A copywriter, an art director, and an advertising account man are boarding a plane to go to a client presentation. Slightly implausibly, they open the overhead locker and a genie pops out. The genie says, “I’ve been stuck in that bloody overhead locker for 10 years. As a reward, I’ve only got three wishes, but I’ll give you one each.”
The genie turns first to the copywriter and says, “What’s your wish?”
“I think I’d like the life and the prose style of Hemingway. I’d like to live that life. I’d like to write that way. I can’t think of anything better.”
And poof, the copywriter disappears.
The genie turns to the art director, “What would you like?”
“It’s got to be Picasso. Think about it. The locations, the lifespan, the eye, the beauty. I’d like the life of Pablo Picasso.”
And poof, the art director disappears. And so the genie turns to the advertising account man and says, “What about you?”
He says, “I want those two guys back. I’ve got an important meeting in two and a half hours.”
In that joke, there’s a kind of analogy for the present day, which is that we’ve sometimes allowed the urgent to drown out the important. The short-term consideration drowns out the long-term consideration. But in the process, rather like that account man, we may also be ruining it for everybody else.
I’ll come to that thought, but I’ll start with something which I always share for a very good reason—I think it might save somebody’s life. The image below shows how extraordinarily subjective our perception of time is.
You’re all familiar with the thing on the inside. That’s a speedometer, denoted in miles per hour.
The thing around the outside is an interesting thing, which has only recently been, not invented, but publicized. It’s a paceometer, which shows how many minutes at that speed it will take you to go 10 miles. Assuming you’re going 10 miles at 10 miles an hour, it’ll take you an hour.
Now, most of you will have noticed something a bit strange about this, which is that whereas the numbers on the inside are completely regular, the numbers around the outside are anything but. If you’re going 10 miles, or 20 miles, or 30 miles, something in that order of magnitude, there’s a big time-saving by going at 30 miles an hour rather than 20 miles an hour. In fact, you’ll save a whole 10 minutes just by accelerating about 10 miles an hour.
On the other hand, if you accelerate from 80 miles an hour to 90 for example, or 70 to 80, you basically save a minute.
Some of you may have noticed this if you’ve got a GPS in your car. You’re driving on the motorway at 60, you realize you’re going to be five minutes late for an appointment, so you welly it. And after driving at an insanely fast and dangerous speed for about eight minutes, you suddenly realize your arrival time has only improved by one minute.
This is fascinating. Because to a physicist, they’re exactly the same. But when I present the information about time and distance in a different way, your reaction is now completely different. What it effectively says is: going quite a bit faster when you’re going slowly is a really big gain. Going very fast when you’re already going fast is the action of a dickhead.
Basically, once you hit a comfortable 65 or 70 on the road, don’t bother. That’s enough. It’s a waste of time because the risk you encounter—the risk you incur on yourself, the risk you effectively impose on other people by going any faster—is utterly pointless in terms of time saved.
So that’s a useful application of reframing time. Here’s a slightly more mercenary application. It fascinates me that all rail ticket–buying applications assume that you’re in a hurry. It’s odd. Maybe you want to save money instead. Below are two tickets from London to Exeter. On the left is a ticket from Waterloo to Exeter St Davids with a stop in Salisbury. It takes about an hour longer than the direct route from Paddington. It’s very scenic.
But in order to find that vastly cheaper ticket, you have to search Waterloo to Exter St Davids and type in “via Salisbury.” Unless you do that, the algorithm will not show you that ticket. Not because it isn’t cheaper—it’s a lot cheaper. Not because it isn’t nicer—it’s a lot nicer. But because it’s slower.
* * *
What happens when you give a load of engineers a brief? I always ask the question: What would’ve happened if you hadn’t given the brief for High Speed 2 to a load of engineering firms who immediately focused on speed, time, distance, capacity? What if you’d given the brief to Disney instead?
They would’ve said, “First of all, we’re going to rewrite the question. The right question for High Speed 2 is: How do we make the train journey between London and Manchester so enjoyable that people feel stupid going by car?” That’s the right question. It’s not about time and speed and distance. Those things only obliquely correlate with human behavior, with human preference.
What would’ve happened if you hadn’t given the brief to a load of engineering firms who immediately focused on speed, time, distance, capacity? What if you’d given the brief to Disney instead?
Why does that question never get asked? Because it’s an open-ended question. And businesspeople, governments, and politicians aren’t looking to solve problems; they’re looking to win arguments. And the way you win an argument is by pretending that what should be an open-ended question with many possible right answers isn’t one. Make it enjoyable, have free booze on the train, put Wi-Fi on the train, have a ball pit on the train for kids—these are the Disney answers. Those are multiple and involve what you might call human judgment. You can’t win an argument with those.
What you do is pretend this is a high school math problem with a single right answer, you solve for the right answer using high school math, and then nobody can argue with you because apparently you haven’t made a decision. You’ve simply followed the data.
This is a massive problem in decision-making. We try to close down the solution space of any problem in order to arrive at a single right answer that is difficult to argue with.
