Mind Reading
Finishing each others’…
Sentences? Sandwiches? Jinx…
Linguistic models work because there are only so many words that can follow others words. You can build a model based on what millions of others have said and their choice of words and come up with a likely sentence completion. Google Mail’s composer suggestions work like this, for example.
What if we could go beyond that based on people’s behaviors? In the end, we’re not so much reading minds but coming up with probable next actions based on recognizing a pattern of behavior. However, that’s enough for a service doing this to seem spooky or possessed.
The real question is what can this fortune telling do to benefit us? What can you do about knowing I’m going to go to bed in 20 minutes that’s going to benefit me enough to share some of that value back to you? Will I spend $20 / month on an Oura Ring membership that tells me when I should eat to optimize for sleep? What about when to write a prospect to optimize on sales?
The quick answer is yes, there is value to be unlocked and shared through prediction but the problem we’re trying to solve should be addressed first. In Design Thinking, the concept of the 5 Why’s is one tool to drill down to the problem being solved.
Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
We might not be able to solve the fifth why but zooming back out will help us be more empathetic to the problem. Then, we can see what tech we can apply to resolve the issue. It’s often easy to get awed by a technology that we forget what was the reason for the tech to exist in the first place — to solve a problem.
