Mind the Uncanny Valley: Thoughts from CES on the Right Way to Innovate
Every January, over 170,000 people descend upon Las Vegas to see thousands of companies display their most innovative wares. The conference extends across a few miles, multiple buildings, and thousands of exhibits. Trying to see it all is a nigh impossible task. Trying to sort through all you can manage to see also offers a challenge all its own. With that in mind, here are 5 curated themes from CES I’d like to highlight. Replete with photos as captured by my “high quality” smartphone camera—so you can literally feel like you were there too—those themes are Autonomous Vehicles, Future Cities, Virtual Assistants, Privacy & Security, and Data Management & Risk. At the end, I’ll leave you with a discussion on the uncanny valley as well as 6 questions to consider as we strive to deliver true consumer value in how we innovate.
Autonomous Vehicles
A lot is happening in the Autonomous Vehicle (AV) space, with a lot of focus on safety applications. While we are still on our way to full autonomy, even now we can see how our relationship with the car is changing. I kicked off CES by attending the keynote address delivered by Ola Källenius, Daimler’s chairman. Källenius discussed our evolving connection to the car along three veins, which I’ve categorized as
Connected Life: our vehicles have the capability to tell us how our favorite sports team is faring, what the weather will be later today, and even to help us turn off the lights in our smart homes.
Gesture Control: symbiosis—in a trifecta between man, machine, and nature—was a key theme in Daimler keynote as Källenius highlighted how Mercedes is innovating to allow humans to issue fluid, seamless, and intuitive motion commands to their vehicles.
Sustainability: rounding out the third piece of that trifecta, Källenius emphasized connecting tech to nature by taking inspiration from the world around us to improve the vehicle’s performance as well as to minimize the environmental impact.
Bringing together the themes of connected life, gesture control, and sustainability, Källenius unveiled the concept car Daimler had been working on in collaboration with the Avatar film crew. Check out a video of this wicked-cool concept car below.
Innovation should empower consumers to access opportunity without getting lost in complexity. This maxim, if you will, from the Daimler keynote speaks to why we must prioritize UXD and consumer insights in our innovation process. I often like to say that when it comes to innovation, we can adopt one of three philosophies. We can choose to privilege either the technology, the business, or the consumer. That is to say, we can either start by asking ourselves, “what can we build?” or, perhaps, “what are our most pressing business objectives?” In my opinion, only one strategy strictly dominates; we must ask ourselves “what do consumers want and need?” I don’t like reliance on luck, and the only way to minimize luck in the innovation process is to adopt consumer-centric design principles.
By making the consumer the heart of how and why we innovate, we can live into another principle Källenius shared that’s crucial to delivering effective innovation. That principle is simply this: “The more natural the connection, the better”. We’ll revisit this point a little bit later.
As we progress towards full autonomy, we can also expect the form factor of the car to change. Autonomous Vehicles are something I’ve been dreaming about since I was seven (I won’t tell you how long ago that was!), waiting at the window for my parents to get home from work. I figured that if people didn’t drive themselves traffic-flow would be better. About five years ago, I sketched out a picture of a circular car, and told my dad that I think that in the future cars would be round with all the seats facing inwards (or at least having the capacity to do so). My thinking was that since the safest collision is one where you’re hit from the rear, then by having the seats all facing inwards in a circle you could make any crash that occurred as close to approximating a collision from the back. The fact that we would have reached Level 5 autonomy means that there would no longer be any need (if not ability) to hand off control between the car and a human driver. I’ll save for another day/post a discussion on why I think that to reap the full advantage of Level 5 autonomy, fully autonomous driving must be mandated within cities. In a world where no humans drive, there’s no real need to face forward or to have your eyes on the road. Instead you might as well face inwards and have a chat.
So, what does this have to do with autonomous vehicles at CES? Well, I was shocked (though somewhat pleased) to see that many of the autonomous vehicle concept cars realized some of what I’d theorized. For example, one of Toyota’s vehicles featured above has seats that are all inward facing. Even ZF Friedrichshafen, a German auto parts manufacturer, featured an autonomous vehicle with a form factor that has all seats inward facing. In the future, your autonomous vehicle might feel much more like a living room for socialization, or an office for work.
“As we progress towards full autonomy, we can also expect the form factor of the car to change.”
