If you are a child raised by Italian-speaking parents, there is a sentence your parents wished you every night before going to bed: « Sogni d’oro ». It literally means “golden dreams” and it’s the Italian way of wishing you a good night. Yet reading the best-seller from Matthew Walker called Why we sleep, a crazy idea came to my mind. What would happen if a company could actually manage to extract money from your dreams? How could this become the new Data Gold Mine? And more importantly, how could this impact your private life?
If you wanted to analyze REM sleep in the 50s, you would place electrodes on the scalp and it would give you a general sense of the brain waves activity. In the early 2000s brain-imaging gave the opportunity to reconstruct three-dimensional visualization of brain activity thanks to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI scanners allow to measure the local activity of the brain cells, that allow to recognize patterns on a participant who is dreaming. Many scientists are interested in these techniques, like the Japanese team led by Dr. Yukiyasu Kamitani in 2013. Their experiment has not been fully conclusive, so the goal of my article is only to imagine the implications in the eventuality that the technology arises. To keep it short, the participants in the experiment of Dr. Kamitani were shown images while they were under a MRI scanner, so scientists could see which patterns in the brain would be activated. When they are dreaming, still under an MRI scan, scientists would compare the patterns and seek for similarities. If we show a participant a flower and understand the exact pattern when he sees one, it would be possible to predict it.
Still using this hypothetical approach, let’s put our entrepreneur mindset for a moment. With these two hypotheses of 1) more efficient technology and 2) a decrease in scanners price, we could extrapolate and imagine the development of a whole new business: I called it the Dreams Business. What if a scanner, practical enough to fit in your bedroom, would analyze every night what you dreamed about? When you introduce a new technology, developers need to gain a favorable public opinion. It would first be marketed as a medical tool for mental health: by seeing if someone’s dreams are negative and if the client have suicidal thoughts, we could prevent that and have a positive response right away. These arguments will lower the ethical concerns of the population, which will accept the new technology, that will of course be used for commercial purposes. Artificial intelligence could analyze your thoughts and recommend you targeted advertising afterwards…
At the moment, Google sells information to companies to target their customers. Imagine that the company sells coffee: Google will say to the company “Look, we have this 33-year-old guy who looked four times on the Internet yesterday to buy a coffee machine. If you give me some money, I’ll put some efficient advertisement to push him to buy your Espresso machine, do we have a deal?”.
Now imagine this new Google-like company saying: “Look, we have this 20-year-old dude that dreamed 4 times of love in the past week, and more precisely he dreamed 3 times of finding his dream-girl which whom he will go on a road trip to Australia and fall in love. If you give me some money, I’ll put some efficient advertisement to push him to install your Tinder-like app to find the perfect girl for him. Or I can even directly sell him some tickets via your airplane company to Sydney so he could find a girl there, do we have a deal?”.
Insurance Companies may also give these devices for free to their clients. Using them every night, clients could get reductions on their fees, because insurance companies will have data on the amount of their sleep. Sleep is correlated negatively with depression, cancer, diseases and the new data could also help preventing mental breakdowns or depressive behaviors. The customer’s health would increase and, knowing the mental health of customers, companies could adapt their fees and increase their margins.
But wait a minute… that’s not ethical, right? Dreams are the most private things we own!!!
If you think of Smartwatches and for example the Apple Watch, this is how they run their business model. When they implement their technology, they highlight how much lives they will save with the watch and how effectively they will save you when you have a stroke, fall on the ground or when you have a panic attack. We have to keep in mind that, at the same time, they are collecting data that is sold to companies. In August, Google and SwissRe joined forces to make a new company, named Coefficient [more info].
My article may not be the most scientifically precise, but the goal was to make you think on how far you personally allow companies to collect your personal data. As you will learn in HEC, data is the new oil and companies fight to control the different markets.
The Facebook company (with Instagram/Snapchat/WhatsApp/etc.), is the leader in collecting data on how you interact with people, what you talk about and how you can influence your friends. Amazon, Google and Apple are fighting to be the leader on what you talk about and what are your habits at home (Alexa, Google Home and Home Pod), but they are also fighting on your health data with smartwatches and other devices. If you are an entrepreneur with no ethic, think about these new niches that will emerge to make money. If you are a citizen who fights for the protection of private life and data, use the dream’s business example to determine how far do you allow private companies to know you by using your data.
Companies will be able to predict when you will die thanks to your health data, one day they will predict what’s in your head with your dreams data. Is this the life we want?