Recording: The Future of People

On January 19th, 2022, Jeff Blankenburg, Principal Technical Evangelist, Alexa at Amazon discussed the many ways that artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, sensors, ambient computing will and can impact our future. Technology is often seen as a complicated set of code, a slew of electronic devices, or a robot ready to take over the planet. What you may not realize is how much we time, energy, and money we spend on menial tasks that could be quickly solved with technology.

For example, no one enjoys going back and forth with calendars when trying to schedule a hangout with friends or having to head to the store to pick up one or two items that ran out mid week only to discover that the store isn’t open. Or worse, leaving the house not remember if the hair straighter was left on, if the dryer is turned off, or if the garage door is closed. Sensors, ambient computing, etc. can help humans quickly identify and resolve concerns and tasks. It could tell you that you left the straighter on, whether or not the garage door is open, or if you forgot to turn the light off, and do it for you. Technology can help execute tasks, reduce stress associated with coordination, and make our lives easier. It allows us to spend less time worrying about x, y, z and allow us to do what we’d rather be doing in our free time like spending time with loved ones, in nature, or diving into a hobby.

Recording Transcription

[00:00:03.830] - Jeff Blankenburg. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Get my screen sharing set up here. I think we're doing it. Yes. Awesome. Awesome. Well, certainly, Doug and Melina, thank you guys, for having me here today. And I'm excited to kind of tell this little story about the future of people. It's very big and very vague the title of this. But as you'll see, it's going to become more and more focused as we get into this. So just very quickly, let's see if I can actually get my clicker to work here. There we go. I work on the Amazon Alexa team, so I spend all of my time talking with people, thinking about how voice conversation should work with computers. And so a lot of my time is thought about how do we build conversations, how do we build voice interactions, and how do we provide good experiences for people that are thinking about things with voice. And so that's the core of my job. And while I am here specifically as a representative of Alexa, I'm not necessarily here talking about specific Alexa promises. Right. I think that's one of the things that I like to always make sure that I leave a great big Disclaimer about is that I'm not here to make promises.

[00:01:19.880] - Jeff Blankenburg. I'm not here to make feature announcements or anything like that. But I do want to talk to you about the future. I want to talk about where we're looking, where we're headed, where we hope a lot of this kind of technology will be in the future. In order to do that, we kind of have to start at a really far away level, right, as we kind of peer through the clouds and get a good picture of what we think this will or won't be. I think it's really important to understand where we are today, and then we hope to get closer and closer to this vision as we go. But as we look at it, this is still kind of a far off look. I want you to picture in your heads maybe five or ten years. So at the core of all of this, though, are people. And the reason that this talk is called the future of people is because people are covered pretty much everything we do. People are important. People are pretty much the reason why we go to work, why we have activities, why we have hobbies. Everything comes down to spending time with people, doing things for other people.

[00:02:15.630] - Jeff Blankenburg. And without people, life is a pretty boring, meaningless place. I'm sure some of us as we've thought about being cooped up in our homes during this pandemic, I thought about how nice it would be to just be the last person on Earth, just the peace I would have. I don't have to worry about diseases or anything else. I just get to be on my own, and I can do what I want. And I don't have all these other people around me all the time. But the more I think about this kind of picture, it makes me sad, right? To think about being the last person on Earth? Sure. At first it might be nice. You can sit and you can get some reading done, and you can eat whatever you want. You don't have to worry about a lot of the normal day to day. But on the flip side, instantly your life becomes a story of survival. And you have to spend all of your time focused on making sure that you have the things that you need. Because now there isn't the infrastructure and the people and the companies and everything else that exists today.

[00:03:05.630] - Jeff Blankenburg. You're completely on your own. And all of that energy and life you get from other people, it's not there anymore. So I just want to make sure that I talk about a little bit about how technology has already fundamentally changed humans lives. I think it's really important to cover these kinds of topics, and I want to start with one of the most stress inducing images I could come up with. So I apologize. Trigger warning. But here we go. The incoming call. For many of you, you've probably experienced this, and I apologize for any of you that are having any kind of rush or anxiety as this happens. But the idea behind this image is something that is stress inducing for all of us. When we pick up our phone and we have an incoming call, it's not, oh, great, there's someone on the other line. It's like, Dude, just text me. Please don't just call me out of the blue. I've got things going on. It can't be that way. And why are we so averse to talking to someone on the phone? I mean, I can come up with dozens of reasons depending on the person or the organization.

