34 GENIUS INTERVIEW Dalton Combs
“THE WAR OVER ATTENTION IS ONLY GOING TO INTENSIFY” Boundless Mind co-founders Dr. Dalton Combs and Ramsay Brown know how your brain works. Their company (previously Dopamine Labs) has created an artificial intelligence platform that helps apps, games and interfaces to more profoundly influence their users. The growing field of behavioural design has been aggressively developed by media tech giants from Facebook to Netflix to turn human attention into cash. But Boundless Mind wants to level the playing field by giving wider access to this powerful, behaviour-shaping technology so it can be used for good, not just greed.
In this month’s Genius Interview, Boundless Mind’s Dalton Combs pulls back the veil on addictive screen technology.
FEED: How did Boundless Mind get its start? Dr. Dalton Combs: Our COO Ramsay Brown and I were in the neuroscience PhD programme at the University of Southern California. We learned a lot about what changes people, why people are what they are, what about us produces our behaviour. Ramsay and I started brainstorming different ways we could make that knowledge useful to people and help people change. What we came up with is this AI system that helps businesses and individuals build habits by using quirks of human subconscious psychology.
every year or so we would come up with a new ‘category killer’, where a product takes over a whole vertical. But we found that there was a lot of domain expertise needed for us to tackle each of those verticals, so we looked at the solutions we had built and figured out what was universal about what we were doing. We decided to focus down and make something we could sell to people who were trying to make category-defining apps, using the core AI technology we had been previously taking from project to project. FEED: What is the Boundless AI and how does it work? DC: It’s based on the principles of habit psychology and the idea that everything you do, you do because at one time it felt better than you had expected. That surprise, that unexpected ‘rewardiness’, is what fuels future habits. We came up with a method for taking in all this data about an individual’s context
DR. DALTON COMBS “The most important move we can make as a society is to help people become the self they want to be”
FEED: What was the process of turning that neuroscientific knowledge into a product?
DC: We started by building one-off solutions for individual behaviour change problems. And that’s originally what we thought we would end up doing – that
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook