champion, an incredibly complex game. And then DeepMind beats itself after learning to play the game again. Now, while that's important and while that's an incredible feat, I'm much more interested in the human behavior and strategies behind what it would be like to actually then take a collaborative approach and put together the different supercomputers involved, put together the AI involved, and then see how you can have a multiple perspective. We have multiple computers and you have multiple people going towards what goal? And it's that goal that's open for us with augmented realities, virtual realities, as we end up moving forward. Tokugawa Ieisu founded the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan. And a big part of his strategy was patience. And in today's day and age, that may sound a bit counterintuitive because as I mentioned with the brain, technology is similar. It's exploding and moving forward. And oftentimes people are afraid they're not gonna be able to integrate or their businesses aren't gonna be able to catch up or they're falling behind or they're thinking that they might be losing a job because of this. And that type of fear around these things, it's very real, but I think it's important to look in a different way. Look forward. When you're looking with patience, when you're thinking with patience, you're looking at the timing involved and where to move forward. Now, this is the picture from the anniversary, the morning, that I found out that my sister had cancer. Perspectives like that sometimes. It was a beautiful sight. It was terrible news. Sometimes we move forward in paradoxes and that's what this experience was like. I asked what I was gonna do and my wife said, I'll tell you what you're gonna do. You're gonna go home. And when we go home in the coming months, the time you spend with your sister and those kids are gonna be some of the most important work that you do. Now, when coming back with my sister and sitting with her and meeting with the surgeon, this was an exercise in perspective. Coming down to a single point. We have so much happening within a periphery. Sometimes things just narrow. And so in meeting with the surgeon and sitting down, an amazing thing happened and it sounds really simple and it's subtle, but when she sat down, the surgeon sat down, her face, she actually opened up enough to share. While my sister and I were talking with her, she shared that she cared. It was in her face. The same way you can feel it with music. Not all surgeons do that. Some of them, you can throw rocks at their face. I swear, you know, and they're gonna have this look of impasse. I mean, it's part of their gig. It's part of their job. They're gonna be impassive. But I really appreciated the fact that she went out for us and took that time because then when my sister was in surgery, that's what I was holding on to. And when you're waiting in surgery, this is what you do. You sit. We're talking about, I'm talking about relative environments, relative perspective. This is the perspective. And you're waiting and you're not only, with this type of surgery, you're waiting to see if it's exploratory at first, waiting to see if they're gonna be able to keep going forward. And the main approach to use in that case was, for me, patience. Doka Gauye's patience. And waiting with the trust that the surgeon's gonna come through with that care. And as the surgeon came out and she walked over, I could tell from her face before she said anything that it went all right. From one artist to another, from a musician to a surgeon, I could tell from her face that what she had done was successful, she felt good about it. And when she went and sat down and talked with us, she said that she got all the cancer she could find, everything that she could see and feel. Does it mean that the path for my sister is over with this journey? No. But it means that this surgeon gave us a path forward, gave us hope. We can move out of that single point in time. So what I'd like to do to close the talk is to bring it back to music, bring it back to those moments in time, playing with space, working with silence. Because as we look to augment our realities, we look to add things to it, as we look to look in different environments, add these environments, form strategies towards doing it, it's important to step back and ask ourselves what it is about our behavior and human nature that we're trying to augment. And I think it's important to try to augment the best in who we are, the best in what we have, the trust that we have as human beings, that ability to touch and communicate in nonverbal forms. Because sometimes, that's what matters most. Thank you very much. Thank you.