This is the start of Season 5 of ThrowForward Thursday.
Welcome to 2029, where a weekly 15 second recording of your voice is used to diagnose a whole range of diseases and give early warnings of health problems in your body.
This idea is based on the reality of recent medical experiments. Read more here.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to ThrowForward Thursday… Hang on. I’ve got a message coming in, so just wait.
“Please get ready for your weekly vocal diagnosis test. Graeme, speak now for 15 seconds”.
Thank you, online doctor. It’s great to do this every week. Just check up on my health using my voice, and thank you very much. I look forward to getting the results in a moment, but now I’d better get back to the ThrowForward Thursday viewers.
Thank you for joining me here in 2029, where, yes, every week you get a vocal biomarker prediction checkup. What we mean by this is that there are lots of diseases in your body which show up in your vocal cords, in your throat, and in your chest, in your head, in your nose.
You know this. When you get sick, when you feel poorly, we can change the way that we speak. We sound different, not only to ourselves but to other people as well. And here in 2029, we’ve been able to put together a massive database of all the ways in which your voice is linked to the many different diseases that we are able to diagnose by those vocal biomarkers.
And so now what we do is once a week, we get an automated phone call from our medical providers, and we just have to do a 15-second talk into our smartphones, and the app immediately just makes sure that everything is on track, nothing is happening, and that the earliest signs of all of the diseases that we are able to diagnose through vocal biomarkers, those earliest signs are spotted as soon as possible, and we are given an alert to go and do a more detailed medical checkup.
Pretty cool, hey? What we’re doing here is we’re using large data samples, large data models. We are using predictive analytics, and please notice, I am deliberately not using the word AI. This isn’t AI, this is just predictive data analytics. You don’t actually need a huge amount of intelligence here. What you need is a large data sample and a lot of analytics about those samples to work out which vocal biomarkers are linked with which diseases.
And yes, we might be able to use some of the capabilities of generative AI to help us with that, but to be honest, probably an Excel pivot table is just as good for a person who knows what they’re doing with data. And then what we have done is we have put all of that into an automated app that then keeps us healthy.
Hey, one of the things we’re going to see in the future is dramatic improvements in our ability to anticipate, predict, get early warning signs, and be preventative and proactive in the way that we engage with the problems that these human machines, our bodies, encounter.
Welcome to 2029. Maybe we’ll do it even faster than that because this feels like something worth doing.
As always, thank you for joining me in the ThrowForward Thursday studio. This is Season Five, and I’m looking forward to taking you into the future and looking at what’s going on there and then imagining what it might mean for us today.
I’ll see you next week in the future again.
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For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.