It’s not related to anything you’ve seen from us so far. However, we feel an obligation as people standing on the frontier to look at the foundations of the human experience and ask: “What do we want to be different?” “How do we want to be different?” and “What do we want to become?”
We must ask these questions. We must find new answers. And we must tell stories of deeply human futures that we can all want to be a part of.
That’s why we are announcing:
We’re building a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies.
We’ve dreamed of something as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa, and we’re unveiling a path to that - today.
One of the overarching themes of the 21st century will be the expanding reach of intelligence and what we choose to do with it. We talk to artificial intelligences every day - and increasingly we talk to them about our health.
Whether we’re talking to doctors or AIs, what we do with our health comes down to having data and an awareness of our bodies.
You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.
In an ideal and near-term future, we take this information and watch how it changes over time. We compare it to the general population, we talk to doctors, nutritionists, coaches, trainers, and AI friends. We become more aware of our health and we improve our lifestyles. We make smarter, more proactive, more frequent decisions. And we live longer, healthier lives, better lives.
That's the dream - now let's step back to our machine:
It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what's happening inside your body.
The goal is for this process to take no more than 60 seconds.
You go into the water, you come out of the water, and you're done.
When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.
As you descend you pass through a ring made of half a million tiny squares each the size of a fine grain of sand, and each capable of acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone.
Each square creates ultrasonic waves and records the ripples back at millions of times per second. Together they act as both a choir and an audience - producing terabytes of data each second. If we converted that data into HD internet video you’d need to watch 500 hours of footage for every 1 second of scan data.
The sheer number of mechanical elements, the inconceivable volume of data, and the computational power required for this to all come together is one reason why no such machine was ever made - until now.
As you descend into the water, hundreds of thousands of tiny elements take turns, sending out waves, listening together, compressing and then streaming data to a massive cluster where thousands of computers split the task.