Free The Naked Future by Patrick Tucker Page B

electrodermal conductance (i.e., how much electricity your skin is emitting), and in 2012 a company called Cogito, founded by two MIT grads working under a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant, created a platform that can detect—and predict—your mood levels based on tone and cadence of speech. It was intended to help mental health professionals working with returning vets better anticipate the rise of depression. One day, a future version of Cogito could make its way into an iPhone app capable of helping you anticipate and plan around your future feelings. It would telegraph your
emotional
future the way horoscopes are supposed to but would be based on data points accumulated through actual life, as opposed to unproven notions about the effects of planets. There are countless other examples of self-diagnostic apps waiting to be developed. Research from University of Maryland scholar Lisa M. Viser has shown that it’s possible to detect dementia in keystroke patterns, or simply based on changes in the way someone types over a period of weeks or months. (You can also detect whether someone’s been drinking at lunch.) 12 Bream Brush is a smart toothbrush that dialogues with the user’s smartphone via an app to keep a log of brushing time. The data can be shared with the user’s dentist, insurance provider, et cetera. 13
    Let’s assume one of these start-ups, or one not yet conceived, makes it to mainstream adoption. Once that occurs, the personal costs for self-quantification will have collapsed in just a few decades. In the 1980s, when Ray Kurzweil decided to flout the advice of his doctor, take himself off insulin, and begin keeping a detailed log of every meal he ate and what was in it, few other people would have had the patience, know-how, or inclination to attempt anything similar. The behavior at the time seemed positively bizarre. When Kurzweil first began his self-quantification experiments, the costs in terms of time and effort were a bit lower for him than they would be for anybody else, except Stephen Wolfram. Today, they’re joined by enterprising people such as Sacha Chua, and the numbers are growing.
    We are one app away from becoming Ray Kurzweil.
    Here’s what that app might look like to you in practice. You would give the program access to your biophysical signals, gleaned from your activity levels, mood analyzers, implants if you have any, e-mail and voice mail, et cetera. The program in turn would give you a rapidly evolving window into your future health. On any given day, you might receive a notification with the following warning: “Dear Patrick, as a result of that stress event you had a couple of weeks ago, the dizzy spell you complained of last night, and the fact that you’ve recently increased your daily alcohol consumption from two glasses of Merlot to four, your probability for stroke in the next year has just increased to 10 percent.”
    Naturally, if you received this message, you would act to avert this stroke before it happened, rendering the prediction incorrect, but still invaluable.
    Yet more cloud processing and an abundance of carefully collected personal data aren’t the magic ingredients that are going to bring the above scenario to life. Even with the right technology and a seamless interface or analytics engine to take the difficult work out of making usable predictions from your data, the most important component of your changing health picture is other people’s health data. Here’s the trade-off, the point where our outmoded ideas of privacy begin to get in the way of progress and better health.
The Network Is Your Doctor
    In June 2012 a group of researchers from MIT and Columbia created a system that can predict future illness. They call the system the Hierarchical Association Rule Model or HARM (a bizarre but at least memorable acronym for a medical algorithm). It can’t tell you what’s wrong