Watch yourself -- this could be the next big chapter in big-data.
Seriously. You thought the big payoff in big-data was in sifting through mountains of data generated by computer mouses, Web servers, mobile phones, and myriad other machines?
Or maybe you thought the big bucks were going to be made in scanning gigabyte streams of log data from IT infrastructure -- all those machines reporting all their processes, memory faults, and hardware glitches.
Not so, says Silicon Valley investor Dave Asprey. The real opportunity in big-data is going to be in -- are you ready? -- human flesh. States Asprey on his personal blog, Cloudy Words:
My thesis for investing in big-data has nothing to do with data from e-commerce or IT management systems. I believe that the volume of data we are generating now from machines absolutely pales in comparison to the volume of data we will soon be generating from our own bodies via new consumer grade medtech offerings.
That's right, folks, the human body, that sweaty, spongy, suffering mass of flesh, bones, and biorhythms is where big-data's really going to shine. "The human body is a blank slate," Asprey gushes. "There is limitless data to gather about electrical, chemical, and physiological states, as well as about behavior and location. That's not even including 24/7 audio or video."
Personally, I can't think of anything more stupefying than an hour's video, much less a 24-hour feed, about me, myself, and I. Talk about cures for insomnia.
But who am I to say? Unlike Asprey, I'm not down with the Quantified Self movement ("self-knowledge through numbers"), whose members delight in describing how they're not only recording every last brainwave, heartbeat, and jiggle of fat but also analyzing years of such data to better understand and "improve" their personal selves.
Data visualization is a big item with this crowd, but me, I don't particularly want to
see my brain waves, my temperature, my pulse, my heart rate variability, my galvanic skin resistance, the number of steps I take, what I eat, what I breathe, who I talked to, my hormone levels, how happy I was, my brain's efficiency at any time, and anything else I can think of.
And I don't want to store data about all that in "a very large, very secure, very friendly cloud analytics application" or to "share that data anonymously with any researcher who is doing something cool."
No, I'd prefer not to. But then, I am not Dave Asprey, the man behind Websites like Upgraded Self and Bulletproof Executive. There, the self-obssessed self-quantifier sells things like Upgraded Coffee. At $24 a pound, this is "the result of an obsessive pursuit to find the absolute highest performance [!] coffee beans on earth," beans that "make you feel noticeably better than anything else you'll find." (Great, I'm sure, for washing down Bulletproof's Upgraded Whey, "the finest grass-fed non-denatured whey protein concentrate, supercharged with powdered coconut MCT oil to boost energy levels and pharmaceutical-grade bovine serum albumin." The finest? A large claim.)
Asprey claims that 15 years of hacking his own biology (his words) have helped him to lose 100 lbs. of excess weight without exercise, "lower his biological age," and "upgrade his brain by >20 IQ points." (Yet, he still feels compelled to hold down a day job as a VP at security firm Trend Micro.)
Ultimately, I would bet that Asprey will be proved right. Big-data will find its way to the human body. Cheap physical sensors, personal area networks, and ever-smarter smartphones will soon be streaming gobs of human telemetrics up into the cloud, there to be stored, tracked, and analyzed, encouraging us all to reconceive our selves even more in terms of numbers and risk factors than we already do. I will resist as long as possible, but others, I'm sure, will make some big-money from this big-angle on big-data.
Feeling more wired than usual? Please share your thoughts... For now, alas, fingers and keyboard are still necessary.
John - I think we need moderation with all things. Technology is not going to make us any less human, but it does cause a few decisions by a person on how to deal with their humanity. As you'll notice most of the discussion here is regarding improvements in healthcare via technology. I'm not talking about wearing an antenna on my head so I can get satellite radio, I'm talking about recording data and researching the human body in a way that allows advancements in medicine to save lives.
You mention, "they like the idea of replacing their organs with man-made ones". What's wrong with this? My friend needed valves replaced in his heart or he would have most likely died due to an issue with blood flow. The surgeons used a plastic and metal alloy to construct valves to replace his existing valves. Is this going too far? Nope.
