The Naked Future (6 page)

A flat tire on a Monday at 10
A.M
. isn't actually random, according to the strict definition of the word. We just don't yet know how to model it. A certain type of person, someone who wears his tires thin without replacing them, someone who drives through an area with lots of hazards, et cetera, is more likely to suffer a flat every few months than is someone who doesn't take her car out as often, or to the same places, or who replaces her tires religiously. Sadilek's system doesn't explain why some people have more flats, but it does find some people are more prone to these anomalies than others. When you have a data set with enough points, even outliers can reveal a pattern.

I asked Sadilek about how people respond to his work on the Far Out model when he tells them about it. Researchers, by and large, are intrigued and appreciate it. Folks outside the field, many of whom carry a GPS tracker in their pocket without ever realizing it, have a different reaction.

“A small amount of people always worry about the privacy implications of this,” he answered the way a doctor may discuss the unfortunate symptoms of a chronic but medically interesting condition, as in,
Of course you will experience night terrors and eye
bleeding; these are now just a part of your life.
The prescription: take this insight and modulate your behavior. “Now that you know, looking at our papers, what can be done when you tweet about your stuff,” he told me. But it was clear he didn't actually
want
people to tweet less, to become less predictable. He just wanted them to feel differently about it, to be as excited about this discovery as he was when he made it. This speaks to an important point: the idea of someone else, a government body, a company, a stalker, knowing with more than 80 percent certainty where you will be a year and a half into your future sounds like a scenario from dystopian science fiction. Yet the ability to predict
your own
future location that far in advance qualifies as a superpower. Sadilek's breakthrough brings that power closer to reality for more people.

Here's an easy step you can take if your location predictability level worries you: simply turn off the geo-location feature on your smartphone unless you really need it, and certainly limit the number of apps that have access to your location data (then watch your battery life magically regain its youth). But make no mistake: while you can turn down the signal that you're sending out, that doesn't actually make you less predictable; it just makes your predictability level harder to detect. Your future is still naked even if no one has noticed yet.

As we watched the people below us from the Toronto Sheraton, Sadilek put it slightly differently: “Everybody needs a schedule that they can fixate on, otherwise they get really unhappy. If you live this random life, you always are so bombarded with new signals and craziness . . . A random person who walks around with a coin and flips it and then decides based on the outcome, that guy is going to have a horrible life.”

Your life pattern is you. It's what you do, with whom, and where. It's the content that fills the vessel of your existence. A few decades ago this content was private, but also forgettable, a stream of experience that flowed into oblivion. It's now less private and the stream flows to someone's server.

Privacy hasn't diminished in
importance
simply because we're
adding connections, embedding new sensing capabilities into our physical world, and using mobile technology in new ways. But our discussion of privacy seems to have remained in a static state of fretting for decades. One of the best defenses against potential misuse is to personally get hold of your data. This sounds like a chore because it is. We should demand that this become much easier in the years ahead than it is today. Your data, and what it says about your future, belongs to you first and foremost.

If you've got a bit of spare time, sign up to receive updates from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, subscribe to the ACLU's
Free Future
blog RSS feed, and when these organizations plead at the end of the year for funds, maybe send them a check. Just know that even the ACLU can't change the simple fact that privacy isn't what it was, and it's not what we imagine it to be. If we choose to give up the ghost, reconcile ourselves to the reality of modern interconnectedness, of greater visibility, of transparency, and thus of predictability, the question becomes: What's the upside to the fact that we create data in everything we do, and that makes us predictable? What can we predict about ourselves? What's the right way to live in the open?

The Signal from Within

THE
year is 2009. The setting is a television station in Washington, D.C. I'm about to do an interview with CBS correspondent Tracy Smith on how technology is going to change life in the coming decades. It should be a simple Q&A, but this is television and I've convinced myself I can't go to this interview without a prop, a physical relic from the future. I can pick maybe one object to represent the most important trend that will change life on this planet and whatever I pick has to fit in my pocket. Two days before my interview I start to panic. What the hell kind of world-changing, futuristic invention fits in your pocket?

I remember a story I had written for the
Futurist
the previous month about a California start-up that was manufacturing an interesting new health product, not a pill or some exercise contraption but a 2-GHz RFID clothes clip that could record calorie burn, sleep, and other biophysical signals. Such devices weren't exactly uncommon in 2009 but unlike a standard pedometer, this device let the user upload stats directly to a Web site for automatic tracking and potential sharing with doctors, family, friends, or even the public.

The gadget spoke to some of the novel ways people would soon be interfacing with computers outside the act of typing. The idea of consumers buying a device to track and publicly broadcast the sort of signals that would normally only be collected in a hospital setting suggested the emergence of an entirely new product class.
Normal
was shifting and this device was the evidence. It had the makings of a great prop for a future-themed TV bit.