[00:04:09.970] - Jeff Blankenburg. But the biggest reason has to do with our time asynchronous communication. Things like texting and email and stuff like that allows us to communicate how and when we want without interruption. We don't have to worry about am I doing it at the right time, or is the other person getting the information that they need? This is a relatively new requirement for our lives. I remember when I was a kid, a ringing phone was an infinite number of possibilities. And when you heard the phone ring, me and my brother, my sister, my parents, maybe not so for my parents so much, but all of the kids, we would go running to try to answer the phone because we wanted to know who was on the other end. It had to be something amazing. And now today we have all of this technology. Everyone has a phone in their pockets, and the thing that they use that device for the least, making phone calls. I think it's interesting another way, technology has changed our lives. Is the idea of having a meaningful conversation, let's say at a bar or a restaurant with some friends and somebody brings up a point.

[00:05:06.140] - Jeff Blankenburg. And in the past, let's say 30, 40 years ago, you would have to say things like, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree because there wasn't another way to know. Let me give you a quick example of a question. Someone might have asked, what actor or actress has won the most Academy Awards? Now, as you think about this question, you might know the answer or you might not. But as we sit at a table and we argue these points, there's a bunch of different answers. People might say, no, it's got to be this person or it's got to be this person with technology, again, with having that computer in our pockets. This is not how it works. Today we can't say, I agree to disagree. And in the past, because we didn't have phones in our pockets, no one was going to run to the library and look this information up. There wasn't a good way to really confirm your answer unless you happen to have like a book that might have this kind of information in it. So you agreed to disagree. But today we can't do that. And I would bet some of you that are watching this right now stopped, opened a browser, Typed it in, and tried to figure out what the actual answer is because you needed to know this is something that has just happened to us as part of our society, as part of our natural occurrence is that we have the technology to get the answers that we want.

[00:06:18.760] - Jeff Blankenburg. So let's look that thing up. By the way, for those of you that had the patience here's, the payoff. The answer is actually Catherine Hepburn. She has four. And there are a bunch of people that you may have been thinking of that have three. One of the most common answers I see to this as well is Tom Hanks. I believe he only has one, but people think Tom Hanks might have the most. Anyway, enough about that. Let's talk again about people and some of the ways that they like to spend their time when they're capable of having just that free time. Right. We have people that are really into staying fit, getting stronger, running, getting exercise. They dedicate their free time to this stuff to get bigger, faster, stronger, whatever it might be. And they're doing this because this is what they want to do with their time. If they had more of it, they would do more of it. Same goes for artists, right? If artists had more time, think of the things that they could create. They dream about what's possible, and then they create art that inspires others to be able to share their ideas, whether that's political or cultural or whatever.

[00:07:18.800] - Jeff Blankenburg. They always have some information that they want to convey with their art. As a part of this whole pandemic, I've also found many of my friends have been attracted to woodworking. They're building amazing things, beautiful chess boards with colored inlays and tables and furniture and all sorts of other things. This is something they found a real passion for. Another thing, certainly this is close to my heart is lots of people that have the technical skills have started writing software for themselves, maybe to simplify things around the house, or maybe because they have a really cool, innovative idea that they want to create a start up around. You've got to build that prototype, you've got to start building those ideas. I've done something like this myself, and it relates to something else that I've found myself spending a lot of time doing recently, which is collecting baseball cards. Again, I kind of dug through my old childhood collection during the pandemic and found that I really still liked collecting cards. So I started getting back into modern cards that are out today and wrote myself a bunch of software to track and manage and look at all of the things that I have going outside my collection.

[00:08:19.670] - Jeff Blankenburg. It's actually pretty cool. And I've had people ask me, hey, how can I use your software? Well, that's the next problem. Now I have to figure out how to handle more than one user. But all of these things are about how do we spend our time. A lot of you probably spend your time this way as well, right? Absolutely nothing wrong with this. I know you're lying if you say you don't watch television because on average this is going to scare you. Here's the average numbers for American adults, people over 18 over the last three years. You can see that this is media consumption. 10 hours, 11 hours, ten and a half hours. People are spending a ton of time not just watching TV, but this includes things like playing games on your phone or on your Xbox, playing with your tablet, watching TV on any kind of device, watching DVDs, even listening to the radio. But you can see that this is a substantial amount of our time. And if you figure that there's ten or eleven, maybe 12 hours a day, that we are consuming stuff, and then you hope that you sleep another seven or 8 hours, that doesn't leave you a whole lot of any time for anything else.

