You’re probably more vulnerable than you think to near-future neurotech. Not the speculative Matrix-inspired dreams (or nightmares) of direct knowledge uploads and hive minds, but the accelerating pace of development in sensors and systems that will provide ubiquitous ways of looking into the state and dynamics of our brains.
The rule of thumb to figure out if your product will be impacted is simple: does it interact directly or indirectly with human beings? If so, congratulations! Knowledge of psychological and emotional states will greatly increase its ability to help and delight your users (other things too, but that hardly needs saying).
However, there’s a catch. Very few designs — very few software architectures — are deliberately built around explicit models of human psychology. We collect all sorts of demographic information, social graphs, interest tags, and historical data, and then push it through variously opaque models, but few designs have something as simple as an internal variable representing how distracted is the human being on the other side right now. And this matters – for many products this matters a lot! When you’re driving a car or operating heavy machinery, for sure, but how tired you are matters when you’re releasing code, your emotional state is key in a game, and so on.
For almost every piece of software in business, entertainment, or anything else, there’s some information about the psychological state or preferences of its user that would improve its usefulness, safety, and enjoyability. Good designers are aware of the importance of psychological state. Great designers can guide it. But, increasingly, software itself will have access to this information. Just as being able to know the geographical location of users led to re-designing software and services to use this information, knowing the psychological state of users will mean re-designing everything to take advantage of it.
Be empathetic or be extinct. That’s the first rule of the neurotech world.
The first step in this world doesn’t require running around buying and testing hardware but rather rethinking your product with psychological features as first-order characteristics of user state and learning to take advantage of this even when you are just estimating it somehow. Yes, having a GPS fix on somebody helps with, say, advertising, but geolocating their IP is often good enough for many things. The key for both is, first and most necessarily, having software that understands the concept of location. You can use an API to get real-time location data without having to figure out GPS signal decoding, but that’s useless if your product doesn’t know how to make effective use of it.
The same applies to psychology: once neurotech becomes as ubiquitous as GPS everything will be expected to operate as attuned to your psychological state as it’s now adjusted to your physical location, but even before that, simply designing a product with psychological states in mind and using basic estimates (here AI analysis of correlated data can be immensely valuable) will improve its effectiveness and give it a huge competitive advantage leveraging near-future neurotech regardless of what platform, company, or technology wins that race.