DNAi | Manifesto

Our guiding principles.

Manifesto.

Relational Service Providers

Netflix, Uber, and AirBnb, and many more have demonstrated consumers' desire for on-demand services.

Powered by the rise of the internet, the on-demand revolution took the consumer landscape by storm for transactional services. With the tap of a finger, you now have access to a car ride, hot meal, bed to sleep in, and movie to watch. The on-demand revolution stops at transactional services, where the service provider is fungible; there is no value in the same Uber driver on every trip, or movie on Netflix. What about relational interactions where the value lies in the peer-to-peer relationship? The internet- powered on-demand revolution stopped there.

Your personal trainer, family doctor, physiotherapist, councillor, and professor are inherently limited by their time. Their time supply is fundamentally capped at 40-50h/wk, and their time demand varies on their value to their respective market; the greater their demand, the more their service costs, and the lower the number of consumers that can afford their service.

As we’ve seen with the most successful companies of today listed above, the future is accessible and on-demand. Let’s zoom out and imagine a world where relational interactions are equally as accessible and on-demand as an Uber ride.

Painting a Picture

You wake up at 6am, down a quick Cliff bar, and head downstairs to the PlanetFitness in your Philadelphia condo building. It’s not the most elite gym. But it does have everything that Steven, your personal trainer, said you need to loose the 10LBS you want to before summer comes. And it’s affordable.

You hit the gym floor, and meet Steven. But Steven is in San Diego, still fast asleep. The Steven you meet lives in your smartphone.

You wave and groggily say hello to him through your camera. He says – in his familiar energetic tone – “Morning sunshine! How was the weekend? Ready to hit chest and triceps today?”. It’s clear by his clever smirk he’s eagerly awaiting a response. You’re tired from a late Sunday night out, but manage to work up an “Oh yeah, can’t wait.” His energy is a lot to digest this early, but you know that in 20 minutes his happy-go-lucky attitude will rub off on you, as it does every morning. That’s one of the many reasons why – of all the personal trainers in the world – he’s the perfect trainer for you.

The Steven that guides you through your workout is a Digital Clone of the real Steven, who is still fast asleep 2,700 miles west – and will be for a few more hours. But you still hear his voice, see him on your smartphone, and absorb his outgoing personality; you can’t tell the difference between the Steven on your phone and video calling the biological Steven 3 timezones away.

Throughout your workout, Steven uses data from your wearables and smartphone to assess your form. He coaches you through improving that weird wiggle thing that your left arm always does on bench press because of your rotator cuff injury. He tells you what weight to select, to slow down on the negatives for tricep press downs, and makes friendly conversation between sets. He even remembered today is your Black Lab’s 4th birthday.

Your left shoulder is tighter than usual today, and you bring this up with Steven. He suggests speaking with Emilia, who has been a reliable physiotherapist for the last 2 years. An event is created in your smartphone calendar for a session with Emilia over breakfast.

When you wrap up today’s workout, Steven gives you props for the hard work today and reminds you not too have to much birthday cake tonight for your dog’s party.

Over your 8am breakfast, Emilia says hello and asks how the shoulder is doing. Like Steven, the Emilia you’re speaking with is a Digital Clone. Unlike Steven, Emilia is a 20 minute drive from you in downtown Philly. After sharing details on your shoulder pain this morning and an examination of your ROM and velocity trends from this morning’s gym session, Emilia determines it’s best to come in for an in-person rehab session. Here, she can physically work on stretching out your tissues to prevent further damage and continue towards the pain-free workouts you’re looking for.

The Future is Not Digital. It’s Augmented.

Along with your family physician, professor, and therapist, Steven and Emilia are Digital Clones made possible by the latest revelations in AI. Models are trained on curated datasets to understand their behavioural tendencies, temperament, and tone of voice to embody the outward facing attributes of the individual. They are then imposed on lip-synced images and videos of the individual to provide the visual and audio representation needed to close the loop of a fully Digital Clone. They make use of various data-gathering endpoints – such as wearables, health sensors, and computer vision – to make in-depth judgements in line with their service.

The next obvious question is “can we just replace the service individual with the clone?” This plagued me for years with both family physicians and personal trainers. Both positions are regurgitations of well understood literature; if-this-then-that algorithms are followed to provide a prescription – may it be a pharmaceutical for low blood pressure, or a workout plan to tack on an extra 5LBS of lean muscle. How soon can these, and similar positions, be replaced with a nameless, faceless digital version?

Both my wife and my father are physicians, with whom I’ve had long discussions about their seemingly imminent replacement. They were certain that their careers cannot be replaced by such an artificial entity. While I wasn’t convinced, both argued one key point: relationship. People need the doctor for the human-to-human relationship.

I became convinced over the last 5 years working with personal trainers. Like physicians, I assumed the value of a trainer was the workout program itself. Digging deep with countless personal training clients, I discovered the true value of the trainer. Relationship.

The future will not be one filled with nameless, faceless algorithms. Humans innovate and build tools to better the lives of humans. And humans are deeply emotional, social beings. The next revolution will produce tools that augment ourselves.

We’ve seen this time and time again. The industrial revolution was feared to replace human workmanship – instead, it produced tools to make workmanship easier. The computer revolution was set to replace human creativity – instead, it produced tools to expand our creativity. And today, the AI revolution is set to replace human-to-human connections – instead, it will produce tools to expand the ability we have to interact with each other on a wider level.