THE MACHINE THAT MAKES YOU HUMAN
JOSHUA FEAST has a distinct conversational tic: a nervous laugh that escapes when he’s worried something he says might come across as self-serious or highfalutin. Like, for instance, when he mentions that he was the first New Zealander to be selected as a Fulbright Scholar in entrepreneurship, or tells you he once spent two weeks in a coma after contracting malaria in Indonesia, or says he was among the highest-scoring secondary-school students on a national math exam.
Feast grew up in the suburbs of New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, where it’s considered unwise to act like a big hairy deal. Kiwis enjoy nothing more than cutting a “tall poppy” down to size. So Feast, a slender, bespectacled 40-year-old, is studiously careful at all times to deflect credit and minimize his importance. “I’m not very comfortable talking about myself sometimes,” he says, with appealing humility that stops just the right distance short of false modesty.
You can’t help analyzing someone’s personal affect after talking to Feast, because that’s his business. Feast is co-founder and CEO of Cogito Corporation, a Boston-based software startup that uses artificial intelligence to measure and improve the quality of certain key conversations, such as sales and customer-service calls, in real time. Or, as Feast puts it, Cogito—which is Latin for “I think”—“helps people be more charming in conversation.”
“Charm” might sound like a hard thing to quantify, and it is. But Cogito’s other co-founder, MIT professor of media arts and sciences Alex “Sandy” Pentland, has spent the past 20 years doing just that. Through experiments in his Human Dynamics Lab, Pentland has shown how unconscious, nonverbal “honest signals”—he wrote a book with that title in 2008—including tempo, emphasis, and mimicry influence the outcome of interactions like salary negotiations, team meetings, and romantic courtships. “Language is culturally something that’s relatively new to humans, but before language we were already social beings,” says Pentland, a polymath and futurist whose expertise extends to evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, and data science. “We’re all sort of brainwashed to think it’s about the words.” Thanks to Pentland’s work, we now know the mechanisms of human connection can, in fact, be boiled down to a set of mathematical equations. Those equations are what Cogito is built on.
Cogito occupies two floors of