The Future of the Quantified Self

The "Quantified Self" was a movement that I helped start over 20 years ago. The idea was to use technology to measure and improve ourselves, our behavior, our health, our performance using mostly wearable bits that were becoming cheaper and cheaper. A worldwide movement blossomed, including a massive number of devices, methods, and aspects for personal information tracking, allowing individuals to collect data on things like their own allergy response, glucose fluctuation, athletic performance, mood variation, work output, and more. But there was a critical technology bottleneck, and many of the companies that sprang up because of this new movement are no longer around. Although it quickly became very easy to gather a huge corpus of data, the tools and intelligence to facilitate understanding and meaningful advice for improvement have been slower to develop. There is much less hype around the movement now, but there is still progress toward the original goal of personalization. And the scale and access to AI required to turn rafts of data into actionable insight will arrive. When it does, we will see benefits in the form of medications that are tailored for our particular selves at a particular moment in time. We will gain a deeper understanding of the correlations between our habits and efforts, and the quality of our personal relationships, our creative endeavors, our work performance, and the condition of our bodies. We will come to know and measure ourselves to such an extent that it will become not only our personal identity, but also our digital identity, our identification, accurate and daresay impossible to fake. Quantified Self gave us a rubric for pursuing an n of ourselves, and it will continue to inform the basis of how we think about and personalize everything around us.

[thobraa]

Panopticon for the rich to 'observe/track' so we can 'self-correct' our behaviour so it suits the owners.

[willjohnston]

KK, so glad you're doing these videos. It still seems a bit early to expect much, but definitely a future of personalized health information will be optimal. I think when the apple watch is coupled with some AI and an ability to see everything in our immediate environment (what we eat, meds we take, alcohol or drugs we consume, etc.) that we'll see some real breakthroughs and broad adoption. Probably still 20 years out though.