There are lots of ways to introduce me. Simon did a very gracious and lovely one, thank you. I realize that the other way to introduce myself is also to say, again in the context of this building that I am the daughter of an anthropologist. I was raised by anthropologists. I was babysat by Derrick Friedman and I lived to tell the tale. Roger Keesing introduced me to drip coffee and chocolate chip cookies, things for which I remain grateful. I grew up in the ANU, and so the Australian National University in the 1970s and 1980s, while my mother was doing her fieldwork first in Indonesia and then in central and northern Australia.

I spent most of my early childhood living in Aboriginal communities in central and northern Australia with Aboriginal people who remembered the country before white fellows came, and who at the drop of a hat would take my brother and I out of the settlement and onto their country and teach us all of the really important lessons. I learned about what it is that informs Aboriginal spirituality and Aboriginal thinking, but I also learned a series of deeply pragmatic things like how to get water out of frogs—something that I have yet to actually exercise! It is never necessary in London. I also know the difference between a snake hole and a lizard hole and which one you should put your hand down for dinner.

I had a childhood where I was surrounded by anthropologists. My mother jokes that I was kicked out of my first anthropology class when I was four-and-a-half. It turned out that I could work out what a matrilateral cross-cousin marriage looked like and none of the grownups could. I was consigned to the corridor for the rest of my mother’s first semester of anthropology, but it means that people like Evans-Pritchard and Boas and Frasier and Levi Strauss were the names that decorated my childhood. It was an unexpected thing that brought me to the technology industry. Many of you know that that was never my intention. I thought that I would be a professor. I thought that I would teach the things that I had worked on—Native American studies, feminist theory, query theory, a bit of critical race theory thrown in for fun and good measure. As one can imagine, that hardly predisposes one to end off in a tech field.

In true Australian fashion, and I know that there is at least one other Australia in the room—Aaron where are you? Thank you. Oh, there may be others, but in true Australian fashion I met a man in a bar in Palo Alto in 1998 and he changed my life. For Americans I usually need to hasten to add that I did not marry him, nor have a sexual relationship with him, nor procreate with him, because that is often the understanding of changing one’s life in that context.Instead he asked me what turned out to be an incredibly important question. He said to me, “What do you do?” I told him that I was an anthropologist. He said, “What’s that?” I had had at least one beer, and so I told him what that was with some enthusiasm and vigor. He said to me, “What do you do with that then?” I said that I was a professor at Stanford, which was true. He said, “Huh.” There was kind of a pause which was kind of unexpected, right? Usually, a professor at Stanford stops most conversations in Silicon Valley. He said, “But you could do more.” I was kind of like what on earth does that mean? It was an extraordinary moment to realize what more might look like.

Ultimately, it led me to join Intel where I have now been for 15 years, as of last Monday. In my time at Intel, I have had the experience of working with a number of people in this room. It is nice to see many of you again. My job there has always been about two things. One of them has been to do the work that many of us in this room do—classic ethnographic research and bring the insights of that research into the company and use it to shape product direction, innovation—and then to shape the work that Intel does.But there is a second part of my job, and ultimately I think in recent years it has become the more important part of my job, which is also having a conversation about technology. It is not just about what it is that we value as human beings, but how it is that we make sense of technology. Increasingly, I think that part of the job of those of us who have the backgrounds that most of us in this room do—at least in the technology field but I would argue more broadly—is that we have a responsibility to shape the conversation in which we talk about the future; in which we talk about the work that technology does, and in which we talk about things like big data. Tricia did a lovely job of unpacking that earlier this week. For me that work of thinking about the stories we tell, it is about informing them through, for me, ethnography and anthropological theory but also about taking kind of a stand about what the future stories are that we want to tell.

For me, that is about this notion of how we chat and unpack the sociotechnical imagination. William Gibson, a really quite well-known science fiction author had this piece on Twitter two days ago, which I thought was a stunning line. He said that he woke up from a dream that seemed to have taken place entirely in Google Maps street view. One wonders if he meant a dream or a nightmare, but we all know what that feels like, right?

There is something here about what it means to have a man whose work frankly has shaped a whole lot of our imaginings of technology over the last thirty years—to admit that he too is being shaped by the technology around him and that it influences him. It is that dialectic between the technology; the ways that we talk about it; the way that it infectively becomes a reinforcing circle, that for me is what I want to unpack here. Frankly, that is I find something I cannot stop thinking about and talking about.

