Driving north on Massachusetts Route 3 today, I noticed traffic was starting to back up. How serious is this slowdown? Waze informed me that traffic was getting worse and offered to re-route me. A quick peek at the map showed clotted red roads ahead. I took the suggested route change. Thanks Waze!
Have you ever wondered where all that traffic data comes from? In the old days, some poor slob would be leaning out of a helicopter with binoculars, checking on the Tobin Bridge or whatever. But those days are over. Now, dear reader, the traffic data comes from you. Or from your phone, to be specific. That phone is telling the world where you are and how fast you’re moving, and this information can be aggregated into a beautiful map.
Your phone knows an awful lot about you. In addition to where you are, it knows who you’re talking to, what you’re listening to, what you’re searching for. Throw in a wearable, like an Apple Watch, and it knows even more: temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate. Let’s imagine it also knew how happy you were at any given time. It seems to me not unreasonable that this will soon be a thing: continuous automatic mood detection. It would be really interesting to look at maps of aggregated happiness values. Then we could have happy maps the same way we have traffic maps now. Imagine looking at the Happiness Layer on Google Maps. Want to feel better? Just steer into the area crowded with yellow bubbles.
Some of the results might be obvious. It’s pretty clear that parks make people happier than parking lots. But it would be fascinating to see when the hours of peak happiness are for a park. Why are some parks happier than others? When do crowds make people more happy and when do they make them less happy? How strong is the correlation between wealthy areas and happy areas? I like the idea of getting a notification that my neighborhood is “more happy than usual” tonight.
If we measure changes in happiness, we can see what areas are associated with large improvements in happiness (as opposed to just being places where happy people go). I’ll make an app called Happy Feet. Where should you walk if you want to improve your mood? If you follow the happiness gradient uphill or downhill, where will you end up?
Image by Midjourney
So far I’m describing this in terms of location-based happiness. But we can look for all kinds of correlations. What music makes people happiest? What food? What gifts? Data science and artificial intelligence are going to give us ways to sift through huge amounts of data looking for interesting connections. This whole notion may seem creepy and invasive, but consider how valuable it will be to advertisers, and thus how inevitable it is. You use Google every day, but its premise is kind of dystopian: several times an hour, tell a giant corporation exactly what you desire at this moment. If it wasn’t so damn useful, you’d never do it.
So that’s my prediction for a thing that’s on the way: happy maps. I can’t tell you how to be happy, but I can tell you where to go stand to be next to happy people. Of course, that might just make you miserable. Your smileage may vary.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 