[00:09:19.790] - Jeff Blankenburg. So people are obviously spending a whole ton of time doing this, but it doesn't matter what your time is or what you want to spend your time doing. All of us have our own pictures or visions about how we want to spend our time, and we only wish that we had more time to do it. We all have diverse perspectives and interests and hobbies, and we're chasing those things. We work to get money, to buy time, to be able to do things that we want to do. But there is one thing we have all in common, regardless of our background or our age or anything like that. And that is that we all have stuff. We have so much stuff just floating around in our heads, right? We have ideas and aspirations. We have things that we worry about. There's lots of good stuff, right? Hey, I have this really cool idea for work. Or hey, I just solved this cool coding problem. Or maybe, hey, I can't wait to see my friends on Friday. These are all cool things that are kind of floating around in our heads. But I would bet if you're anything like me, there's also a whole bunch of other gross negative things that can completely derail your day.

[00:10:19.810] - Jeff Blankenburg. How am I going to get all this work done? Or when was my last doctor visit? Are my kids doing okay in school? Is my boss happy with my work? Did I leave the oven on? These are all other things that take up cycles and time in our days that we have to then focus on. So this is where I want to ask you to start using your imagination. I want you to take several leaps beyond where many of you may consider ambient computing or voice to be. Today, I want to have a personal AI companion. I want you to imagine having a human assistant, someone you've hired to help you with a lot of tasks and work that you have going on in your life. I want you to imagine having that human assistant, but they're completely digital. They are autonomous. They can handle anything that you could throw at a human imagine. That is our future. I want something that makes it easy for me to focus on what's important rather than all of the other nonsense that happens to be floating around me. But to do this requires trust. So I want you to imagine for a minute you're standing in this beautiful field.

[00:11:22.630] - Jeff Blankenburg. Sunrise is coming up. Everything is covered in a thin coat of Dew. The bright sunrise is creating rainbow pinpoints on each blade of grass. You take a deep breath in and you see me come charging out of the woods at you. I'm soaked up to my knees with a Dew that is soaked into my pants. I tell you that today is the last sunrise. There won't be another one. Do you believe me? I would bet. Almost certainly not, right? There's nothing you could do, I could do to convince you that the sun isn't going to rise tomorrow the same way that it did today. You have far too much historical evidence and there's no way you're going to believe my word. The crazy person running out of the forest. This is how personal AI is going to feel to all of us. Trusted, reliable. It would be unconscionable to suggest that it would fail you. But this trust is a responsibility that we as developers and technologists, we have to be hyper focused on. Now, I want you to picture your Bluetooth headphones. I've got my pair right here. Really nice headphones. Really not very inexpensive.

[00:12:32.930] - Jeff Blankenburg. Do you have the same kind of trust with your Bluetooth headphones that you do with the sunrise? Do they work? Yes, most of the time. But when they don't, you're not surprised when the battery isn't charged, or they just don't seem to want to pair with your computer or your phone or whatever. They're frustrating. When something works, it's amazing. When something important is unreliable, we end up using it less. We end up saying, Well, I'll just go with a wired set of headphones, because at least those work every time. But when they work, when those Bluetooth headphones work, oh, my God, it's as good as that beautiful sunrise. Trust is fundamental to any technology that we use, and it's really important for us to think about this as we head into the world of ambient computing. It's the foundation on which everything else that I'm going to talk about is based on. Okay, so we're back to our frustrated self. We have all these ideas. They're all swirling around negative things, positive things. Our headphones aren't working. Our kids are screaming, dogs barking. We decide, okay, I need to just step away. We walk out to the mailbox to just get a little bit of fresh air, a couple of steps down to the end of the driveway, and what do we find?

