The Future of Smartphones, and Everything.
A generalized roadmap for ambient computing
The initial idea for Maslo was to create a hardware based companion. The concept of a companion was driven by what I saw at Sphero in the way humans relate to the personification of technology. Our phones are already companion-like. They are with us at almost every point in our life but they do not care about us. When you mix companionship, that there-ness, with Abraham Maslow’s teachings of human motivation, you get a powerful combination that will help billions of people the world over.
I strongly believe that personal robotics will take over our phones before they take over our homes.
In ambient computing, every surface will be a sensor (thermostats, speakers, lights, clothes, watches, shoes, etc), but the phone will be primary source for the personal relationship… the gateway. As I mentioned before, the phone is already a companion, it simply needs the personality and emotiveness to empathize with humans in the same ways that we do with eachother (physically through actuations/vibrations/touch and digitally via pixar/siri-like audiovisuals).
Why start with simple apps and services on the phone? There are three reasons why the Maslo approach is winning rather than going direct hardware route. 1) you need a heckofalot of multimodal data, in consequential places, to understand the people and the world. The amount of signal in the world is staggering. See below for a small list.
The second and perhaps the most important reason is 2) people need to trust their companion (if they do not, point 1 is impossible). Trust is how the world works. There’s an abstract shared agreement that you and I are both humans and to put our shared wellbeing at risk is a bad thing to do. But, as we’ve seen in recent history with technology… our leaders sometimes lose sight of the fact that we’re all human. The way you build trust is through empathy. And the way to grow empathy is through shared relatability.
Once you have 1 and 2, you can then focus on point 3, which comes down to deeper signal analysis. To learn from the signals that are being emitted, and then emit signals back in symphony. Our brains evolved to filter signal from the noise to learn about what is important. And computers will need to do that too. Investors often ask me what our algorithm is. There is no single algorithm or model for Maslo. It is ever growing. Signals, Algos, come and go as they are useful, just like in reality.
We are very excited about the future of empathetic computing and are proud to be leading the charge. My hope for the future of computing, whatever it ends up being, is that we all continue to create things that are deeply personal and empathetic.