This really came home to me explicitly two years ago. Now, I get to talk about a Furby in the Royal Institute! It may not ever be any better than that, which is sort of sad. Two years ago this video turned up on YouTube. It is a Furby—most of you remember those, right—yes, talking about Apple Siri. This was done when the Apple Siri launched. I know, splendid. It is 47 seconds long. It is the best bit of video in history as far as I am concerned. The Furby does what Furbies do. I have discovered that given my cold, I kind of actually make the Furby noise. But you know when the Furby goes “eh, eh, eh, eh, eh?” Yes, the Furby does that and the Siri says, “Would you like me to call Shell Oil?” The Furby then blinks and wiggles her ears and goes la, la, la, la, la.” The Siri says, “I cannot find Graham in your address book.” It’s 47 seconds of recursive splendor, right?

I watched this a number of times unable to work out why I was so smitten with it. Slowly it dawned on me that part of what was fascinating about this was precisely the work it was doing of telling a story about our relationships with technology. I realize that it in fact was not just telling a story, but it was playing out three distinct and discrete stories of genealogies of technology. The first one is an obvious one. It’s a kinship diagram. This is grandpa talking technology talking to baby talking technology. Frankly, the Furby was one of the first digital technologies that talked—you know, not particularly well or informatively, but it did talk. And the serious clue then the most recent generation. One, it was simply kinship, right? A relationship of talking things.

The second thing I realized about it is that this is also a kinship diagram in the more archeological sense, so a tree of humanity kind of diagram where effectively what you have is the Neanderthal talking to Homo sapiens, because there were series of kind of significant technical evolutions that are happening here—where these are very different objects in a lineage that is not a straightforward relationship. Part of what it is here is that there is an evolution happening. That for me turned out to be really important. The evolution here is from a talking object to a talking and listening object. The fact that what the Siri proposes to do, as incompletely as it does to listen, suggests a complete shift in what it means to have objects with voice. Suddenly it is not just talking; it is also listening. I got unnecessarily excited about this, I have to say. I subjected this to many of my colleagues at Intel with a great deal of again, possibly overexcited enthusiasm. I kept saying to them, “I don’t think that you understand.” This is this really important moment. If objects can listen to us, genuinely listen to us and respond to us, it suggests and signals to me that we are moving from human-computer interaction to human-computer relationships.

The relational piece is really interesting. The promise of listening is the promise of more than just talking. It is the promise potentially of care, of attention, of reciprocity. Many things are built into that. I said this to the engineers with whom I work quite closely, and to a person they all said to me, “No.” I’m like what do mean, no? They’re like listen, if the machine can listen to us and then talk to us and we are going to have a relationship with it—you know what happens next? I’m like yes, it’s going to be great! Nurture, care, reciprocity, trust. They are like no, death. What do you mean, death? They’re like listen, if they are capable of having a relationship with us, the next thing they’ll do is they will kill us. Somehow my seemingly rational engineers had gone from this happy Furbies to this voice recognition technology to this. I was like wow, and they had done it like that!

I suddenly realized that this single piece of video was actually telling a different story. The genealogy here, the sociotechnical imagination that it was implicating was actually one of extraordinary fear. The notion of having devices in our lives that knew us, that could converse with us, that might be on a par with us—was a narrative that instantly evoked fear. I was like where the hell does that come from?

What I want to do now is walk you through for me how I think we make sense of where that fear comes from, about why one of the threads we have for talking about our relationships for technology is a thread riven through with fear. It starts with this: it starts with the death of magic, which commences early in the 1500s in the West. It abruptly comes to an end in 1636, or maybe early 1637 depending on whom you are listening to.

It is all tied up with the death of what I want to call here magic. I mean it in the classic anthropological sense. I mean, magical thinking. I mean the things that you cannot see, the things that are unexplained, and a desire for there to be things that are invisible—and at some level wonderful and terrifying all at the same time.

The first thing that happens starting in many different places and many different times, but really kind of increasing its acceleration in the 12th and 13th centuries is the appearance of abilities to start thinking about time—not as a discrete, tacit, fluid, localized object—but a thing that could be monitored and measured. That starts to happen with the appearance of mechanized clocks that started to be things that you could put on display in large public places; the effective creation of time as a measure; as a thing that had 24 increments that could be recorded and notified, which really starts to happen in the 1300s and 1400s in Europe.

