What I Want My Phone To Do
Whether it’s five years from now or fifty, artificial intelligence is coming. We’re already walking around with the embryos of digital consciousness in our pockets: our mobile devices: Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana are the first stages of digital personal assistants that — or maybe who — will become so proficient at organizing our lives, they might better them.
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Beneficial AI That Gets People Off Benefits
There are people who aren’t factored into the American unemployment percentage, because they’ve given up on finding work after years of rejection. Entire industries crumbled in the aftermath of 2008. Virtually unhireable mid-career-aged people with antiquated skill sets and lack of training for other industries’ narrow job requirements abound.
Many of the employed are in scarce part-time jobs with no health care, mental care, dental care or retirement investment opportunities. They don’t make enough money to pay all of their bills.
Even splitting utilities with another person isn’t all that helpful, because these people are so far below any imagined line of where fairness or justice should begin, pulling up a couple of rungs higher on the economic ladder means they’re still just over or below the minimum threshold to be considered impoverished.
And yet, almost all of us have a phone that works as a digital personal assistant. This doesn’t mean that ghettoized and homeless people with phones aren’t really poor; it’s how Western culture operates. Around the globe, indigents can ask Siri, Now or Cortana to pull up a digital map and — using satellites in outer space — get that person to where they want to go, all in a myriad of languages and personable accents.
It’s astounding.
But what I’m curious about is whether or not future iterations of these electronic helpers will assist people in finding rewarding careers. Imagine someone being like:
“Hey, Siri?”
Yeah?
“I need a job that pays the bills.”
You aren’t qualified for any of those.
“Why didn’t you tell this me before I was broke?”
This level of responsiveness is the result of the latest neural-net upgrade, but I’m confident we can turn things around with online training courses for careers that fit your personality type and aptitudes. You can start a paid apprenticeship in as little as ninety days.
“How much does all this cost?”
You will pay Apple five percent of your gross monthly salary for every ten thousand dollar increase in annual income. The payroll deductions begin after your apprenticeship and continue for six months.
“Sign me up.”
I want future digital assistants to be more than marketing machines with useful apps. Imagine AI helping a person prosper. Big data used to maximize human potential.
Virtual reality classrooms, combined with augmented reality, can train people anywhere in the world to expand on their talents, enabling them to live a happy lives with comfortable incomes.
I want the phone of the near future to help people that can’t help themselves. People with mental illness will be guided by their digital assistant to the proper treatment (and they can afford it, because the phone helped them get a good job). Sick people, whether physically or mentally, will be given more opportunities to overcome the financial distress caused by illness or injury. Medical-bill-induced bankruptcy will be a thing of the past, as people are trained into growth-sector jobs that earn a livable wage.
Let’s program our device’s AI to help people that are bad with money to maintain a budget and increase wealth through investments. If freedom is a good thing, let’s stop the financial markets from being a playground dominated by the rich, and open the whole thing up to everyone.
The tech world is filled with moonshots. Let’s get that AI to end poverty and replace plutocracy with democracy.
Or, will the artificial intelligence work for the elites, because it was designed to increase their control of global wealth? A tool of the technorati that extracts what little remains from the lower classes.
Southern Dialect
Many moons ago, a person corrected my spelling of “y’all” — a moment that was seared into my brain. All this time later, I still get paranoid that I spelled it wrong. Today, I pulled the word up on Google to double check, and these are the results that I was given:
What a reminder of the marriage between the U.S.’s South-Eastern culture and Christianity, and how intricate some American English contractions are.
Technology Happenings
I’m all for pharmacology that’s used for human enhancement, but this article from Big Think saying that Adderall might be destroying user’s lives — because it impedes apathy — caught my attention.
People often talk about how rich Bill Gates is, but they don’t often mention how powerful being the richest man in the world makes the founder of Microsoft. If he says AI is a concern, people should listen.
The brainiacs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology probed “the Dark Side of Google’s Ad-Targeting System.” I wonder if they used lube.
This factoid that “an influencer with 500,000 followers and good engagement might earn $5,000 to $7,500 per Instagram photo” is pretty damn interesting.
Music Muse
As I wrote previously, I’m very into mellow electronica right now. Here’s a song from the Freshman album of Glass Animals.
Originally published at www.governmentfishbowl.com on July 9, 2015.
