Paul Valery once said the “The future is not what is used to be…”. Our perception of the future is indeed altered everyday, continuously eroded by the fast pace of technological developments. The rapid expansion of new technologies is making it more and more difficult for us to predict the future.

Will tomorrow’s healthcare systems be truly connected, allying preventative and predictive medicine? Will this connection be truly useful for us, mere mortals who suffer from the foibles of personal and private behavior?

I’m personally not quite sure if this connectivity will be useful…

The Theory of All Things Connected

The Theory of All Things Connected is as follows: “Every year, on the 31st of December, we all take the same stupid decisions. What we call “New Year’s Resolutions” (this year I’ll stop smoking, I’ll drink less, do more exercise, be nicer to my sister, stop sleeping with hookers, etc…). However, we all know, in our heart of hearts, that these decisions are completely useless. We all know that come February, we’ll all be smoking again, eating again, insulting our sister, and we will have met Tatiana on Tinder…”

The Theory of All Things Connected says that Connected Health will bring a radical behavioral change; that it is one of the principles of Quantified Self that as soon as a person understands the signals of his body, he wants to know more and becomes interested in his health. The Theory of All Things Connected says that when you step on a connected scale and that you see that when you loose 200g you see you glucose levels go down, your blood pressure go down, your activity go up, etc it is much more interesting for the user of the scale and he thinks “Way cool” and gets more invested in his health, thus becoming an actor of his health rather than a mere spectator. That is the Theory of All Things Connected… Apparently it is based on a thing called “Health Micro Management” and will work quite well. Little decisions taken every day are much more effective than big stupid decisions taken on the 31st of December. So according to the Theory of All Things Connected, Connected Health is not a solution for all of us, but rather a solution for each and every one of us. It will allow us to offer truly personalized healthcare solutions, adapted for every single person. Connected Health will be Exclusively for Everyone.

Mmmmmh… seems a bit simplistic to me. Having worked in the connected health industry since it’s beginning, I am finding that users of connected health device are not yet better managed than those with unconnected devices. Just giving them information is not enough. If you actually think about it, information is not a driver for behavioral change. I’m pretty sure that most people who smoke don’t think that smoking is good for you. They know that smoking is bad, but yet continue to smoke. The question is, how can we maximize the impact of the correct information at the right time, so that changes of behavior become imbedded in the unconscious decision making process. I believe that this will be the role of the next generation of connected devices that will move from the “wearable” phase to the “forgettable” phase. The new generations of devices will integrate themselves into your daily lifestyle without you even realizing that they are there.

Everything you can imagine is real

We will not recognize the healthcare systems of tomorrow. Pablo Picasso used to say,“Everything you can imagine is real”. The problem is now that technology is moving so fast that we cannot even imagine the future.

When I was a kid we used to imagine a future where amiable and helpful robots would cater to our every whim, where civilization would be grandly automated according to the lofty ideals of Ayn Rand (Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values…) and where mankind would have a promising philosophical future.

This vision of the future is now compromised… It is compromised because of one simple factor, which is the evolution of human population. In year zero of our era, 2000 years ago, there was a population of about 200 million people on the planet. It took until year 1790 to reach a population of 1 billion people. Then it started climbing incrementally, and when I was born in 1965, there was a population on planet earth of 3.5 billion people. So in my lifetime of 50 years, we have more than doubled the population on earth to 7,4 billion people.

The first Supercomputer, the Cray, dates from 1974. It could handle three million floating-point operations per second (flops). An iPhone 6 is 1000 times more powerful than a Cray of 1974. So the calculation is evident. Today, there are 7.4 Billion people who have access to a device with computational power that is 1000 times more powerful than a supercomputer of 1974.

So technology is moving fast. I mean REALLY fast… So fast that it has become difficult to imagine the future, because innovation is coming from all sides.

One of my all time favorite books is 100 Years of Solitude, by Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The first paragraph is momentous: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

We are today in a world where technology is moving so fast that it is necessary to point at things all the time. Everything is new and we can no longer predict the future. It is terrifying. New fundamental technologies are arriving everyday. By fundamental I mean that these technologies will seem obvious in a couple of years, very much like internet seems an obvious part of our life. Nanotechnology, printing in 3D of body parts, Big Data, DNA, in a couple of years we will not recognize the technology of the future, indeed we will wonder how we ever lived without it.

Some of these technologies seem quite dangerous, because we are still applying our mores and expectations about the future to them. But this is normal, just a learning curve. We will need to learn to approach these technologies with finesse, with respect, with intelligence.

But I believe that intelligence is not enough…

I believe in Illumination.

Schopenhauer said that intelligence will allow you to hit a target no one else can touch.

I think that Illumination will allow you to touch a target no one else can see…

Indeed, it is for us to plan the future of mankind, because it is not yet written.

Uwe DIEGEL

www.medactiv.com