Build Stuff'15 Ukraine

"The Turing Test will be passed by 2020. Not by an advanced artificial intelligence, but by a human being who is stupider than their own phone" 

Did you read about the man who drove his car into a lake because Google Maps told him to? Or the woman who put her phone into "airplane mode" and threw it out of a window? Does Google ever freak you out by showing you stuff it's not supposed to know about?

Software and smart devices are changing the world beyond recognition, and all too often, the human beings who create it are struggling to keep up. We create devices that can make crystal-clear hi-def video calls to anywhere in the world, and then laugh at someone who microwaves their iPhone because they read online that it would charge the battery. You spend $800 on a tablet computer that doesn't even include an instruction manual - and then your three-year-old kid finds a shortcut for playing Peppa Pig videos that you didn't know existed. At the other end of the scale, we're building huge distributed systems too complicated for any human to understand. Decisions that affect our lives - the pages that show up in our search results; the people we meet on Tinder; the price we pay for car insurance - are being delegated to algorithms so sophisticated that nobody can explain why a particular result happened, or predict whether it will happen again.

So what can we do about it? As developers, how do we build systems that don't make people feel stupid? How do we empower users to make decisions and apply common sense in a world where tomorrow's technology is indistinguishable from yesterday's magic?

In this session, we'll talk about auto-correct, waterproof smart phones, cognitive bias, Markov chains, Windows 10, self-driving cars, chaos theory, the psychology of risk, Monty Hall, user experience design, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and why Facebook is still showing you adverts for cheap flights to Lithuania even though you're already here.