Tech-Enabled Human Transformation: What Excites Me in 2020

I’m often asked what I’m excited about in Transformative Tech, so here’s a few big trends that I’m tracking.

1)    Spaces and Places – This has become an obsession for me. I’m curious about the ways that we can use the built environment to transform ourselves. Now that we know that light, sound, temperature and more can have a tangible effect on human cognition and wellbeing, its time to expand how we use the places that we live. In 2020, for me, this means, cities, offices, buildings of all kinds, and our homes. It means spaces and places for relaxation and for healthy aging. It means our cars, our school, and all our environments. What do we want these places to be like? What more could they do for us? We had two thought-provoking panels at the 2019 Transformative Tech Conference on this topic.

2)  Superhuman – I had a great conversation with Taizo-Son about using technology to bring everyone to superhuman status, no matter where they began. Its an intriguing idea. As an example, one of my favorite talks at the 2019 TTC was Achin Bhowmik from Starkey Hearing Technologies. Achin went to Starkey from Intel under the agreement that he could make a hearing aid so amazing that everyone would want it. The hearing aid that they designed with this brief replaces hearing aids, and also your Fitbit, Alexa, and Headset while translating 21 languages and monitoring fall detection. When he spoke at the conference, indeed, everyone in his session wanted it including me. The following week Starkey went on to be included in the Time, 100 most important technology products of the year.

3)    Emotion Synch – I’m actively seeking researchers and companies that have products and experiences that facilitate group connection and group experiences. For many years, this was solely HeartMath – but I think the field is expanding and I want to know these people. I think we’re going to need more tools that help us quickly drop into connected experiences with each other. Today, in the analog world, the ability to have these experiences has a high level of friction in them in that they are antiquated or hard to find, hard to replicate, hard to extend. However, once we’re able to do this reliably I think humans will want to do this often. Certainly, it will cause some unintended behaviors in some, but for the most part I think we’ll love it. Adjacent technologies required for these experiences to happen will be emotion recognition, haptics, HRV sensors etc.

4)    Multisensory Feedback Loops – I’m very excited about leveraging more than one sense for transformation. This type of system is well represented by Dr. Adam Gazzaley’s new product that combines relaxation with neurofeedback, sight, sound, smell and more.

If you are building anything in these areas, or know of anyone who is, please connect them to me. 

Last, as we enter 2020, I’m excited by the opportunity for founders and innovators in our community to not only make transformative products but to become transformative agents in the world not only via their companies but also via their lives. We spend a good chunk of time in our online accelerator and our conference working on founder development because 1) we believe it will make our founders better leaders and thus increase their probability of success by reducing the founder self-sabotage that is fairly common, and 2) you make what you are – whatever level of consciousness a founder has will make its way into the product, and given the up-level that humanity needs now, we need the best tools possible.   

Welcome to the Golden Decade, together we can make it so.