36 GENIUS INTERVIEW Dalton Combs
and history to figure out how to modify their experience on a moment to moment basis, making it as surprising as possible at the right times, to gear the habit formation process. All of this looks very subliminal to the user – it’s subtle stuff – but it adds up to large effects in changing future behaviour. FEED: What practical trials have you had with the Boundless AI? DC: Some of our big successes are with apps that help people be nicer to each other on social media (Brighten) and help people walk more after surgery (Movn). Walking after cardiovascular surgery dramatically reduces the chances of having to go back for another surgery, and the Movn app, which uses our AI, was able to increase the time people were walking by 60%. FEED: Is habit psychology the only way to alter behaviours? Or is it just one of many methods? DC: It is by far the most effective way of changing people’s behaviour. We spend
WE’RE IN A SITUATION WHERE A HANDFUL OF GIANT TECH COMPANIES ARE THE ONLY ONES WITH THE RESOURCES TO DO BEHAVIOUR DESIGN AT SCALE
the vast majority of our day being our default self, and our default self is our habitual self. You cannot be the kind of deliberative person that we tell ourselves we are, all day long. That’s just not the way we’re wired up. We’re wired up to use short hand and to fall back on our habits. Modifying those habits is by far the most effective way to change someone’s behaviour, especially in the long term. Where we see the future at Boundless Mind is that any time someone can build up the short-term motivation to change, we want to convert that motivation into habits as efficiently and quickly as possible. FEED: There’s a theory that there’s a limited amount of willpower you have in the day and once you’ve spent it, it’s hard to make changes after that. DC: Exactly. Many of the problems that we’re facing as individuals, and therefore as societies, are based around these problems of not being perfectly motivated. There are so many more people who wish they went to the gym every day than actually do. All of our biggest problems, from heart disease to obesity to ennui – this sense that we don’t know what to do with ourselves – stem from people not being able to achieve the change they want or become the person they want to become. These are the critical problems of our age. It used to be dysentery and car accidents were the biggest things to kill people. Now it is cheeseburgers and ennui. The most important move we can make as a society is to help people become the self they want to be. So we’re taking this technology, which so far has only been used by large tech companies to addict people to social media, and liberating those methods from those use cases and making it possible for everyone to change. FEED: Some might say that you’re just manipulating people and saying its for their own good. What is your take on the ethical issues this technology raises? DC: We approach that in a few ways. Some are narrowly practical. At Boundless Mind
we have a scoring system that we use when new leads come in. We score them on how well what they want aligns with what’s best for the user, and we don’t work with companies that have bad alignment. In the more long-term, philosophical sense, we have a conviction that the more broadly available these tools are, the better the equilibrium position will be. And educating users on what addictive technology looks like and what effective behaviour change looks like means they will be able to select for themselves the technology that changes them into who they want to be. A technology that effectively gets you to walk more is a good thing. A technology that gets you to spend more time on the couch binge-watching B-grade TV shows is not such a good thing. And users will be able to see and choose for themselves. We’ll have a new kind of interactive media literacy, which is going to be an important part of making sure, at a societal level, that these technologies are used for good. The dangerous part of these technologies is not the technologies themselves, the dangerous part is if only one person has these technologies. If the technologies are democratised and widely available and widely used, then they’re much safer, and the net effect will be more positive. FEED: But is that a bit like saying if everyone has a gun, we’ll all be safer? DC: It’s a similar situation, but I think the fact that it’s not guns is a critical difference! I think we could look at cars or computers as an analogy. When computers first appeared, people were concerned about the fact that basically only militaries had them and you had this massive power disparity between people and their governments. But the big transformation in society came when everyone had computers. Currently, we’re in a situation where a handful of giant tech companies are the only ones with the resources to do behaviour design at scale. We think the world will be a lot better place when everyone is able to do behaviour design.
CREATURES OF HABIT To change a person’s behaviour in the long term it is necessary to produce in them different habits
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