Future Cities
Just as we can expect the form factor of the car to change, so too will the car’s role in transportation. The advent of autonomous vehicles will not only increase the efficiency of public transportation, but also radically transform its very nature. Imagine a world where an autonomous vehicle knows your daily commute and simply shows up to your house in the morning to take you to work. In the afternoon, another autonomous vehicle is there to take you back home. As efficient public transportation becomes even more ubiquitous, the infrastructure of cities—from roads to parking lots—will change. For example, with the dawn of full autonomy and air taxis, garages as we know them will disappear as we move from parking to docking. See below for another autonomous vehicle concept from Toyota (with inward facing seats!) as well as an air taxi from Bell Nexus.
Driving itself will increasingly move from a necessity to a leisure pursuit. Currently, I manage strategy and innovation for a P&C insurer. From day one, I’ve been asking what this impending change means for the bread and butter of carriers like Allstate, State Farm, and Progressive. Like in a chess match, we must all think multiple moves ahead. As innovators we must not only ask ourselves what impact disruptive forces will have on or business, but also how we can both harness and develop those disruptive forces.
Toyota did just this in showcasing their vision of the future with Toyota’s Woven City: a Prototype City of the Future. In partnership with Danish architecture firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, Toyota plans to build a hydrogen fuel cell-powered smart city in the shadow of Mt. Fuji. Toyota first announced the creation of this future city at CES, and will use the city’s fully connected ecosystem to develop and test all manner of technology, including autonomy and alternative power sources.
Virtual Assistance
Everyone at CES, it seems, peddled some kind of virtual assistance. At every turn, I had the opportunity to substitute a real-life interaction with a virtual one. Honda used sophisticated but hyper-sensitive simulations to demonstrate tools for managing Levels 3-4 autonomy. During the simulation, the steering wheel moved to which ever portion of the dashboard I wanted it to go. Once I’d transferred control back to myself as the driver, the car registered my gaze so that if I took my eyes off the road, the car wouldn’t turn even if I moved the steering wheel.
However, as soon as the vehicle thought I put my eyes back on the road, the car gave me back full control. This sent me sailing into a wall since I’d already turned the wheel to the right while I was looking away. Yeah…a bit hypersensitive, and not yet at Olympic level handoffs. Still, it shows promising advancements towards managing that tricky stage in which both man and machine drive.
Integrating virtual assistance with humanoid form-factors, HSBC highlighted their bank teller robot, Pepper as well as their software-based, AI assistants designed to provide greater access to customers via a host of different languages.
When it came to virtual assistance, there were, of course, the usual suspects. Amazon, Google, and others demonstrated how everything from your bookshelf to your fridge can virtually assist you to live your best (or perhaps, worst) life. Amazon asked “why not let your bookshelf weigh how many coffee pods you have left and order more before you run out?” Samsung asked “why go to the gym if you can have your own at-home virtual trainer?”
“…what is the value of the human touch?”
Nevertheless, in a time when people in the post-industrial world express more loneliness than ever before, what is the value of the human touch? In our bid to lend a virtual helping hand, are we truly putting the consumer at the center of our innovation philosophy? I think it’s worth comparing and contrasting Samsung’s pseudo prosthetic piece that links to a virtual trainer with Nintendo’s Wii. In doing so, we might conclude that Samsung privileged technology and business objectives to produce what Nintendo already created years ago in an experience that connected rather than isolated people. When we keep the consumer at the center, we deliver what they truly want and need.
Compare Samsung’s product with Nintendo’s Wii Sports…
Privacy & Security
Data, as many have said, serves as today’s oil—a highly profitable commodity with the qualities of a premium good. Digital fuel, data not only serves and connects us, but also reveals who we are. From GDPR in the EU to CCPA in California, data privacy and security policies fight to return control over one’s data to the consumer. Thus, it comes as little surprise that many of the biggest players in tech talked a lot about privacy and security at CES. In a bid to get ahead of or else help shape externally imposed regulations and policies, tech incumbents are striving to define what adequate privacy and security policy should look like. While there was much chatter about the urgency of protecting consumers’ privacy and security, the discussion often seemed more like lip service than an honest attempt to restore data ownership and control to the consumer.
Take this Google example. You’ll see below Google’s declaration that they respect your privacy as they encourage you to ask their virtual assistant about anything. You can even ask Google to delete all your data at the end of the week. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Except, a week is more than enough time for Google’s machine learning algorithms and AI to learn everything that they need about you. Plus, is anything deleted ever truly gone?