* * *
There are brilliant examples all over the place of people tweaking time subjectively. One of my favorites is the Uber map. It doesn’t change how long you wait for the taxi. It changes the quality of the waiting time by reducing uncertainty. If you look at human emotions, although humans might say, “I don’t like waiting for a taxi,” what makes them uneasy is the uncertainty of the arrival. It’s not actually the duration. Too often, we optimize for the numerical thing, time and speed. We’re not optimizing for the emotional state, which is disquiet or anxiety.
With advertising, you can rebrand time: “Good things come to those who wait.”
What was the one downside of Guinness? Bartenders hated it because it took sodding ages to pour. In fact, if you wanted to make bar staff hate you, you just put in a huge order for drinks and crisps and then end it with, “And a pint of Guinness.” And they think, “Shit. I could have been pouring that while you were telling me about the other crap.” Take a weakness, turn it into a strength.
We also regard time as a kind of commodity, as if it’s fungible, as if 10 blocks of 10 minutes is the same as one chunk of 100 minutes. In human terms, this is absolutely not true. “The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” That’s Charles Dickens. In other words, if you try and break up your day into lots of little chunks of time, your productivity is massively destroyed even though the time available is pretty much notionally the same.
One of the worst mistakes we ever made was making email instantaneous. We should have built in a two-hour buffer unless you flagged the email as time-sensitive or urgent. Why is that? Because now everybody has to check their email every 10 or 15 minutes on the off chance that someone has sent them a time-sensitive email. So the burden falls on the recipient (which means everybody) rather than the sender (which means one person) to sift the urgent messages from the important but not time-sensitive.
It has been a productivity disaster. A fundamental catastrophe. In fact, one of the greatest ways you can improve your productivity is by setting your server to only check for new emails every two to three hours.
* * *
There’s an extraordinary case of this bias toward time-saving, that faster must be better. Someone I know who is an expert at Transport for London found out that quite a lot of people, quite a lot of the time, actually enjoy commuting. They enjoy the commute home much more than the commute to work. Men enjoy it a bit more than women. (That’s because men are a bit like Sky Boxes—we’ve got a standby mode. We like a bit of staring. If you look at coarse fishing, 95% male. Why is that? Because coarse fishing is basically staring with equipment.)
Quite a lot of people enjoy their commute time. And there’s good behavioral evidence for this because economists have noticed that people live a bit further from work than they optimally should in order to create a chronological buffer between where they work and where they live. We like that decompression time.
So this person announces the research to the people responsible for transport modeling at Transport for London, and they say, “You must never tell anybody that. It’s absolutely wrong for you to say that people might actually enjoy a train ride.”
“Eh? But it’s true.”
“Maybe it’s true, but all our models that justify transport investment assume that travel time is always a disutility. In other words, the more time you spend in transit, the worse off you are. If you come along with fancy ideas suggesting that people may sometimes prefer slower to faster, it fucks up our whole model.”
So this is what’s happened to the world: optimization trumps human preference. The people who want to win the argument are effectively prepared to ignore human truths to preserve the integrity of the artificial model.
The people who want to win the argument are effectively prepared to ignore human truths to preserve the integrity of the artificial model.
The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies is a fantastic book, which argues that people create these models because if you can reduce decision-making to an algorithm, or a formula, or a process, or a procedure, you avoid the risk of blame. Computer says no, effectively.
Instinctively, people love to codify things, and make them numerical, and turn them into optimization problems with a single right answer. Because the second you acknowledge ambiguity, you now have to exercise choice. If you can pretend there’s no ambiguity, then you haven’t made a decision, you can’t be blamed, you can’t be held responsible. And what’s the first thing you remove if you want to remove ambiguity from a model? You remove human psychology, because human psychology, particularly around time, is massively ambiguous.
* * *
In the nineteenth century when they finally built a railway to California—I’m not making this up—people actually said, “Imagine how much leisure we’ll have if we can get to San Francisco in two and a half days rather than two weeks.” They imagined that your clients wouldn’t know that the railway existed, so you could pretend you’d gone by ship, spend 10 days playing golf, and then turn up by train.
Unfortunately, that information became widely known, and you were expected to turn up in two days. And this leads to a problem, I think, which bedevils many technologies and many behaviors. It starts as an option, then it becomes an obligation. We welcome the technology at first because it presents us with a choice. But then everybody else has to adopt the technology, and we suddenly realize we’re worse off than we were when we started.
You can see that with things like the fact that four in five motorists want to get rid of parking apps. It’s not just that parking apps were bad necessarily, it’s because they went from being an option to being an obligation, to a point where people are installing them in basement car parks where you have no chance of a mobile signal. That’s the kind of thing that happens. And when behaviors become universal, they affect everybody.
This is a shot of a concert. Now, you could argue that this urge to photograph everything prevents people from being in the moment. And you could say naively, “Well, that’s an individual choice. If you want to watch the concert, watch the concert. If you want film the concert, film the concert.” But there’s a problem there because even if you don’t want to film the concert, the behavior of everybody around you is fucking up the concert. And the weirder thing is that, when I researched this more, the people it most ruins concerts for are the performers, who say, “We used to be performing to a live crowd. Now it feels as if we’re just doing something to be sucked into people’s telephones.”
