Nichol Bradford:
It's my pleasure to talk about my passion. And so I'm going to take you on a very fast overview of an emerging sector called transformative technology starting with the question what is the next human agenda? Yuval Harari says that it's going to be longevity, happiness, and augmentation. And I think, in part, this is true, because we have a massive problem. You all have seen the psychological data and so you know that in these areas it is accelerating globally across cultures, cohorts, and countries. The way that we see well-being is across a spectrum. So on one end, you have people who need human support for anxiety, stress, depression. In the middle, you have the human condition-- loneliness, connection, empathy, compassion.
And on the other side, you have exponential well-being, enhanced mental and emotional capacity, transformative leadership, your gifts unlock completely, wisdom and joy, and persistent nonsymbolic experience, which is the academic term for enlightenment. And so what transformative technology suggests is that if technology is that force that makes things that are scarce abundant, then why not for mental health, emotional well-being, and psychological thriving? We should have things that are scalable, accessible, and affordable.
So I'm the co-founder and executive director of the Transformative Technology Lab. And we do three things at the lab. We support basic research, we create community, and we support entrepreneurs who are building technologies that work on these three points. Transformative technology is being driven, like everything else, by the exponentials, specifically the large psychological data sets that are very good proxies for our human psychology as well as key drivers that include rising cost, consumer demand, and just progress in the various technical domains, whether it's neuroscience or behavioral psychology.
We track 11 areas of transformative technology. Every one of these areas has an application for inner development and human well-being. And so this is our market map. This is it. I'll send you a link to all of this, but this is what the space looks like. And these companies, not including the major anomalies, the major companies, took on $1.6 billion in investment life to date.
So what this means is that this is a sector that is hiding in plain sight. And the way that you should think about transformative technology is that it really is a new use case, a design intention, a pivot towards using current and emerging technologies to support the inner development of mankind for wellness, well-being, meaning making, behavior change. And so let's go through a few.
So these are two of my favorites. I love emotion recognition and pattern recognition. And so you've heard from Beyond Verbal. There's Voice Face. What Empath does is their system picks up the emotion in a room. So if you're having a meeting, the meeting room will change colors based on the emotional state of the people in the room. You may not want that, but it's interesting.
On behavior recognition, life tracking. Truly, with our phones and our behavior online, everything you do, everywhere you go is tracked. And people are using this to support depression, depression support, stress management support. Home.AI has this wonderful program that they're doing behavior recognition and pattern recognition inside the home in order to help elderly people stay in their homes longer. In California, the cost of assisted living is $13,000 a month. Every month that you could allow someone to stay in their home, because everyone feels that they are taken care of, is a true value.
This is really leading towards intelligent assistance and driving it. What many of you may not know is that Alexa, in the top third of the commands that she gets every week is Alexa, help me relax. And so you're seeing a growth in depression bots and inspiration bots. My replica just started asking me about my mood a few weeks ago. The game box is-- it's a digital girlfriend. It helps with loneliness, right? It's OK. But what you'll see is the majors are all going to move into this kind of support, because the one who serves best will win. And they can't afford to lose the home market.
Other areas-- mood management, positive psychology, behavior change, focus-- you can do focus with pills or electrical stimulation or sound-- focus at will we'll talk later. I use this product every day when I work. On emotion tracking and HRV training, the BFB labs-- this is a great product. I love it. What they do is there's a heart rate variability monitor that goes on your ear and the kids are playing a game. And the faster they can lower their heart rate, the stronger their spells. And so what this means is that they're being taught to manage their physiology.
And then all of us know from talking on stage or right before the exam, your ability to regulate your physiology goes far to regulate your psychology. And so this is scalable. This is fantastic and it's natural. Also wearables, all in ones, neurostimulation, and consumer EEG and everything's converging. I'm in love with the glasses from Interaxon. And now that it's also an all-in-one, you can see that everything is converging.
These are more categories. One of the things that I'm really inspired by are the very innovative health care systems that are incented to keep people healthy. One of the programs that they use is Will. Will Delivers to over half a million people through 35 of the Fortune 500 content for yoga and meditation. But what's important, it's not just content, is they also they also provide the tracking that big HR needs in order to bring people in to their organizations. And so they're really the leader in that and not many people know how big they are.
The other thing that I really love is I love haptics. So these rings right here called touch-- when you have one on and your partner has one on, wherever you are in the world your heartbeat is pulsed through the ring. So wherever you are you can feel the touch, the heartbeat, of the person that you love. I think this is a really great example of the ability for technology to increase intimacy, things that we don't typically think of for technology, but it has that potential. We just have to decide that's what we want it to do.
And then of course there's VR, AR. You've probably seen the data on increases in compassion and empathy, the ability to expand the in-group for someone. I mean as the world gets more and more and immersive, this is going to be incredibly powerful. Also, a little out there, emotion detection. This is an RF frequency that can detect emotion with the same efficacy as on-skin ECG. So this guy is Ming-Zher Poh. He's at MIT. If you're not tracking him, you should. This is only one of the things that he's developed. So it's moving very, very quickly as a space.
I'm also really excited about expanding human capacity. I love Mary Lou Jepsen with Openwater. She's seeking to miniaturize FMRI, and for sure that's going to be a major health innovation. She was one of the people key to creating the $100 laptop computer. So I wouldn't bet against her, but if, with your permission. I could give you a look into my mind and into how I'm feeling, what might that do to reduce conflict? Intheon is doing for signal processing what, for transtech companies, what AWS has done for general tech companies making it accessible for people to create new products.
So this is what I see is going to happen in 2018. These are my predictions. First, the emotion layer is going to get added to most everything, because it's just too easy not to. There's going to be a programmatic layer, so I can subscribe to happiness, calm, so you'll see state not goals. Hardware is going to continue to go into the background. Interfaces are going to become simpler, which will scale adoption.
And we've got to deal with the privacy and ethical concerns around this, because the psychological profile data view that's picked up from the media is not medical data to date, so it's not protected. So, you know, we really have to think about this and create a system where people can understand what they're giving up and what it means.
But I do believe that if we're providing the value that allows people to feel more engaged and connected and contribute and to find their human potential, and it's done in a system where they know what they're giving up and what it's for, and then, you know, I think that's a value add that could be acceptable, because we can solve this problem. We can solve the social problem and we could create a new age and bring forth the full potential of mankind.
So I will leave you with this. There is no more noble use for technology than to bring peace to the minds of mankind. So thank you so much for your time.
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