We are so immersed in the technology that we forget about its presence. Around the streets, it’s hard to see someone not busy in handling a mobile phone, we can’t even imagine a hospital without technology. We drive cars that take decisions autonomously: they brake without our intervention, soon they will drive us whilst we’ll do other tasks. In the last 20 years the technology focused on the automation of processes to support optimization, efficiency and costs reduction. We are now in a new age, the “making- decisions machines” one. It’s huge opportunity: we can treat a software as kind of second-opinion maker, we can get advices, we can let it learn by the examples we provide to it with. It will compare them with the statistics of similar situations, and it will give us back scenarios of the near future. Imagine than how much we can do in the sphere of risk prediction and consequently in risk mitigation.

The expectation is to get customized and tailored services, thought and built around ourselves. It’s there, it’s happening now, and it’s great: On one hand we can delegate not only operational tasks, but decisions on how to accomplish tasks to a machine, on the other hand we can save time to focus on more strategic tasks requiring creativity and human touch.

There is a price, immersive technology is characterized by two costs:

Privacy. To customize a service, a machine has to observe us, to collect and crunch a lot of data. The protection of personal and sensitive data can’t be delegated only to a slogan claiming: “don’t worry we are a web-giant and we’ll care about your data”. There is much more risks in sharing behavioral data than a credit card.
Confidence. Despite the marketing hammer, technology is not perfect. We tend often to overestimate its accuracy, with the real risk to delegate to a piece of software critical decisions, without knowing exactly under which conditions the system might fail (eg. Boing 737 max 8, bugs in autonomous driving cars,…)

At Perceptolab, we are adopting a no-compromise approach: we are moving the data processing steps completely in the device that generates data. No personal, nor sensitive data are shared to any third party. Just the final output of such processing is sent to our backends to offer the services like insurance quote to protect better the costumers at lower price, and to support them in mitigating incumbent or unnecessary risks. The adoption of implicit technology thought to learn from costumer feedbacks is developed to avoid the user critical-decision delegation: the system increases the risk awareness and possible right actions, but decisions are taken ultimately by users.