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Body hackers can get all sorts of information about their personal health. Image courtesy of Flickr user juhansonin

To treat almost any injury, I heard my father say “Rub dirt on it” often enough that, against all logic, I still believe in the healing power of soil. As for preventative medicine, in my family, it meant avoiding lepers and trying not to eat a whole cake by yourself.

Let’s just say we weren’t exactly forward-thinkers when it came to taking care of ourselves.

So I’m fascinated by those intensely self-involved geeks known as “self-quantifiers.” Put simply, they want to know everything about themselves, at least everything that can be expressed in data readouts.

They walk around wired, tracking the obvious stuff—weight, heart rate, blood pressure, footsteps. But some wear headbands every night to keep tabs on how much REM sleep they get. Or they take photos of each meal and the caloric content is automatically logged into a file. Others capture info related to their attention spans, caffeine intake, sweat output, even sexual habits. People truly committed to their “Inner Me” talk of the day when we will be able to routinely take readings of our urine to alert us to vitamin deficiencies.

Too much information? Not at all, says Tim Chang, a Silicon Valley investor quoted recently in the Financial Times. He sees “body hacking” as a leap forward in understanding what’s really going on inside us—which is why he’s putting money behind some self-tracking devices.

That said, there’s often a wide chasm between what’s possible and what’s convenient. Most of us are in no hurry to get wired up and read a bunch of printouts. But as the technology becomes less of an imposition—say, when the bathroom mirror is able to take our pulse or sensors in our clothes let us know when we need a checkup (just two of the digital medicine innovations that the physician-scientist-inventor Daniel Kraft recently postulated) — would we really want to know everything our bodies are up to?

Why not? It has to be a good thing to know our digital vitals, right? How can we become finely-tuned machines unless we know what to tune? Or more realistically, isn’t this the kind of intelligence we need to make us realize that preventative medicine means more than using handi-wipes.

And yet.

I think about how many years we’ve known about the nastiness of tobacco, but the FDA still feels it needs to slap hideous images of dead bodies and charred lungs on cigarette packs to get people to stop smoking. The ugly truth isn’t enough; you need to show the ugly.

Seems there’s a lesson here to carry with us into a future of personal quantification. For most of us, data won’t be enough. We’ll need visual jolts.

So here’s my idea. Let’s say that electronic magical mirror is refined to the point where it can gather all your key data through just a touch. Why not display the results in one of two modes, “Show” or “Tell”?

“Tell” would give it to you straight—a simple, numbers-happy printout.

But “Show” would ratchet up the drama. If your numbers are good, you’d see a different you in the mirror, one who’s 10 years younger. But if the news is grim, you’d be face-to-face with a version of yourself  that’s, well, a little bit dead.

In that future, mirrors would lie a little. But they’d still be brutally honest.

What say you?  Would you want to hack your body? And would that motivate you to take better care of yourself?

Google founders Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their company's driverless car

I’d like to say that my fascination with driverless cars has nothing to do with my son having a learner’s permit. I’d also like to say my hand gestures to other drivers are meant as a sign of peace.

Not that my son’s a bad driver; he’s actually pretty good. But there still are times when we’d both be happier if the potential for human error wasn’t in the mix. I wouldn’t be pushing my phantom brake pedal to the floor. And he wouldn’t have to keep reminding me that my co-braking was helping neither his confidence nor his ability to slow down the car.

So I was intrigued to read that Nevada has passed a law requiring the state’s Transportation Department to develop regulations for the operation of “autonomous vehicles.” This is not about the altered states of visitors to Vegas, but rather a way for Nevada to get a leg up in becoming the proving ground for robot cars.

Google hired a lobbyist to push for the law. The company built on fine-tuning technology to help us navigate modern life is now mobilizing machines to take on more daunting challenges, things like gridlock, drunk driving and road rage. Quietly, over the past few years, Google has become a leader in designing vehicles in which humans are along for the ride. And its models do way more than parallel park.

To see just what’s possible with a car outfitted with the latest sensors, cameras, lasers, GPS and artificial intelligence, watch the recent TED talk by Sebastian Thrun, who’s been refining the systems since his Stanford team of students and engineers won a self-driving car contest organized by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency back in 2005. To see a tricked-out Prius, sans driver, winding down San Francisco’s Lombard Street, is to believe.

When robots rule

So the technology works. But now comes the tricky part, where innovation runs the gauntlet of cost/benefit analysis, legal murkiness and, in this case, fear of robots—or more accurately, the fear of them making us lesser humans.

Thrun, now working with Google, says his motivation was the death of his best friend in a car accident. His goal is to someday save a million lives a year by taking our hands off the wheel. But he sees other benefits, too, such as making cars and trucks more energy efficient and traffic jams less likely.

Others suggest Google’s motives are less altruistic. Free my hands, the thinking goes, and I have that whole long commute to go online and use some Google product. Still others speculate that the search behemoth is thinking bigger, preparing to build a fleet of shared robot cars, like Zipcars without drivers.

Wherever this goes, it’s likely to take a while to get there. Lawyers haven’t even started to get involved. What happens to the car insurance business? Would the carmaker be liable an accident? Or, since a human occupant would have the capability to take over in an emergency, would he or she be on the hook?

Then there’s this thing a lot of us Americans have about driving. Taking the wheel on the open road is still seen as some kind of a personal declaration of independence. I mean, would Thelma and Louise have blasted off in a Google convertible?

Or imagine Steve McQueen doing this in a robot car?

The Department of Innovation logo by Jamie Simon

Editor’s note, August 19, 2011: Read about our new name and logo here.

Seems a long time ago, but it was only back in January when Barack Obama told us that America had reached a “Sputnik moment.” He was referring to the competition with China to be the Big Dog of the 21st century global economy, but the subtext was that the country needs an attitude adjustment, that we need to start channeling Silicon Valley, a place where people may pledge to “Do no evil” but the true religion is innovation.

It made for one fine sound bite. But it hasn’t exactly inspired a bunch of innovation rallies and bake sales. So in the spirit of banging the drum for new ideas and fresh thinking, this blog will track all things innovative, not just in science and technology, but also in how we live, how we learn, how we entertain ourselves.

The Department of Innovation is about people and ideas that likely will shape the way we will live one day. Don’t hesitate to send in suggestions of subjects we should cover.

You can learn more about me on our About page.

Ed. note — Thank you to everyone for your comments about our logo. We have since shifted the gears and switched in a new logo.