In the segment that eventually aired, I'm about thirty pounds overweight with an Irish double chin. I hold the device up to the camera and reveal how the gadget will allow users to monitor and broadcast their activity levels. A voice-over reads, “Our descendants might wear their heart rates on their sleeves with a device like this, the Fitbit
.”

I know, I know.
Descendants?
Were we really that timid in 2009?

Since its launch, Fitbit has received considerable media coverage in the
New York Times
,
Time
magazine,
and others. Not all of the publicity has been positive. In 2011, a tech blogger pointed out that many users who were confused or ignorant of the device's privacy settings were inadvertently sharing the data details of their sexual activity, prompting
Forbes
writer Kashmir Hill to observe that sex, “even at its most ‘difficult' . . . doesn't burn nearly as many calories as the elliptical at the gym.”
¹

The market for devices such as the Fitbit and its close cousins such as RunKeeper and various smart scales, armbands, and clips has expanded tremendously in the last decade. According to a recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life survey, one in five Americans use some sort of device to track health stats for either themselves or someone else.
²
These gadgets have become recognizable symbols of one of the most interesting health movements since cutting out carbs: Quantified Self (QS).

QS is either “sort of mainstream, now” according to movement cofounder and
Wired
maverick Kevin Kelly
³
or an unfortunate obsession afflicting certain young people “who like to record and share every aspect of their lives no matter how inconsequential,” according to
Vanity Fair
's Graydon Carter.
⁴
At the
Quantified Self
blog, the community's Plymouth Rock,
Wired
editor and movement leader Gary Wolf describes QS as “a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in self-knowledge through self-tracking. We exchange information about our personal projects, the tools we use, tips we've gleaned, [and] lessons we've learned.” While a lot of the data that self-trackers collect are directly related to health, much of it isn't. Any measurable behavior or experience can be part of a self-tracking regimen.

One young woman I met who embodies this movement is Sacha Chua. Here's what self-knowledge through quantification looks like: when Chua visits a clothing Web site she is impervious to impulse purchases. She can predict with statistical certainty which outfits and garments she is more likely to wear and which she is not. She knows how long she sleeps during a night, her average resting heart rate, and whom she is most likely to talk to on a given day (her mother is number two—a fact her mother hates). She has a remarkably clear idea of how long she is likely to spend on any given task. When she chooses to, she can determine—down to the minute—how wind speed and direction will slow her bike ride to work.

By day, she's a freelance technical consultant and boasts an impressive résumé with a master's degree in human-computer interaction and loads of Fortune 500 clients. By night, she's one of the cofounders of Quantified Self Toronto and editor of
Living an Awesome Life
, a blog in which she documents her experiments and gives tips and advice to interested novices.

We meet at a bar with several other members of her group. Though we are at an establishment that serves liquor she orders only water, which I find almost obscene. “I don't drink anything that might affect my brain,” she explains. She also doesn't do caffeine. “I'm too excited already. They would have to scrape me off the ceiling.”

When the subject hits upon her self-quant projects, she becomes talkative and bubbly, like a child at a party. Unlike Kelly, she doesn't feel socially encouraged to track the ins and outs of her life on this planet. She does it expertly, but knows this is not something that will find sympathy or interest in Toronto, Ontario. “Some people
think it's a bit obsessive-compulsive, this record keeping,” she admits. Chua doesn't match the profile of someone hobbled by a neurotic condition like obsessive-compulsive disorder. She isn't a dysfunctional person. Quite the opposite. She's
hyper
functional. She's happy and confident and seems more
awake
than regular folk—in the Buddhist sense of the term; not wired, just present.

I ask her if she has a particular goal that's she's striving to achieve through self-tracking. In fact, she says, she has thousands of small goals, each built around optimization. She wants to get better at commuting, better at making time for her husband and her child; she simply wants to use data and the technologies that make data generation easy to get closer to a scientifically perfect existence.

“It's the pursuit of relentless improvement,” she says. “It's compounding interest in life.”

The practice of collecting data about groups for public purposes has been around since the Babylonians began taking census surveys in 4000
BC
. But collecting data about oneself hasn't caught on. There's a very simple reason for this: cost versus benefit. When a nation, state, or kingdom conducts a survey on national health or the activities of its citizens, the cost is shared across the public. When a corporation decides it wants to collect every piece of information that may ever be recorded by any machine anywhere, they, too, have the option of first estimating the potential value of the data they're seeking, then the price of obtaining it, and then the monetary value of publicizing the results of its exploration or keeping the findings private. But the benefits of systematically collecting
personal
data are more hidden. What are the rules for tabulating this stuff? How much should be stored? Most important, will the benefit of this self-knowledge ever surpass the cost in terms of time and energy spent collecting it? The answer is very subjective, as everyone understands costs and benefits in very unique ways—much like hope, fear, resentment, and envy.

