For those of you working on AI systems intended to be able to hold conversations in English, I just figured out a killer application.
One of the biggest problems the developed world faces today is akrasia. It's not something we are programmed to instinctively find scary, but if you add up the cold numbers for the fraction of people's lives wasted watching television or playing World of Warcraft, the epidemic of obesity - now a health problem on the same order of magnitude as cancer - the social problems of drug addiction, the endless stories about broken resolutions and failed attempts to fix one's life that get nearly everyone in the room nodding in recognition - there aren't a whole lot of more serious problems short of death itself, and it's going to keep getting worse decade by decade as the world moves further from the environment in which our motivation systems evolved. The most powerful weapon against akrasia is social pressure. Our minds are programmed to act based on encouragement and discouragement from other people, not to operate autonomously; but the old social institutions have largely broken down. One man went so far as to hire someone to sit beside him and slap him every time he started goofing off (1). His productivity quadrupled. But despite the demonstrated success of this option, most people won't take it, because hiring people is expensive and has social complications of its own. The solution may lie in another quirk of the human mind: our tendency to anthropomorphize; we instinctively attribute personhood to all sorts of things - including, in some circumstances, computer programs (2). In other words, a companion AI program would not have to be good enough to pass the Turing test. It would only have to be good enough to *feel* like a person. To make your motivation system *feel* as if it were a person encouraging you to stop reading reddit and get back to work, to put down that cookie, to go to the gym. Leechblock doesn't try. Microsoft Bob failed. But Eliza succeeded by accident, albeit in a different domain, so it can be done. One of the world's biggest problems is there for solving. We are now at the point where a program capable of solving it could run on a cell phone. I think there's a few billion dollars up for grabs by a team that can deliver - and you'd be making the world a better place. (1) http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i-hired-a-girl-on-craigslist-to-slap-me-in-the-face-and-why-it-quadrupled-my-productivity/ (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
