Deepen: Vision and Roadmap

Changing the way we interact with the Self.

By Adam Cohen Hillel, originally published on Substack, Jan 16, 2023

The well-known philosopher Socrates famously stated, "know yourself," when asked to sum up the essence of all philosophical principles. Behind these simple words lies a great idea - that self-awareness is the foundation of wisdom and virtue. Socrates believed that by understanding oneself, one could understand their limitations and make more informed decisions. The way there is through self-reflection and introspection, by examining one's thoughts and actions.

For centuries, journaling has been a powerful tool for self-reflection and understanding. However, with the emergence of modern psychology in the 20th century, new methods and techniques were introduced to gain insight into human behaviour and emotions. Pioneers like Freud and his techniques of free association and talk therapy significantly advanced the field of psychology as we know it today and shaped our understanding of the human mind.

So what IS Deepen?

The vision for “Deepen” will be the next phase of this ongoing transition - a tool for one to explore and interact with their Self in a way that was not possible before. I’ve written at length about Generative AI in the past, and it will be the building block that will enable Deepen.

By leveraging the Large Language Models under the hood, Deepen will provide an interface to write your thoughts/journal (and later on, also import data from different places), so you can (literally) interact with your Self. You could ask yourself questions, see insights from the data across time, track your mood and experiences more systematically, see what affects your mental state, and more.

Imagine being able to travel back in time, to any day from the past three years, and have a conversation with your past self. With Deepen, this will be a reality. By swiping to any given day since you started using the platform, it will build a chatbot tailored made for you (based on your data), so you can ask your old self questions, gain new insights into the path you chose in the past, and maybe even go through the process of self-healing by gaining compassion for the person you used to be. Deepen will revolutionise the way we interact with and perceive ourselves.

Roadmap - What’s ahead?

The Near-Future Features → Current Focus:

This month, we will release the platform's first version, which will include an essential functionality for Beta users, as follow :
1. An interface to journal daily thoughts
2. Automatic analysis using Gen-AIs to produce different metrics (like emotions, such as “depression” and “excitement”) and extract data points (like activities, people, etc.) to build a connection graph →
3. A dashboard to see the analysed (think about it as an emotions tracker app dashboard, just way better and with much less effort).
Then, over February, we will work closely with the Beta users to fix bugs and change the UI/UX based on the feedback to make the platform stable for open registration.
Then, we will introduce a more interactive interface to the user’s data - being able to “chat” with themselves, ask questions, and perform a semantic search.
Lastly, we will add the option to import data from (or connect to) Google/Notes/Notion - to enrich the platform’s capabilities and understanding.
? Free-association interactive journaling (Freud 2.0) → making a gamification journaling interface to foster free-association.
At this stage, I’m hoping to have some feature requests from users!

Farer Vision - Where Can This Go?

Idea: Facing Outwards:
The first stage (as described above) focuses on individuals interacting with and strengthening their understanding of themselves. This stage, however, is about effectively communicating that understanding to others. A simple feature like the ability to "Export to a therapist" will fall under here. Think about it; it can reduce the learning curve of one’s history and make the transition to a new therapist much easier. The same can be expanded to help communicate within relationships and express feelings. No longer will the question "Why are you like this?" be necessary, instead you could share parts of your Deepen ;) (I am only half kidding. And yes, I do know there is a Black Mirror episode about it)

Idea: A New Type of Business Model
This is when I start losing people in my explanation of the vision. Still, it is such a fascinating idea to explore that it is worth mentioning now briefly, but I will explore it in more detail in one of my next articles. Bear with me - Deepen can be the foundation for a new business model.

By introducing a new way of measuring mental state, we can start applying measures of success to certain goods that were much more difficult to achieve before. For example, in therapy, imagine being able to measure its success over time. And then imagine a therapist who’s willing to invest in your current “low” value in return for a future value increase → this can create a kind of exchange where consumers can exchange their current “social token”/”mental state” value in return for goods, which then later the goods-provider will be able to cash-out with profit (if its service was good).

But Why? Well, the current business models companies use, such as one-time-cost, subscriptions, pay-as-you-go, or "entirely free," all have flaws, one of which is the lack of alignment between the goods provider (the company) and the consumer. Think about Meta (Facebook); they have no direct/true interest in providing the best product or service to the consumer because it will almost always mean compromising on profit. SAME FOR THERAPY.

If companies’ way of increasing profits aligned with the customer’s interests, the world would be a much better place. Deepen might enable such a thing in the future.

ALSO - I AM LOOKING FOR BETA USERS. IF YOU’RE INTERESTED, REACH OUT ON TWITTER/EMAIL (AT THE END).

A Funny Story before You go:

A few months ago, during a therapy session, I was reflecting on a significant period in my life. With hindsight, I could see how it had affected me, even today. During the session, I confidently shared different aspects of the story, and at the end of the session, the therapist asked me to try to remember more details in preparation for our next session.
So, being the engineer that I am, during that night, I took out my phone and began scrolling, for hours, through old WhatsApp chats, creating a timeline, connecting the dots between different people, and even checking my Camera Roll (I've had an iPhone for many years) to understand where I was and what I did in specific days back then. Ultimately, I realised that the story I had been telling myself for years was completely incorrect. It was shocking at first, as I was pretty confident about the story, which shaped my thinking, but eventually, it helped me see the story from a whole new perspective, which I needed. Imagine if I could send my old self, “Yo, Adam, what have you done?”

Thank you for reading. If you liked my content, don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d love to talk with more people and discuss everything: tech, philosophy, AI, ideas, Lex Fridman, startups, software, science, whatever!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/adamcohenhillel
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Email: adamcohenhillel@gmail.com

Adam.