[00:13:46.010] - Jeff Blankenburg. Bills. And now our brain is racing about how much everything costs, and there are so many stressors in our daily lives, and we are the only ones that can solve them, right? Or are we? Let's talk about those bills for a second, because in the vision I want to paint, we don't pay our bills anymore. Now, I wish I could say that we're doing it the way that you might have thought I was suggesting, which is that there aren't bills and I don't have to pay them. Certainly our expenses have to be paid, right? Things cost money, and we have to make sure that they're paid. But what if instead, our personal AI did that? And I know this is a big leap for some people. Stick with me. I promise it will be all worthwhile at the end. But I know what you're thinking. Sometimes I don't have enough money to even pay all my bills. I have student debt, I have credit cards, I have a mortgage. Paying my bills needs to be a very manual process so that I can make those decisions subjectively for myself every time. My question for you is this, do they really need to be manual?

[00:14:45.770] - Jeff Blankenburg. And do you make better decisions than artificial intelligence would? Let me give you a quick example. How many times have all of us been driving down the street? We're on our way home from something, and you're like, oh, I'm just going to swing into Starbucks even if you don't have enough money to cover your bills. Most people, at least I'll speak for most Americans. Most Americans won't restrict themselves from a little treat, right? I'll have a four dollar coffee or I'll just get a little cookie while I'm at the grocery store or whatever. And even though money is tight and you should be more responsible with those things, it's important to treat ourselves. And so we do need to make some of those manual decisions along the way. But are we making the best possible financial decisions for ourselves? That's the question that I raised, because as we look at AI, as we look at the state of things, even today, look at the game of chess. In many cases, the Masters of chess would argue that, in fact, the game has been ruined by artificial intelligence and machine learning. A human really can't beat a computer anymore at chess, very rare occurrences.

[00:15:49.630] - Jeff Blankenburg. Does that ever happen? And the reason for that is because a computer can look 10, 15, 30 moves ahead and optimize around the best move. In each case, a human maybe three or four moves ahead, but that's going to be the extent of it, and they have to wait and anticipate and do their very best. But if you're able to predict 30 moves ahead, what all the best possible conditions are, and then make the best decision each time, you're obviously going to be better in each individual instance. Let's talk about something a little closer to home, the stock market. If you guys don't realize this, in the stock market, there is a lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence being run on a daily basis, on a microsecond basis. Trades are being made on and off, sell and buy by computers all over the world, trading, trying to optimize around those little profits, maybe make a couple of cents here, maybe just lose a sense here, but then gain $0.04 there. And in each of these cases, the machine learning engine is making these decisions autonomously. There's not a human driving each individual trade. And because of things like this, we found that actually there's a lot of situations in which being close to the markets themselves, being close to the New York Stock Exchange, as an example, is an advantageous position because the length of the wire between your server and the stock exchange is the only thing limiting you in speed.

[00:17:10.200] - Jeff Blankenburg. So what they've actually had to do with the stock market is introduced miles and miles of extra cabling so that people that are right next to the building don't have a significant advantage over those that do. It's an amazing kind of situation to think about. But a majority of the trades that are being made in the market today are not being made by humans. Let's talk about medicine, for example. This is a very human thing, right. As we think about doctors talking with patients, putting their hands on us to feel and see how things are working using devices like X rays and MRIs to see what's going on inside. But what we found as we've started to apply artificial intelligence to the world of medicine is that, in fact, AI is outperforming doctors. Now, this isn't to say in any way that doctors are doing a bad job. Doctors are better and smarter than they've ever been. But artificial intelligence has one element working for it that doctors do not. And that is the inability to be subjective. They make objective observations about patients, data and their records, and are often diagnosing things in a slightly different way than traditional doctors would.

[00:18:13.640] - Jeff Blankenburg. It's not, again, not to take anything away from doctors. I'm not here to say that we should stop having doctors or anything like that, but it is interesting to look at how they're making decisions versus how artificial intelligence can. And there's been study after study in some of these examples where you can see that AI is actually outperforming diagnosis and things like that. Let's move to something a little more fun. The baseball season is just around the corner. Artificial intelligence is being applied here, too. In the minor leagues. Major League Baseball has implemented specific tracking mechanisms, algorithms to understand when a ball is outside the strike zone or inside the strike zone. Right, a ball or a strike. And so what they've found is that one of the biggest frustrations that people have in watching baseball is that when they watch it on TV, especially, they can see the box. There's a box drawn on television that shows you whether the ball went through the strike zone or not. And in some cases, the Empire will call it a ball even though it was inside the box. Or they'll call it a strike when the ball was actually outside the box.