Already humanity produces immeasurable volumes of data every day, and that rate continues to proliferate. In the face of such phenomena, data privacy and security become ever more crucial. Don’t get me wrong. Google provides immense value to consumers all around the world. The question isn’t so much at what cost do we receive that value, but rather do we have to pay the current price. Currently there seems to be little corporate profit in consumer privacy. We must ask ourselves how can we flip this model where consumers pay in privacy and security for goods and services?
Data Management
As the Google example above aims to illustrate, sure it’s great to provide the option to delete data once it’s been harvested, but why not design for privacy from the ground up? Fortunately, novel technology—from homomorphic encryption to DLT—emerges to help us better design for and mitigate data risk. More than just a generator of efficiency and convenience, DLT like blockchain enables the isolation, containment and elimination of risk.
Currently, corporations tend to experiment with and deploy private + permissioned DLT solutions. These private chains are like the intranets of yester-year. Just as corporations had to shift from intranet to internet to more fully capitalize on the benefits of network connectivity, industry today must and is learning how to circumspectly leverage public chains. This will require moving from route competition to strategic coop-etition, where seemingly adversarial entities cooperate for the common good (without, of course, transgressing antitrust statutes).
Moreover, Dapps (i.e. decentralized applications) will allow consumers to selectively permit the use of their data on the open market, rendering what many companies once held as proprietary more of a commodity without their direct control. The threshold for innovation will rise resulting in higher value products and services for consumers.
Indeed, as we move towards an increasingly decentralized and distributed world, the nature of ownership will change. Imagine never needing to own your own phone or computer. You’d simply pick up any device and unlock your specifications and data with your private key. The possibilities are boundless. DLT will impact and enable numerous technological innovations from securely connecting and operating IOT devices to addressing the threat of deep-fakes on authenticity. Whether you’re a fortune 100, small business or gig-economy worker, DLT will radically transform how you work.
The Uncanny Valley
From Curium to Einsteinium, scientists have been able to synthesize over 20 non-naturally-occurring elements. You can even get lab-created diamonds. However, we’ve never been able to accurately synthesize the human element, though we sure do try to get close. The uncanny valley speaks to that place that seems to so closely approximate what is human that it throws into sharp relief just how unreal the object actually is. The uncanny valley is a place to which innovation can so easily but must not lead.
When discussing Autonomous Vehicles, I noted the importance of consumer-centric design, and that “the more natural the connection, the better.” I spent four full days at CES, and by the morning of day three a wary feeling had begun to settle in. Sitting in my hotel room, I couldn’t quite put my finger on the source of my uneasiness. It wasn’t until a couple of days later when I met Emily Withrow, head of R&D at Quartz, at the airport that I began to truly connect the dots on what was happening. She asked me whether I thought CES painted a utopic or dystopic future.
Spurred on by her question, I began to search through my memory archives and found that there was something cold and unnerving about watching UneeQ Digital Humans’ virtual banking specialist attempt to impersonate human emotion and expression. Watching the yellow ball pictured below follow Samsung’s CEO around the stage made me wonder just who wants a mechanical pet that video/audio records your every move? Do we need that?
In the pursuit of innovation, are we engineering solutions or simply manufacturing more problems? Maybe it’s better for everyone’s health to take a walk outside and interact with human civilization than to have a little yellow ball train you or your fridge get all your groceries.
I hope you’ve found these highlights from and discussion about CES thought-provoking. In sum, I’ll leave you with these six questions (slightly bent towards the P&C industry) that we can ask ourselves as we aim to navigate around the uncanny value to deliver true consumer value.
How can we effectively plug into the human-operated & autonomous driving experiences to gather risk data and remain relevant?
As the future nature of transportation & car ownership evolves, how can we build new paths that generate new income streams?
As we leverage AR/VR to make the consumer’s life more convenient, how can we utilize simulations that run on robust data models?
How can we ensure that we deliver on the consumer’s best interest when it comes to privacy & security?
How can we leverage emerging tech like DLT to not only enhance the consumer’s experience but also better manage risk?
As we innovate how can we ensure that we universally privilege the human experience above the technology itself?
If you’ve found this insightful at all (or entirely disagree), I’d love to hear from you. Drop a comment below or connect with me on LinkedIn!
