Your body is your password. Your digital identity is you. All the tools that VR is exploiting, all the ways it needs to capture your movements, to follow your eyes, to decipher your emotions, to encapsulate you as much as possible so you can be transported into another realm and believe you were there—all these interactions will be unique to you, and therefore proof of you. One of the recurring surprises in the field of biometrics—the science behind the sensors that track your body—is that almost everything that we can measure has a personally unique fingerprint. Your heartbeat is unique. Your gait when you walk is unique. Your typing rhythm on a keyboard is distinctive. What words you use most frequently. How you sit. Your blinks. Of course, your voice. When these are combined, they fuse into a metapattern that almost can’t be faked. Indeed, that’s how we identify people in the real world. If I were to meet you and was asked if we had met before, my subconscious mind would churn through a spectrum of subtle attributes—voice, face, body, style, mannerisms, bearing—before aggregating them into a recognition or not. In the technological world, we’ll come to inspect a person with nearly the same spectrum of metrics. The system will check out a candidate’s attributes. Do the pulse, breathing, heart rate, voice, face, iris, expressions, and dozens of other imperceptible biological signatures match who (or what) they claim? Our interactions will become our password.
Degrees of interaction are rising, and will continue to increase. Yet simple noninteractive things, such as a wooden-handled hammer, will endure. Still, anything that can interact, including a smart hammer, will become more valuable in our interactive society. But high interactivity comes at a cost. Interacting demands skills, coordination, experience, and education. Embedded into our technology and cultivated in ourselves. All the more so because we have only begun to invent novel ways to interact. The future of technology resides, in large part, in the discovery of new interactions. In the coming 30 years, anything that is not intensely interactive will be considered broken.
10 TRACKING
We are opaque to ourselves and need all the help we can get to decipher who we are. One modern aid is self-measurement. But the noble pursuit of unmasking our hidden nature with self-measurement has a short history. Until recently it took an especially dedicated person to find a way to measure themselves without fooling themselves. Scientific self-tracking was expensive, troublesome, and limited. But in the last few years extremely tiny digital sensors that cost a few pennies have made recording parameters so easy (just click a button), and the varieties of parameters so vast, that almost anyone can now measure a thousand different aspects of themselves. Already these self-experiments have started to change our ideas of medicine, health, and human behavior.
Digital magic has shrunk devices such as thermometers, heart rate monitors, motion trackers, brain wave detectors, and hundreds of other complex medical appliances to the size of words on this page. A few are shrinking to the size of the period following this sentence. These macroscopic measurers can be inserted into watches, clothes, spectacles, or phones, or inexpensively dispersed in our rooms, cars, offices, and public spaces.
In the spring of 2007 I was hiking with Alan Greene, a doctor friend of mine, in the overgrown hills behind my house in northern California. As we slowly climbed up the dirt path to the summit, we discussed a recent innovation: a tiny electronic pedometer that slipped into the laces of a shoe to record each step, then saved the data to an iPod for later analysis. We could use this tiny device to count the calories as we climbed and to track our exercise patterns over time. We began to catalog other available ways to measure our activities. A week later, I took the same hike with Gary Wolf, a writer for Wired magazine, who was curious about the social implications of these emerging self-tracking devices. There were only a dozen existing ones, but we both could see clearly that tracking technology would explode as sensors steadily got smaller. What to call this cultural drift? Gary pointed out that by relying on numbers instead of words we were constructing a “quantified self.” So in June 2007 Gary and I announced on the internets that we would host a “Quantified Self” Meetup, open to absolutely anyone who thought they were quantifying themselves. We left the definition wide open to see who would show up. More than 20 people arrived at my studio in Pacifica, California, for this first event.
The diversity of what they were tracking astounded us: They measured their diet, fitness, sleep patterns, moods, blood factors, genes, location, and so on in quantifiable units. Some were making their own devices. One guy had been self-tracking for five years in order to maximize his strength, stamina, concentration, and productivity. He was using self-tracking in ways we had not imagined. Today there are 200 Quantified Self Meetup groups around the world, with 50,000 members. And every month, without fail, for eight years, someone at a Quantified Self meeting has demo’d an ingenious new way to track an aspect of their life that seemed unlikely or impossible a moment before. A few individuals stand out for their extreme habits. But what seems extreme today will soon become the new normal.
Computer scientist Larry Smarr tracks about a hundred health parameters on a daily basis, including his skin temperature and galvanic skin response. Every month he sequences the microbial makeup of his excrement, which mirrors the makeup of his gut microfauna, which is fast becoming one of the most promising frontiers in medicine. Equipped with this flow of data, and with a massive amount of amateur medical sleuthing, Smarr self-diagnosed the onset of Crohn’s disease, or ulcerative colitis, in his own body, before he or his doctors noticed any symptoms. Surgery later confirmed his self-tracking.
Stephen Wolfram is the genius behind Mathematica, a clever software app that is a math processor (instead of a word processor). Being a numbers guy, Wolfram applied his numeracy to the 1.7 million files he archived about his life. He processed all his outgoing and incoming email for 25 years. He captured every keystroke for 13 years, logged all his phone calls, his steps, his room-to-room motion in his home/office, and his GPS location outside his house. He tracked how many edits he made while writing his books and papers. Using his own Mathematica program, he turned his self-tracking into a “personal analytics” engine, which illuminated patterns in his routines over several decades. Some patterns were subtle enough, such as the hours when he is most productive, that he had not detected them until he analyzed his own data.
Nicholas Felton is a designer who has also tracked and analyzed all of his emails, messages, Facebook and Twitter postings, phone calls, and travel for the past five years. Every year he generates an annual report in which he visualizes the previous year’s data findings. In 2013 he concluded that he was productive on average 49 percent of the time, but most productive on Wednesdays, when he was 57 percent productive. At any given moment there is a 43 percent chance he is alone. He spent a third of his life (32 percent) sleeping. He used this quantitative review to help him “do a better job,” including remembering the names of people he met.