While doing Quantified Self public relations I lately meet the challenge of explaining how our lifes are going to change if everything in QS goes the way we want.
A lot of what I do in quantified self is about boring details. Things that don’t fit well into a big story.
Has anyone of you a good vision of a QS Utopia? Let’s imagine a day 20 years in the future and QS is successful.
How will that day be different, than the day’s we live at the moment?
For me, it’d be embedded monitoring links for optimised health measurements (blood pressure, cancer markers, fat% - esp. visceral, muscle-mass), with warning signals - auditory or visual (on a watch-type device?) - for when anything I was doing caused the monitored metrics to go outside specified limits. All this would updated in real-time both from my own monitoring and from the Cloud’s input from other’s info and research.
Each time you visit the doc, the doc will measure additional data that cannot be measured at home. These doctor-collected data, in addition to the data you’re already collecting, with your permission will be pooled with million of others in an anonymous database operated by a public health organization. From there, people will make decision and analysis on a global scale in real time data. You might even get paid for the data they’re collecting.
[quote]For me, it’d be embedded monitoring links for optimised health measurements (blood pressure, cancer markers, fat% - esp. visceral, muscle-mass), with warning signals - auditory or visual (on a watch-type device?) - for when anything I was doing caused the monitored metrics to go outside specified limits.[/quote]How would the day of the average person be different if they would own such a device?
What impact would it have on their lifes?
[quote]Each time you visit the doc, the doc will measure additional data that cannot be measured at home. These doctor-collected data, in addition to the data you’re already collecting, with your permission will be pooled with million of others in an anonymous database operated by a public health organization. From there, people will make decision and analysis on a global scale in real time data. You might even get paid for the data they’re collecting.
[/quote]If I tell that story to the average person, I don’t think I have given them a reason to care about the future of QS. There are a lot of stories about utopia’s that are far more persuasive.
Can we as QS people tell a story of a QS utopia that makes people go: “Wow, I want to live in that world!”?
To me, the valuable aspect of QS is looking independently at health questions. Taking a new look at how to be healthy. I believe there are lots of things about how to be healthy – how to sleep better, be in a better mood, have less acne, and on and on – that can be learned by people studying themselves but are not going to be learned by health researchers any time soon, because of their conflicts of interest. For example, dermatologists are always going to treat acne with drugs, never by figuring out the environmental causes. So the rest of us have to – QS encourages this. Likewise, it appears that psychiatrists are never going to figure out the environmental causes of depression. So the rest of us have to. A QS utopia is one in which people take far fewer drugs, have far less surgery, and so on, and are much happier and live much longer.
All this happens because our understanding of how to be healthy moves forward, instead of being stuck in a world of drugs and other expensive and dangerous treatments.
How about stopping a pandemic before it happens? Or you are patient 100B, or 201B, 122E in several medical trials going on in real time? Rigorous self quantification could make enrolling in a trial a lot easier. All it takes is a visit to the doctor.
I read through everyone’s responses and I’ve definitely got things to add. I always project to where we can go if all people (Yes, ALL people) dedicate to the effort.
I visualize human life - or for that matter all reality - as a collection of forces at their smallest units be that molecules, atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, strings or whatnots… I’m certainly not going to pretend I know all the details of that and nor will I simply embrace a story told by a physicist striving to better their career.
I envision a white canvas covering the Earth and we can paint whatever reality we wish onto it each day and into the future. All it takes is mobilizing the human machine to the right tasks; something that current leaders throughout the world are not doing.
It’s a world rich with the splendor of diverse technologies spliced into healthy cultures throughout the world. There are essentially no significant unknowns from the perspective of health and disease, so our lives are left creating magnificence with every moment sharing great experiences with each other, and continuously tuning up and improving the details of our daily lives such that we achieve greater and greater youthful longevity.
If a new pathogen or genetic disorder does pop out of nature (or let’s go ahead and include bio-weapons in this), then the human scientific machine is quickly rallied to make every observation needed to very quickly identify the path to ending the problem. Everyone is well educated and has a foundation in the simple truth of making accurate observations, recording the observations, sharing them, and helping to correlate them (but most importantly simply collecting them accurately). It’s an embedded part of our culture globally.
The world of covert technology is synergized with the world of public technology allowing a great burgeoning of creative development that the world has never before seen. This would need to be coupled, of course, with a very strong central intelligence structure that monitors technology development to ensure that dangerous development directions are responsibly engaged. First, and most important, we monitor ourselves because we are raised in a way that never causes radicalized behavior, and we have a keen responsibility to the task of ensuring safety, globally. But even under this condition people might unintentionally dabble in a dangerous technological direction and so a healthy monitoring structure must be in place.
I’ve certainly got a lot more to say than this so will add enhancements ongoing…
[quote=“Christian_Kleineidam, post:4, topic:459”]
[quote]For me, it’d be embedded monitoring links for optimised health measurements (blood pressure, cancer markers, fat% - esp. visceral, muscle-mass), with warning signals - auditory or visual (on a watch-type device?) - for when anything I was doing caused the monitored metrics to go outside specified limits.[/quote]How would the day of the average person be different if they would own such a device?
What impact would it have on their lifes?
Their life wold be different in that they would be sent information (readout on a watch/smart phone?): 1: which part of their signs were going in the ‘wrong’ direction’; 2: what to do about it. They would have the choice as to whether to bother.
The impact would be they would feel better and, assuming the science behind the advice was soundly based, they would live longer.
Anonymous collation off all the data would allow research to refine such guidance.