[00:19:09.670] - Jeff Blankenburg. And so by using actual tracking mechanisms, by using a grid of lasers and other measurement sensors, they can actually identify whether or not that ball did, in fact, cross the strike zone. And so what they're doing is instead of just like eliminating the umpire and making it a very robotic game, they keep the umpire. And instead, what they do is they put an earpiece in his ear. If it's a strike, he hears one sound. If it's a ball, he hears another sound and he can signal it appropriately, but it is no longer based on his opinion. Everything else about the game looks exactly the same, except the Empire gets the call right every single time. So let's move on to one more interesting scenario that I'd like to share. Back to the telephone that we talked about earlier. When was the last time you wanted to call your dentist? Now I have an excuse. My dad is my dentist, so that makes it a little bit easier. I call him at least once a week, but for most of you, you probably don't have that excuse. You probably made your next appointment while you were sitting in the chair for your last appointment, and they wrote it down on a little business card for you.

[00:20:11.160] - Jeff Blankenburg. Right? The next appointment is six months from now. It'll be on a Tuesday at 08:00 A.m.. And you agree to that? Because, of course, no one has any idea what their schedule looks like six months from now. So you say, yeah, that's great. So you take that card, you take it home. What do you do with that card? Some of us might stick it on the fridge, others set it on the counter, which, of course, inevitably leads to it getting thrown away or lost or something like that. And so the nice thing is about technologies. They start texting and calling us about a week or two before, and they say, hey, you have an appointment next Tuesday. I hope that's still okay. And you're like, man, no, that's not okay at all. My kids got ski club, and we got volleyball practice. We got all these other things. I need to reschedule it. And so where does that lead us? One of us has to call. Either the dentist is going to call us or we're going to call them and we're then going to create human APIs. We're going to say, hey, I'm free next Friday.

[00:20:56.750] - Jeff Blankenburg. How does that work for you? Well, looking at our calendar, it looks like Friday. The dentist is actually going to be out. How's the following Tuesday? Well, Tuesday could work for me. Are you free after one? No, I'm sorry. You have to be in the morning and you just keep bouncing back and forth, and it's this whole thing where you spent time over the months and over the weeks to schedule these things, and then you still have to go to the dentist appointment. What if instead we had an AI companion that could solve all of these problems for us? And instead, one day you just hear, hey, by the way, I saw there was an opening on your calendar on Thursday. I scheduled you a dentist appointment. I've already got it on their calendar. And I've talked to your health care provider to make sure that it's covered. What? That sounds amazing. Yeah, let's do that. That's the kind of world that I want to live in. I don't want to have to call my dentist. I don't even want to have to think about my dental appointments. But I do want to go to the dentist.

[00:21:43.290] - Jeff Blankenburg. I want to make sure that my teeth are clean and healthy. I want to make sure that it's taken care of. And I am paying for dental insurance. So I should probably use some of the benefits of that, which is an appointment every six months. So those kinds of things can fundamentally change some of those little stressors that are sitting in our head solving one little problem. I don't have to worry about dentist appointments anymore. Think about your annual doctor visit, which I'm sure all of you do regularly. Right? We should, but we don't always do a good job. Let's make this more fun. Take that same concept and now apply it to your friends. So instead of if anybody has ever tried to schedule a fun evening out with other adults, especially other adults with children, you know that this is nearly one of the most impossible tasks ever accomplished by humans. But imagine instead, each one of these people has their own digital assistant that's handling all of this stuff for us. And they all talk to each other and say, these people haven't gotten together in a little while. We should make that happen.

[00:22:40.730] - Jeff Blankenburg. And they make a reservation for us for dinner. They make some plans for us to go down to the beach. They have firewood delivered so that we can build a fire on the beach and hang out and tell stories and sing songs or whatever. Maybe not sing songs, but you know what I mean? So as we think about how that stuff can start to happen, let's take these a little bit further. Let's think about the mortgage on our home. If we own our home or an apartment, we have a mortgage. And once we've gotten the mortgage, once we've found the interest rate of the payment that we're comfortable with and we've purchased our home, we generally don't think about it much. We just pay the bill every month, and that's kind of how it goes. But there are many opportunities to refinance your house when interest rates drop, when there are specials at specific lenders. But I'm betting most of you aren't paying attention on a daily or weekly basis to the interest rates for mortgages. But your assistant could be, and they could even do the calculations for you to say, hey, I just noticed that the interest rates have dropped, so I actually refinance your house for you, and your payment went down by $89.