So when one person does something, it’s an option. It’s something that somebody does. When these things become more widespread, they morph from being alternative options to being social norms, conventions from which you have no escape.
There’s a great book about this by a German sociologist called Hartmut Rosa whose work is about social acceleration. He claims that, dating back to the Industrial Revolution, the acceleration of things has made us miserable because our choices are no longer sufficiently limited that we feel we can accomplish everything we want. We’ve created an acceleration and an explosion of choice, which will permanently leave us feeling fundamentally unsatisfied or under-optimized.
* * *
I often say that the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. I mentioned the Guinness advertisement. You can turn the slow pour of a Guinness into a virtue. You can take a long train journey and you can turn it into a benefit. Go on that train from Waterloo and pack a hamper—it’s a day out rather than a tedious journey.
The great thing about the human brain is it can process the same thing in two different ways. A mathematical model can never cope with that. So every mathematical model concerned with time will assume that faster is better. But there are certain things you shouldn’t try to accelerate. Sex, for example. “3.25 minutes, that’s my personal best.” Not a good idea.
I owe this insight to my colleague Colin Nimick, a brilliant copywriter at Ogilvy who said, “In New York, people speak fast. In the American South, they speak slowly. Both of them are a form of politeness, understood in a different way. In New York, you speak quickly because you respect the value of the other person’s time and you don’t want to take up too much of it. In the South, you speak slowly because you want to respect the person by showing how much of your own time you are prepared to give to them.”
These are two behaviors, which, depending on cultural context, are intended to attain the same end while being completely opposite. And I think human psychology is absolutely packed full of these things. A union of opposites.
We welcome the technology at first because it presents us with a choice. But then everybody else has to adopt the technology, and we suddenly realize we’re worse off than we were when we started.
If you read Influence by Robert Cialdini, what you realize is that many things are successfully sold by opposites. Everybody has one of these, so it must be good. Or: not many people have one of these, so it must be good. You can achieve the same emotional effect with opposite messages. There are two great ways to check into a hotel. One of them is totally automated, where you walk straight to the room and use your phone to unlock the door. The other one is where someone takes you up to the room and makes you a cup of tea. They’re both great check-in experiences. They’re completely opposite.
We’ve got to understand that sometimes as an option, self-checkouts are great. As an obligation, they’re bad—because sometimes the time spent in the process is where the value comes from. You can see this because people on a Saturday love nothing better than to shop in the most inefficient way possible. That’s basically what a farmer’s market is—let’s take a Tesco and reverse everything. You’ve got to go to seven different places to buy anything. You’ve got to have a chat with everybody you buy something from. It’s the mirror image, but we enjoy them both depending on the context.
We see this problem of time in the whole economy. This is William Baumol’s model of cost disease.
This basically explains the whole world since about 1920. Manufactured goods, where you can enjoy extraordinary efficiencies of production—you can compress the time and effort required to make something—have massively reduced in cost. Services, which are time-dependent, have become more and more expensive. If you think there’s a hell of a lot weird with the world that was completely different when you were a kid, this is why. Like the fact that a television is almost an impulse buy, but you agonize about getting childcare. In 1920, it was the other way around. Agatha Christie had three servants in her early life but couldn’t dream of being able to afford a car.
Now, here’s my point. Most of you, if you were students, wrote essays or something like that as undergraduates, right? Fairly confident to say that nobody’s actually kept them? Nobody re-reads them. In fact, the essays you wrote are totally worthless.
But the value wasn’t in the essay. What’s valuable is the effort you had to put in to produce the essay. Now, what AI essays do is they shortcut from the request to the delivery of the finished good and bypass the very part of the journey which is actually valuable—the time and effort you invest in constructing the essay in the first place.
Similarly, the valuable part of advertising is, to some extent, the process of producing it, not the advertising itself. Because it forces you to ask questions about a business which people mostly never get around to asking: What do we stand for? What’s our function? Who do we appeal to? Who’s our target audience? How do we present ourselves? How do we differentiate ourselves? How do we make ourselves look different and feel valuable to the people who encounter us?
There are things in life where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest.
I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest. And I don’t think we’re going to differentiate between those things. Because I think, like my friend at Transport for London, the automatic assumption is going to be that faster is better. We need to understand when we need to go slow.
So I’ll end with a very weird question: What does slow AI look like? We’ve automatically assumed that the way we interact with it is instantaneous. Are we sure that’s right? Would it be interesting to be able to say to an AI, Look, over the next three or four months, can you give me some ideas about holidays in Greece? Do we want to make that decision immediately? I don’t think we do. I think we want to see things, refine things, consider things. I think we want to mull them over. I think we want to discuss them.
The general assumption driven by these optimization models is always that faster is better. I think there are things we need to deliberately and consciously slow down for our own sanity and for our own productivity. If we don’t ask that question about what those things are, I think we’ll get things terribly, terribly wrong.
This essay was adapted from a talk given at Nudgestock 2024. View the talk here.
