Before bowing out to illness, I did manage to catch Paul Graham’s PyCon keynote. For someone with such a flat affect, he was surprisingly funny, probably because flat means an effective deadpan for delivering zingers.
In any event, he basically read one of his latest essays Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas. They’re all thought provoking, but I found idea number 7, Ongoing Diagnosis intriguing:
“One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we’ll seem backward to future generations. And I’m pretty sure that to people 50 or 100 years in the future, it will seem barbaric that people in our era waited till they had symptoms to be diagnosed with conditions like heart disease and cancer.”
I find the “Quantified Self” movement somewhat pretentious because the community of people who want to continually look at charts about themselves is vanishingly small. But if there were positive outcomes of the kind Graham describes, and you didn’t actually have to look at the data, then I could see it happening.