[00:23:40.400] - Jeff Blankenburg. The length of the mortgage is still exactly the same. And all you need to do is sign these two forms and you're done. Oh, my God, that would be amazing. You just saved me $90 a month. I didn't have to do any of the researcher work, and we're good to go. Yeah, count me in. That's a big decision, though. What about something smaller, like your shopping list? There's lots of technology out there that can help us be productive, save us time, reduce stress. And shopping lists are certainly one of those good examples. Alexa does a fantastic job with this. Add honey to my shopping list or whatever it is. And for the longest time, my wife and I actually had a piece of paper that hung on the fridge in our kitchen. It was designed for us. When you run out of something, just write it down on a piece of paper, and then we can take that list to the grocery store. But in all of those cases, whether it's a shopping list app on your phone or you're talking to Alexa, or you have a piece of paper or whatever it is, never do we really get a complete list of all of the things that we really need to do?

[00:24:41.260] - Jeff Blankenburg. And this is because so much of our technology requires a somewhat permanent change of behavior. You hear this all the time. New mindset, new results. Just do these things and you'll be better off. It's the same reason that so many New Year's resolutions have already failed, because we as humans can't do this. Anytime we're asked to make fundamentally large changes to our behavior, our diet, our monetary spending, whatever it is, we always fall back into a specific pattern of who we are. That's a real challenge when we talk about trying to use all this technology in a new way to allow it to take advantage of better features or whatever. That's why the promise of ambient computing is about making your life easier and natural, not about fundamentally changing how you approach the world. It's not about building better habits. And this is something that I see lots and lots of software try to offer. Hey, just start doing this every day and you'll be all better off. One of the funniest things that I've ever seen, it was a meme going around recently about medication for ADHD patients, people that have attention deficits. The cure.

[00:25:51.210] - Jeff Blankenburg. The solution for many people that have ADHD is just to have to take one pill every morning. The problem is those people with ADHD have such a hard time focusing and sticking to a routine and planning all that stuff that it's like a completely out of reach and opposite example of what they should be doing with their approach. It's really hard for people to have ADHD to take a pill every month. We can't focus on changing human behavior. In the long run. It's not going to be successful, but we can start to allow the technology to meet the humans where they happen to be. Let's start with little things like, Did I leave the garage open today? Again, lots of apps and technology to make it easy for you to check the current state of your garage door. You could install a camera in your garage. There's lots of devices you can install that will actually monitor the state, whether it's open or closed. But if you're prone to forgetting to close the garage, aren't you also prone to forgetting to check it later? That's again, one of those human behavior things that we really struggle with.

[00:26:53.670] - Jeff Blankenburg. This is why I'm so excited about ambient computing as a future. In fact, this isn't even fair. This was a stock photo that I use. Let me show you what my garage looks like. This is more like my garage. Not really. It's one of the hardest part about Zoom presentation is like that was a little bit funny, and I don't know if anyone left, but that's okay. This is not really my garage either. But I want you to imagine that my modern, technologically sound garage uses context, and it's proactive. I noticed you just left the house, but the garage is open. I've closed it for you. Or, hey, it seems like you left your garage open but nobody else's home. Do you want me to close it for you? Right. It doesn't always have to be Proactive and do the thing for me, but it could at least chime in and say, hey, I noticed a thing that you may not be aware of. I just want to solve this problem for you. What would you like me to do? Here's another good example. This is probably mostly for the ladies in the audience, but if you've ever used a hot implement, like a curling iron or a straight iron to do your hair, I can't tell you the number of times that my wife and I have tried to come up with new behavioral shifts for hey, we got ready.