Mostly, those clocks appear first in religious settings. Unsurprisingly, they become a way of organizing religious time—time to pray, time for rest, time to pray again. First, there are clock towers in those churches. The bells ring and many of us recognize those sounds. They move from churches into public squares, where again the clocks start to demarcate time. We start to have things that happen at certain times of the day. If you are in a town anywhere in most of Europe by the 1400 and 1500s, if you were in sight of that town, you could hear the clock going. You knew what the time was by the sound in the air.

By the middle of the 1500s however, a really important transition happened. It has to do with this: there was the creation of the watch with an ability to carry time with you. You no longer needed to be inside of a church. You no longer needed to be in a town hall. Time followed you. Wherever you went, you could pull time out of your pocket and know what the time was. We now move from 1530 into the early 1600s where firstly, you can imagine that it is only people with real wealth who have these objects. The distribution of them follows the distribution of many other objects. Once one person has them, other people could be near the person who has them and are also starting to be regulated by this thing called time. The first part of the death of magic is that suddenly the world gets structured and divided and measured, and that measurement is carried with us and written on our bodies.

The second thing that happens starting in 1607, really in 1608, though, depending on where you sit in Europe you will argue this timeline—Galileo capitalizes on some work that was done in a few other places in Europe, and is known to have quote, unquote “invented” the telescope. What does the telescope let us do effectively? It puts us in our place in the world. I mean, this is the moment when we discover that the earth is not the center of the universe. This didn’t necessarily go terribly well for Galileo. We know that took a while to sort that one out, and it was probably not a good look for him.

But the decentering of a theory that said the earth was in the middle of everything, the appearance of effectively the way we now understand our universe—that we are a piece of a much larger puzzle. It is the second hugely important thing. Suddenly, the earth is not the center of everything. It is the piece of a much larger puzzle.

Galileo’s work with lenses makes possible a third really important thing in the early 1600s, that also starts to change the way that we start to think about the world. It is the invention of the microscope. Sometime in the 1620s and 1630s, there were a number of these floating around Europe. Galileo is again implicated in the invention of this, or at least its naming and its first real uses. He takes a telescope, inverts it, and uses it to inspect the closest anyone had ever seen at that point of the pieces of an insect. He started to realize that insects had divisible, knowable, manageable, observable pieces. The microscope is used throughout the 1600s to start to reveal that all of these objects around us actually have visible and manageable pieces that can be understood that are workable. All of these things that seemed to be in some ways operating through things that we did not understand, you could now see them.

Time gets structured. Space gets structured, and the world around us now has a whole set of ways where we see it completely differently. Of course, in 1636-1637, Descartes puts forward what has to be the single most important, in some ways, proposition for the commencement of the scientific revolution. He declares that “I think, therefore I am.” Effectively, what makes us human is our cognitive capacity. It is our capacity for rational thinking and rational thought.

There are lots of ways of putting these things together, but for me the watch, the microscope, the telescope, and this moment all do one thing and one thing only—they effectively kill magic. They also at a different level, and I don’t mean this as a provocation although it will sound like it, but they effectively also kill God. This is the beginning of the scientific revolution. This is the beginning of a very particular move in the post-Enlightenment tradition in the West—explicitly—to have a notion about the way that the world works where we now have the tools to inspect it at every level from the macro to the micro. It becomes about all the things that we can see and make sense of, and it becomes about the ordering of the world. Think of all the typologies that followed with lots of institutionalizing of order and of rigor, the things that appeared magical are now knowable. They become phenomena. There in fact becomes effectively a scientific enterprise explicitly designed to go work out those things that appeared as magic, to go and work out what the magic was. All of it could be written and made into a rigorous set of rules about the world, and so you have the death of magic.

Unsurprisingly, you have simultaneously the birth of fear. A fear that today means we think anything intelligent that is not us, could kill us, which tells us something again about Descartes here. When Descartes says, “I think, therefore I am,” what he sets up in the Western tradition is that it is our cognitive capacity that makes us special. As soon as anything else has cognitive capacity, nothing good can come of it apparently, because it will kill you. How did we get here? Well, it is actually quite simple. It is good that I can say that. It is quite simple and it starts with this.

It turns out that in the 1600s and in the early 1700s, the watchmakers of Europe suffering from a problem that is not unfamiliar to those of us who work in the tech industry. They had sold as many watches and clocks to as many people as they possibly could. They had basically maxed out their marketplace. There were a lot of them because it was a good trade to be in, and they had lots of watch parts. They were left going well, basically sh—t, we have made all the watches and clocks there are. What do we do now? It turns out that once you know how to make small mechanical things, you can do a lot with it.