[Visual: A woman walks into a room, sits, and smiles.] Amber Case: Hi, my name is Amber Case and I'm the founder of the Calm Tech Institute. In my opinion, what makes human intelligence unique and powerful is that we have way more tools than most other animals. And we know of lots of animals that use tools, but we're a really strange species in that we make many, many, many more tools than other animals do. --- [Visual: A person works on a wooden frame with tools. A silhouette of tools on a shelf.] Amber Case: And we have very flexible minds that adapt to the shape of the tools that we use pretty rapidly. And so very quickly we can go from being a carpenter working with wood to driving a car to putting on flippers and going into the ocean. --- [Visual: A person in a car waves. A person walks on a beach with a surfboard at sunset. An aerial view of a person walking on a beach. A person's feet walk in the wet sand.] Amber Case: And this makes us very cyborg-like. And how we work with that ability to extend into our tools or not is something that we can look at through through design. If we design our tools well, then we can do amazing things. And if we design them poorly and don't really care about the interface and how it works with our attention, then we can get ourselves in trouble and spend more time maintaining the tools or configuring the tools than we actually spend using them as pass through objects to to do the work that we actually want to do in the world. --- [Visual: A person cleans a camera in a darkroom. A person types on a phone in a dark room.] Amber Case: I think one of the ways that we can nurture human intelligence in society going forward is to have more self-reflection about how we're experiencing information. --- [Visual: A woman wrapped in a towel holds a phone, the light from the screen illuminating her face.] Amber Case: And I think one of the ways that we can nurture human intelligence is teach people first principles about how to build things, have some sort of craft or hobby that people have that they can build over time slowly, have small local contributions to their community and understand what's going on in the environment. --- [Visual: A person assembles wooden furniture. A person decorates a loaf of bread. An aerial view of a flock of sheep crossing a road in a town.] Amber Case: And also just understand if a piece of information is making you feel a certain way, why are you feeling that way and being able to understand that you could pick up your phone as a choice, not an automatic action. So a lot of it is seeing things that are invisible, the invisible habits and trying to figure out are these good or bad? What could they be swapped out with? And having a bit of mindfulness around how we're experiencing the world. --- [Visual: A person scrolls on a phone. A woman in an office at night looks at her phone. A man on a couch listens to music on a phone.] Amber Case: And I think the difference between being in a very digital world is that you might see a recipe on social media that's already done and you don't get to to experience the physical labor behind that to understand how it feels to produce. You're just seeing something with your eyes and your emotional system. And so the more you can get people to experience something, it doesn't totally matter what it is as long as it's something from the ground up to respect tools and to work alongside something to produce something over time. It kind of counters that idea of looking online and seeing everything that's already built because that isn't very good for self-confidence. If you're building something and it's not good but you're improving over time and it takes a long time, that's something where you learn to trust yourself and you learn to grow. But if you're seeing somebody online whose highlight reel has produced all these amazing things, you're only seeing the end point of all that invisible time that it took them to perfect that craft. And so I think it's this problem where seeing the beginning, seeing almost like the the documentary version or the longer drawn out thing, that becomes really important. And I think that's really hidden when you force everything into a two-dimensional screen with a bunch of pixels and a lot of sharp colors versus being re-attuned to being a little bored, not having as much stuff to do, staring out the window, and getting accustomed to being excited about the little tiny things. Like those those little tiny rituals and things in life I think are are the special moments, not all of the browsing some sort of social media and seeing all the excitement and then feeling bad that you aren't doing anything with your life or feeling depressed so you tap into it and emerging two and a half hours later and feeling like not so good. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to have what I like to call the revenge of the real to re-acclimatize to the places around us and the communities around us and what people are doing and do something about it, whether that's decorating your room or meeting somebody local. --- [Visual: A chef prepares a dish of pasta with shrimp and vegetables.] Amber Case: I think it's really important to focus on human intelligence, and the reason why is that that's what we have. When our systems fail, which they have to because things fail, things succumb to entropy, this is this is what happens. But you can build up intelligence over time and wisdom and if we put high quality information into our environments in a calm way, we can be informed of information without being cognitively overburdened, and we can make better decisions. As one of the people that wrote about calm technology early on, Mark Weiser would say, "We need smarter humans, not smarter technology," but the technology can work alongside us. We don't expect an a camera to be intelligent. We're not putting the intelligence in a camera or a guitar or a piano or a cooking utensil. We're using our intelligence and putting it into it and through the combination of the tool plus what we're thinking about, we can produce something unique and interesting, or we can produce something that just looks like everything else. It depends on what the goal is, right? But it's really important to think about this alongside intelligence where we're looking alongside tools, alongside nature, alongside machines, alongside people, versus having something do something for us because then we risk losing that memory. And I think the the memory of like how to host a dinner party or how to have a nice conversation. A lot of these things are, you know, the focus of a lot of YouTube videos where people are trying to bring this back. Like how do you decorate your room if it's a gray box? And how do you add dimensionality back to life? People know that there's something missing. You know, people don't just want to click a button and get food delivered by a limo for your burrito. They they really want something more. And I think if you don't have that, then you can get really depressed. And one of the ways to get that back is to to do things that are real. It just takes a lot more activation energy to do that. --- [Visual: A woman walks into a room and smiles.] Amber Case: I think there's a lot of inventions that only humans can come up with. I mean I, I think of the camera. There's a camera on me right now that you can't see, you just experience the content, but to think that you could take three-dimensional reality, turn it into two dimensions, and then put it into the future so somebody could see what happened in the past without using a writing tool is really bizarre. Just just writing for instance, like all of the weird things that we've invented, it's a bit of time travel, you know, refrigeration, clothes dryer, washer, electricity. I mean these are all really strange, alien inventions that we've created that uh, you know, the thing is I walk into a room and I think about this constantly, you know, that that you have like a a stream, like a river in a in a shower that you can turn on and then it is like the river is just stored in the pipes, you know, behind the walls and that when you touch a light switch, the electricity behind it could kill you but you just get to touch the light switch and turn on or off the lights without having to be an electrical engineer. I mean these are all just very magical experiences that because the human mind gets so accustomed to things, we just become absolutely normal. --- [Visual: A person mixes paint on a palette and begins painting on a canvas. A person sands a piece of wood. A woman leans against a wall under a spotlight.] Amber Case: I think there's definitely a threat to our creativity in that I think all humans are inherently creative and that doesn't mean you can paint a perfect picture, it just means that people want to make stuff. And when they make stuff, I think that people are a bit happier than if they don't make stuff. But it's this creative need that I think everybody has and when they consume versus we when we create and that gets out of balance, we can feel really depressed, but we might not remember what we're missing because we're so far away from making something. And I think everybody has their own creative way of getting their thoughts out, but they might not know what the best thing is for them. I mean, for some people it might be sports, for some people it might be going on a camping trip or going on a walk and getting some perspective. But many people I don't think have gotten to develop that right now, or they've forgotten it because it's just so easy to pick up a phone. And so I'm hoping that anybody watching this video might start to remember what is it that gives you more restorative time than sucks your time away and to figure out what that is and start to spend just a little bit of time doing that instead of letting your time be used by somebody else. --- [On-screen text: reMarkable remarkable.com]