Presumed Dead

How Garmin Evolved from Car Navigation to Mapping Your Mind

When I heard that Dennis the Menace actor Jay North had died, my first thought was: "Wait, wasn't he already dead?" Turns out the child star who captivated America in the 1960s lived a full life beyond his iconic role, continuing to evolve long after fading from public consciousness.

It reminded me of another presumed casualty of time – Garmin.

Remember those bulky GPS units suctioned to windshields? When smartphones rendered standalone navigation devices obsolete, most of us filed Garmin in the same mental folder as Blockbuster and BlackBerry – once-dominant companies rendered extinct by technological evolution.

But here's the surprising reality: not only is Garmin very much alive, it's quietly transformed into something far more sophisticated than a mere navigation company. While we weren't paying attention, Garmin pivoted from mapping roads to mapping minds.

Disclaimer: This is not a paid advertisement for Garmin, though they'd be wise to hire a strategic forecaster who can see where their technology is heading before they do.

The Invisible Mental Health Revolution

Modern Garmin devices still track location, but that's now just a sidebar to their primary function: creating comprehensive digital representations of your physical and mental states. Their wearable technologies have evolved into sophisticated psychographic monitoring platforms that track not just where you go, but how you feel.

A deep dive into Garmin's research library reveals a company intensely focused on measuring psychological dimensions through biometric data. Their studies on heart rate variability (HRV) aren't just tracking physical exertion – they're detecting stress patterns, anxiety states, and mental fatigue, effectively creating a real-time map of your psychological resilience.

Garmin's research extends into sleep architecture and correlates physiological patterns with subjective experiences of energy, motivation, and focus. This technology essentially creates objective measures of internal psychological states that were previously accessible only through self-reporting.

Creating Digital Twins of Consciousness

This extensive psychographic monitoring connects directly to the concept of digital twins. Garmin isn't just collecting isolated data points – they're building comprehensive models of users' mental functioning that exist independently of the person.

These models continuously update, creating increasingly accurate digital representations of our psychological patterns. They remember our stress responses when we've forgotten them. They detect our emotional states when we lack the self-awareness to recognize them ourselves. They exist as digital entities that partially replicate aspects of our consciousness.

If an algorithm can predict your stress responses, energy fluctuations, and cognitive performance with increasing accuracy, at what point does this digital representation become a meaningful "twin" of aspects of your consciousness?

Beyond Health: The Living Intelligence Future

My research into what the great Amy Webb call "Living Intelligence", the convergence of AI, advanced sensors, and bioengineering, suggests we're heading toward even more extraordinary applications.

Consider this forecast of mine for 2030: couples will experience personalized-yet-shared entertainment where AI analyzes their biometric responses and merges their individual preferences into unified experiences.

See my forecast video here:

This convergence of mental monitoring and AI represents a fundamental shift beyond health applications. The same systems that currently track your stress levels will evolve to influence how you experience entertainment, social connections, and reality itself.

Beyond health and entertainment, we'll see workplace systems that detect cognitive fatigue before performance declines, insurance companies adjusting premiums based on stress resilience, and dating apps matching users based on compatible psychological profiles derived from wearable data.

The Road Ahead

Just as Dennis the Menace continued to evolve beyond what most Americans remember, Garmin has transformed into something entirely different from its original identity. Both remind us that beneath the surface of what we think we know, profound evolutions are happening that reshape our understanding of identity.

The navigation company you thought was dead is now navigating the contours of your mind, building maps of your mental landscape that may eventually know your psychological patterns better than you do. In the process, they're creating partial digital twins of your consciousness, synthetic representations that exist independently in digital space.

This transformation forces us to reconsider fundamental questions: Where does consciousness reside when aspects of it can be modeled digitally? Who owns the data that represents your psychological patterns?

And how will these digital representations of our minds shape our understanding of ourselves?

The road ahead leads not just to new destinations, but new definitions of what it means to be human in an era where our minds, not just our routes, are increasingly mapped by technologies we once thought obsolete.