[00:27:55.840] - Jeff Blankenburg. You look beautiful. Let's go. Five minutes into the ride, did I unplug that? Am I going to burn our house down? All those negative thoughts start to float around in our heads. I initially solved this with a smart plug, right? Just plug the thing into a smart plug, and then we can turn that smart plug off as we're driving to the thing that we're already late for. That might be a really good way to go. There are lots and lots of other ways to solve this problem, too. I've actually seen smart fuse boxes. They can actually recognize that there's a power draw. And as you look at the app, you can say, oh, it looks like there's power being drawn from this place. I want to turn that off. Or if we compose all of this context together. Hey, I noticed no one's home, but there seems to be a significant power draw in this place that there isn't normally. It's not your furnace, it's not your air conditioner. I'm going to turn that off for you until someone gets home. Those kinds of things can start to happen as we offer context and information and as we go back to that shopping list.

[00:28:48.680] - Jeff Blankenburg. It's not just about managing the shopping list, right? We actively curate a list all the time, and we try to decide to go to the store and we have a complete list of what we need. At least that's what we think we have. One of the first things that NBA computing is solving that behavior change. The future of kitchens and refrigerators and pantries will be reliable sensors and cameras that can detect when food is about to go bad, when you're low on something, or when your seven year old just finished the milk without telling anyone. This can be solved in two different forms, right? The first way is through Proactive notifications. You've run out to pick up your daughter from track practice, and you receive a notification that you're out of milk because someone just finished it. But as you come home from track practice, your plan was to make some dinner, and you are going to need milk for whatever that recipe happens to be. So at this point, you can make a decision about how soon you're going to need to stop at a store. Or maybe you just wait till tomorrow's breakfast.

[00:29:39.370] - Jeff Blankenburg. But if you need it tonight, it's good to know while you're on your way home that you need it. The worst thing that could happen. And I know we're talking about something as insignificant as milk, but the worst thing that can happen is you get home and you start to get ready to make dinner and you realize, we're all out of milk. Now I got to go to the store and leave the house again to go do the thing with Proactive notifications, at least we can know like, hey, this is great information. I'm glad that I know I'm out of milk. We'll swing through the grocery store or a gas station or wherever we want to buy milk from on our way home. But there's another step beyond this as we start to lean into automation. What if instead, my refrigerator just ordered the things that I was out of? It knows I always want to have milk, so why don't we recognize that we're out of milk and make sure that there was some delivered that day or delivered at the time when it knows I'm going to be home? Most of this information with the appropriate context can be done automatically without us as humans having to go into an app and say, do a thing, we need to move to more of that stuff, and we're seeing some of that today.

[00:30:36.930] - Jeff Blankenburg. That example of delivering me something when I've run out of it, that's not new. We've been talking about that at Amazon for a little while. With Amazon Dash, there are vacuums and printers and coffee makers and all sorts of other things that can order things for you on the fly as you start to run out of them. I just had this experience with my printer earlier this past summer where I got some ink in the mail, and I was like, I don't remember ordering ink. And the next day my printer ran out of ink. It was unbelievable. I was so thankful that that ink had arrived, but I hadn't done it. I hadn't chosen to make that thing come. I just said, hey, when you're low on ink, order more and my printer does it for me automatically. Let's talk about more Proactive kinds of things that we can do for ourselves. I myself, I don't know how all of you are, but I'm an early riser. I like to get up pretty early. I'm up by six or seven most days. I like to be productive in the morning so that I don't feel bad about being exhausted later in the day, right?

[00:31:29.970] - Jeff Blankenburg. I tend to be more tired as we hit four 506:00. So when I'm up early in the morning, sometimes I'll go run errands. I'll go get some things done. But at 06:00. 07:00, most places aren't open yet, and there is a big warehouse store that I won't use the name of, but they don't open until ten. I only know that because I had a bad experience with this, but I got up and it was like 830. I was like, oh, you know what? I'm going to run over there. I can get some of the things that we need for this weekend, and I'll be home before the kids are done with breakfast. So I hop in my car. It's 830 drive over the place, which is only about 20 minutes away, and I get there and there's nobody in the parking lot. And I'm like, oh my God, they didn't open yet. Maybe it's 09:00, maybe I'm just a few minutes early. No, they don't open until ten. So imagine just a simple proactivity of my GPS saying, hey, it looks like you're going over to that warehouse store. They don't open for an hour, man.