The technology coming out these days for the human body is very much enabling us to fight disease and help others prevent certain medical issues. The enhancements to technology for the human body over the past 15 years has been absolutely amazing and I applaud them for pushing boundaries.
If I want to record certain parts of my body somehow to correlate data or assist in research what's wrong with that? Why is it okay for an athlete to do it and not me? I don't mean sit there at work with wires hanging out of your shirt, but if there's a valid reason for me to do so I'm going to do it.
What about vaccinations against disease that you're given as a child? When that started I'm sure people were terrified that we were using technology in inappropriate ways too. The world is changing and if we have options to do certain things to assist us with our health, in moderation always, I say go for it.
Seriously, @scucci, what do you love about turning into an android? Doesn't it make you feel less human?
This is my point, that technology is starting to make people less human, living less in their own bodies and more through what some computer tells them. And the computer will increasingly be programmed to represent the views not of me as an autonomous agent but those of some corporation (see the 'body' in that word?) or some experts talking jargon and technical mumbo-jumbo that I don't and probably cannot understand. More and more, the medical system - all those experts with special and highly technical knowledge and language - gives us our bodies, tells us how to experience them, defines what we are about.
If you're training as an athlete, no problem, I suppose; wire yourself, measure your intakes and outputs, your heart rate, your calorie counts. But day to day? Do we really all want to be tethered to the Cloud 24/7? Just so our insurance company can keep an eye on us and find a loophole for not paying because we didn't stick with the program (whatever that program might be)? Do we really want to be subsumed into The Machine? Not me.
Now, clearly, what it is to be human - what that word means, in other words - is open to question and debate. Different eras and different cultures have each had their own peculiar ideas about this. We, in the highly-industrialized highly-market driven West, seem to be entering a new era of sorts, an era in which people say they love merging with the machine, they like being wired into remote computers in real-time, they like the idea of replacing their organs with man-made ones, etc. I just have to wonder if there shouldn't be some debate about possible limits to all this. Is there such a thing as going to far? How would we know, where might we draw the line?
To take an extreme example: In a certain very large Asian country, until very recently, prisoners facing execution have been kept alive long enough for their organs to be harvested and passed along for use by others. Then, these people are allowed to die. IUt seems to me that it's only if people - bodies, that is - are considered to be simply machines whose parts can be swapped in and out can such organ harvesting be deemed acceptable. Here in US, organs are harvested from people, too, under slightly different conditions. People are encouraged to donate their organs. Some people do, some don't. The line, in other words, can be drawn differently depending on one's view of things. The question is, I suppose, should we do things, use certain technologies, just because we can?
@Toby - If you think about it there are many different ways that this is happening right now. I've even read that certain pacemakers are now recording data, which is freaking awesome!!
Slowly but surely we're all turning into androids and I love it.
Yes, but this data can show which foods to stay away from, what excercise is helping the most and just be able to assist you with losing the weight..............if you wanted too.
Toby 5/1/2012 11:13:36 AM User Rank Management GUI
Personal Data
@John: This is all around us already. As a cyclist I track all rides with GPS and a Heart Rate monitor, also power output through the bike and a special wireless measurement hub plus calories burned. Runners and others do the same. This all gets onto sites like Strava and of course my own data store where I can analyze rides and athletic conditioning. It is just a matter of time before such monitoring becomes 24/7/365/100+
Taimoor Zubar 4/30/2012 9:21:49 PM User Rank Basic Coder
Re: Interesting concept
@John: From a technical perspective, scalability and security will certainly be key factors. These will need to be addressed if the initial model needs to be converted into a commercial scale.
Lol. You might not be concerned about it but these companies thrive on people who rely on such self-quantifiers. From shampoo ads to fairness creams to fitness tips, I've seen people here run after products for reasons totally unrelated but projected smartly thru ads. And in that willingness, they are ready to give data about themselves without much thought on the security and usage aspects.
John, a very valid concern. All patient records are personal and confidential but with the advent of new technologies and the various data providers and managers etc involved, the question of its safety arises. There have been quite a few examples of security breaches in hospitals, but even more dangerous are the marketeers of these other services/devices which are not necessarily related to health. Similar to the healthcare industry, I hope there is some code of conduct for them too.
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