Benjamin Franklin could be considered the American pioneer of self-quantification and his experiences provide a clue as to the
objective
value of personal data. In his autobiography he discusses
how he became a fan of
The Golden Verses of Pythagorus
. These verses are little more than simple and sound admonishments to speak and act with reflection, avoid envy, bad eating, self-abuse, and so on. Though each verse is but a single line, taken altogether the seventy-one verses provide a sort of laundry-list guide on how to approach life. It's useful, though the modern reader will likely find there are far too many references to Jupiter. They inspired Franklin to keep a book of what he called thirteen “daily virtues.” Franklin's virtues, like Pythagorus's verses, were extremely short, a list of commonsense watchwords and concepts to arm the individual against such eighteenth-century scourges of character as trifling and dullness
.
Number twelve, chastity,
is accompanied by a proscription against the use of “venery [sex] but for health or offspring, never to dulness.”
Franklin's virtues were ordered sequentially with the most important first, beginning with temperance, which proscribed against doing anything to excess. It was this virtue that made possible all other virtues in Franklin's mind.

The book itself was nothing more than pages of tables, seven columns down (for each day of the week) and thirteen rows across for each virtue. At the end of the day, Franklin would look over the table and if he had run afoul of one of the virtues, he would mark the corresponding cell with a black dot.
⁵
In his autobiography Franklin includes a sample template but doesn't go into much detail about how well he performed, admitting only that when he began the experiment he was “surprised to find [him]self so much fuller of faults than [he] had imagined.” (Reputation suggests that he ran afoul of the virtue of chastity rather often.) That Franklin was shocked to discover himself less virtuous than he believed is surprising when you consider how accomplished he was in virtually every area of life. How is it that a man of Ben Franklin's genius could be
unaware
of his own limitations?

In fact, this self-ignorance fits with what numerous psychologists have discovered about humanity's innate tendency to overestimate our own competence, fairness, and virtue. This tendency has been observed so many times it goes by several names, such as
the Dunning-Kruger effect, after two psychologists who observed experimentally a natural human tendency to inflate our own level of competence in a variety of domains, both intellectual and social.
⁶
Then there is the more clinical term “anosognosia,” or lack of self-awareness (reserved for extreme cases). Probably the best synonym for this predilection of self-ignorance—shared by all humanity but very rarely acknowledged—comes from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who throughout his work refers to it as the “inside view.”

The inside view is the human tendency to predict success in novel endeavors—and the timing of success—as derived from a statistically insignificant reference class, namely one's personal experience. That may seem somewhat unrelated to Ben Franklin's problem of being virtuous until you consider temperance, chastity, and moderation not as innate qualities a person either possesses or lacks but as objectives to strive for daily, which is exactly how Franklin began to perceive them. The surprise he describes in his autobiography is not the fact that he is without virtue but that he thinks he falls well short of a level of virtue he believed he had obtained. He comes face-to-face with his own cognitive bias, his own inside view!

In describing what the inside view looks like, Kahneman will often rely on a personal anecdote from the 1970s. He was able to talk the Israeli Ministry of Education into creating an entire college-level curriculum around his area of expertise: judgment and decision making. He assembled a team with experience in teaching, editing, writing chapters in textbooks, and so on. One member had even designed curricula in the past. Kahneman asked these folks to estimate how long they would need to complete this chore of creating a curriculum and expected they would be able to answer with an above-average degree of accuracy. Keep in mind that these were highly rational human beings, top performers in their fields. The team projected they would have the task complete in two years, tops. Thing is, they knew statistically that 40 percent of similar teams had failed at similar tasks, and those that succeeded finished behind schedule. They couldn't convince themselves that the
statistics applied to them. Kahneman's team took six years and the curriculum was never adopted.

So the inside view is human nature, but you may say the same thing about overeating, oversleeping, and chronic masturbation. It should be possible, then, to avoid it. This is where self-tracking comes in. Michael J. Mauboussin, chief investment strategist for Legg Mason, has written about Kahneman's work and suggests that this is a simple matter of summoning the will to find the
right
reference class. In short: “Assess the distribution of outcomes. Once you have a reference class, take a close look at the rate of success and failure. Study the distribution, including the average outcome, the most common outcome, and check for extreme successes or failures.”
⁷

Without exactly understanding the concept of reference class, Franklin knew that the first step to discovering his own capacity for virtuous behavior was first to objectively record how often he fell short of his goal. He needed better and more regular data. He kept up the practice of virtue logging his entire life and seemed to derive great therapeutic benefit from it. But aside from a certain regularity of record keeping, his conclusions about which virtues he had flouted were entirely subjective and imprecise.

Self-tracking became much more of an actual science with the advent of electronic computation; the ability to input, store, and process lots of data. Though it sounds faddish, QS has been around nearly as long as the modern PC. The home computer allowed for better record keeping of more activity at much less cost of time and energy and also provided a much better analysis of those records. This is why the two most significant celebrity devotees of QS are also two of the world's more important modern figures in computer science.