[00:32:22.480] - Jeff Blankenburg. Are you sure you want to go now? Right. And it can learn from that. Maybe I work there. Maybe it doesn't make sense for me to be there early, but in most cases, it's probably going to say no. The opening hours for that are a little bit later, right? 11:00 whatever it might be, all of those situations are solvable, and without researching it, your GPS can navigate you there, but I don't know of a single warning that's going to happen on any GPS to say, hey, I see you're going there, but they're not open. There's nothing worse than spending all that time in your car trying to go do something productive, only to find out that, in fact, you have to wait an hour or longer. In the future, your car will be able to warn you about all of this stuff before you even pull out of your garage. Another thing that's important to talk about is the idea of the voice interoperability initiative. If you guys haven't heard about this, this is something that is going to be incredibly important to all of us in the future, and we may never hear about it described this way.

[00:33:14.480] - Jeff Blankenburg. But I want you to imagine that there are lots and lots of digital assistance out there, right? Google has one, Apple has one, IBM has one. Lots of car manufacturers are building their own. Lots of companies have their own voice assistance, and it doesn't make sense to try to just talk to one and have that one do everything. We fully acknowledge that, and as a part of that, we want to make sure that it's easy and convenient for customers to be able to choose which assistance that they want to talk to in which situation. Again, going back to your car, let's imagine you're talking to your BMW. You say, BMW, how much gas do I have left? And it tells you. And then you say, and open my garage. And it goes, oh, actually, I can't do that, but I think Alexa can. And it hands it off to Alexa and says, hey, Alexa, can you open the garage for them? And she goes, yes, I got it. And it opens and closes the garage for you. It's this kind of world that any voice assistant can run on any device that is really going to unlock a lot of the potential that we think about.

[00:34:10.270] - Jeff Blankenburg. We talk about this whole ambient computing world, right? It's not about just living in one ecosystem. It's about being all the things everywhere that we go. Okay? So I want you to think about that world. A world where things are automated and Proactive and pre planned for us, where we don't have to worry about the minutiae. We don't have to trade six emails to determine a time to have a phone call later. We don't need to drive across town only to find out that our favorite cookies are sold out at the grocery store. We live in a world where life happens when and where it should, without you needing to plan and execute every last bit of it. This is the promise of voice today. This is where we are right now. When we think about Voice, you can talk to things you can control and command, things you can get lots and lots of information with just your voice. But we're still a step away from that full ambient computing awareness. Ai world skills. The apps that live inside Voice are just the beginning of a journey to a personal AI. I want a companion, like the idea of having someone there all the time, solving problems for me, taking things off my plate, scheduling meetings, all of that.

[00:35:24.590] - Jeff Blankenburg. It's coming, and it's going to be amazing. There will always be room for bad jokes and random facts, but the ability to assemble and grow our own personal AI is our future, and I am really, really looking forward to it. We all live in a highly connected world, and with AI saving us the time and the hassle of all the mundane stuff we have in our lives, that's a world I want to be a part of. I want the freedom to focus on invention and free time and hobbies and the creation of new, amazing things. I don't want to be bogged down by just continuing to chunk through the same things that I did last month and the month after that. I think we're on the right path. There's a long road ahead, but I can't wait to get there. So with that, I will say thank you. I'm glad I was invited here to speak. I really appreciate you all taking the time to listen to me today. And hopefully you picked out a few things that are interesting or fun. If any of you would like to get a hold of me or have a conversation after this session, you can do that.

[00:36:23.430] - Jeff Blankenburg. I am at Jeff Blankenberg literally everywhere. I mean, seriously, I'm even on TikTok. So if you have questions, if you want to reach out to me, please do. I'd love to hear from you. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Doug and Lena.

[00:36:37.370] - SCW. Thank you so much, Jeff. That was fantastic. And it gives me a lot to think about and how our everyday routines can become less stressful. We're going to ask the audience for questions. Leslie asks what will we do with all this free time?

[00:37:23.910] - Jeff Blankenburg. It's a really good question. Right. And that was kind of the point of the beginning is like, we all have things we want to be doing with our time. I always pose this question. I know the answer to what you would do with all that free time. And it's the same thing you would do if you didn't have to go to work today. I don't know the specific answer, but I know I just unlocked something in your head for it. Oh, my gosh. I don't have to work anymore. Oh, I know what I'm doing, right. Those are the things, hopefully that we get more opportunities to spend our time on.