My computer has psychic powers

That’s right, my computer has psychic powers! My computer can read my mind, see into my future, and also has a pretty good idea of the state of my kitchen. It’s like a crystal ball that actually works.

And it’s awesome.

It’s awesome partly because I don’t have any sensors, or any half-baked Internet of Things devices, and no cloud-based services. I’m simply not comfortable with someone I don’t trust looking over my shoulder.

Google Now can feel prescient but it’s reading emails, monitoring search and browsing habits, and tracking location. However useful Google Now’s predictions are, I can’t shake the notion that someone else is getting an even better prediction for the sake of manipulating my behavior.

My computer already does a much better job than Google Now of being psychic and manipulating my behavior, but it doesn’t need to read my emails, monitor my online activity, or depend on cloud-based machine learning algorithms. It operates in private, just me and my psychic computer as cooperative partners. I can trust that it has my interests at heart because it doesn’t know anything else.

How It Works

My psychic computer isn’t actually pyschic — there’s no magic involved — but it sure feels that way. It works very simply:

I tell my computer when I do something and then it shows me when I’ll probably do it again.

I wrote some software to take care of the telling and showing parts. If you ask me, I’ve done a bang-up job of it so far.

The state of my kitchen

Each time I wash the dishes, I tell my computer. After a few inputs, it has a good idea of how often I do that. That means it also has a good idea of when I’ll next wash the dishes.

If I slack off and leave them sit a few days, my computer knows. And it tries very hard to tell me: “Your kitchen is a mess, do the damn dishes!” And it’s right. It’s always fucking right. It knows both when and why my kitchen is a mess. I think it’s best that my computer cannot speak.

To make this work, all I have to do is tell my computer when I do things. It doesn’t care what I’m doing, or why. I tell it lots of things besides when I wash my dishes so it knows quite a bit about the state of my home. And the state of my diet. And my fitness. And my relationships.

Reading my mind

Anything I do on a regular basis but haven’t done lately is probably on my mind. If I’ve let the dishes sit for a few days, it’s definitely on my mind; the stack of dishes is right there in front of me. When dirty laundry is piling up, or clean laundry is strewn about, or the floor is gritty, it’s all on my mind. Because my computer knows when I do these things, it also knows a little about what I’m thinking.

It’s a little freaky that my computer literally shows me the current thoughts in my head. If I was more neurotic, all this stuff on my mind would bother the hell of me. But it doesn’t, and that bothered the hell out of my ex.

Seeing into my future

What will I do next? Well, probably something that’s on my mind. More probable yet, something that’s both on my mind and related to what I’m doing right now. Because I’ve designed my software to be contextually aware, I can tell it what I’m doing right now as easily as I tell it what I’ve done in the past.

And so my psychic computer has a good idea of what I’ll either do next or what I will say yes to if cued, asked, or suggested. Thankfully my digitized intentions are private or else advertisers would sacrifice their mother to get their hands on it. I value mothers too much to let that happen.

Psychic? So what?

So everything! It’s a personal and private psychic computer after all. Do you have yours yet? People with psychic computers have a competitive advantage. If you had one, you’d know.

Google has tens of thousands of psychic computers, and look how dominant they are. They make so much money. Facebook also has thousands of psychic computers, and they make so much money. Did you think their AI is playing video games all day? Nope, they’re predicting your future. They know damn well that accurately predicting your future enables them persuade you to act in their interests rather than your own.

But your own psychic computer? It’s the same story except that you get to play the role of Google and Facebook and so on. You get the power of persuasion that prediction enables. Your own psychic computer focuses on your interests.

But who cares if you don’t have a psychic computer, right? It’s a weird idea anyway; you’ll be fine without one. Google and friends will take care of you as if you were their own.