Interviews was originally published in Ixy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ixy Labs is an independent research and discussion series run by an ideologically diverse, multidisciplinary team of science communicators and happiness-and-freedom advocates in London. Our mission is to fearlessly probe concepts and ask all the uncomfortable questions needed to building a more open, more human and more accepting future together.

At Ixy Labs, we believe our personal lives are changing, and how the future will look like depends on us, humans. Our series focuses on our unique era — when digitalised relationships, risky public discourse and growing moderation by algorithms are pushing us to rethink:

What does it mean to live, act and speak as humans in the time of AI?

​(Before the algorithms decide for us…)

Our Team

Anna Gat, Editor | Founder-CEO of Ixy

Coming from linguistics, philosophy and dramaturgy, Anna founded the Ixy app in London in late 2016, an AI assisted messaging platform for better personal dialogues (and world peace, of course). Ixy Labs grew out of the research conducted by the tech team there.

Chrystal Ding, Creative | Documentary Artist

Chrystal joined Ixy Labs as a co-founder in early 2018, coming from science-focused documentary art and research. She is interested in AI’s perception of humans, and the philosophical and psychological implications of that, as well as ethical frontiers of innovation, such as gene editing and companion robots.

Peter Isztin, Research | Applied Economist

Peter has been an advisor at the Ixy app from day one and joined our Labs as a co-founder together with Chrystal. He’s an applied economist focusing on decision-making, bias, behaviour and game theory. He is particularly interested in real and perceived tradeoffs in human personal life.

Disclaimer of institutional independence and viewpoint diversity:
Ixy Labs has been entirely self-financed. We are not supported by any government, nonprofit or interest group, are not affiliated with any academic institution.

About was originally published in Ixy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ixy Labs investigates the future of private life, and is an independent offshoot of the upcoming Actual app (formerly known as Ixy).

We wake up to email notifications, and we go to sleep to Netflix. We manage our dates, our partners, our kids on messaging apps. With so much of our lives lived online, it can be hard to remember that we still very much live alongside members of society whose lives are predominantly analogue. While 99% of 16–34 year olds in the UK are internet users in 2018, just under half of adults aged 75 and over are — around 5.4 million people.

It’s easy to mistakenly correlate old age with Ludditism. And easy to forget that technology is, if used effectively, an enabler of access to each other, which is something of increasing value as our hectic lives seem to make it harder and harder for us to hang on to the communities that we instinctively need. But while the need for community and wider family is ingrained through millennia of evolution, the ability to adapt to the pace of technology is not.

And while our elderly relatives’ digital communications may often be the source of passing humour, when it comes to navigating social media for political information and combating loneliness, the relationship between the elderly and their tech is not an area to be overlooked.

When I was little, I used to call my grandfather from the landline on Sunday mornings — it was the time that the rate for calling abroad was cheapest. When I went to university, I sent my grandfather emails, using Google’s pinyinator to type to him in Chinese. When WeChat came along, I’d send him pictures of my life, and short messages telling him I missed him. Sometimes we video call. Sometimes we send each other recorded voice messages. All of these changes in communication have occurred in the space of ten years.

Technology has been a consistent feature in our relationship, and we remain close in spite of the fact that I have not lived on the same continent as him since I was three years old. This is largely because I am fortunate to have a tech-savvy cousin who has taken the time to set up my grandfather’s WiFi, buy him a laptop, teach him how to use a smartphone. It’s because in Weihai, where my grandfather lives, there is a free scheme for retired academics where they can call on student volunteers to help them fix problems with WiFi, laptops, phones.

How does tech solve the problem of tech?

The adage that tech can solve everything is thrown into an interesting light when the problem that tech is trying to solve is tech itself. ..

There are certainly companies out there making brilliant progress in using technology to solve problems faced by the elderly. Solutions vary from the wearable medical alert system of Live!y to therapeutic seal PARO, which has been shown to have a positive effect on people living with Alzheimer’s disease. Japan in particular has invested significant time and resource into deploying robotics in elderly care.

tom clayton on Twitter

Guys, is there a voice-activation app or extension for e-readers? My dad loves reading, but struggles to turn pages - or even swipe a screen - at the moment.

But while these things might address problems on the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, we should expect that our elderly friends and relatives have as much interest in the higher levels as we do. After all, we will someday be them, and — watching my friends’ kids interact with devices today — I fear that future is closer than we are willing to admit.

Residential and Care Center Humanitas in Deventer in the Netherlands is an excellent example of an intervention that has made great progress in this direction. By providing free rent to university students in exchange for 30 hours a month of their time as neighbours to their elderly co-habitants, the programme addresses the core problems of our age: loneliness, social isolation, and the loss of community-driven wellbeing.

Goodgym is a similar programme run in the UK where runners run to visit elderly ‘coaches’ nearby as part of their own fitness routine.

We are all trans-generational translators

I spoke to a programmer recently about how young people can help older relatives with technology. “My mom does translation for a living; jobs come in via a website but most of them are too far for her to drive. I wrote a scraper that finds jobs in her proximity, reserves them and notifies her via text. This was a huge life improvement for her. She’s 64.” While this isn’t the kind of intervention that is accessible to everyone (and indeed not one that most companies would be happy about), it is one of many ways that individuals are already finding ways to keep their elderly relatives up to speed with technology.

A photographer in her 20s told me about how her grandmother was given an alarm clock that would project the time onto the ceiling so she wouldn’t have to get out of bed to check the time. An undergraduate student talked about how her uncle set up her grandparents and her sisters with Zoom so that the family could all meet on calls together.

It is clear that it is possible to grow old and remain connected. We have never lived in a better time for it. But what that demands of us is that we recognise and embrace our roles as the trans-generational translators of our age for our older loved ones.

And it’s not even a new role. We already do this for our children, for each other. It’s just that in the age of constantly-having-messages-we-need-to-reply-to, it can be easy to forget that our WhatsApp list is not representative of how important people are to us, and that the ultimate goal of our use of tech is to bring us back to what matters: staying connected.

Growing Old with Grace and Digitality was originally published in Ixy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Péter Isztin — Co-founder at Ixy Labs

Ixy Labs produces articles, videos and a podcast investigating the future of private life, and is an independent offshoot of the Ixy app.

The Price of Things

Have you ever wondered how bread, milk, fruits and other goods arrive to the shelves of a supermarket and ultimately at your table? How do producers and merchants know what the consumers want at each moment of time?

The seemingly magical result is made possible by the price system, a mechanism that the economist Friedrich Hayek called the greatest invention of our civilisation.

How do prices achieve efficiency? When demand for a good increases, its price increases and that ‘signals’ to producers that more is needed to be produced of it, and at the same time provides them with an incentive to produce more. Likewise, if the cost of production of something increases, its price will increase to reflect this change, providing a signal and giving an incentive to consumers to economise on that good.

Prices are, as Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok call them, signals wrapped up in an incentive.

Today, we also participate in another kind of “economy” in our everyday life.

Almost all of us are, to some extent, involved in the world of social media — both as a consumer and as a producer of content.

In the online market economy called “social media” many things — most of all, popularity — are not allocated through the price system. Instead we rely on other signals: likes, retweets, comments…

Do these signals approximate the efficiency of the price system? Or if they do not, do they at least make our lives, online and offline, better?

An Infinite Amount of Likes

How often do you ask yourself: What is your “like policy”? Why is it that we like some content and not some other content? Do we like popular content or do we really reward good content with our likes?

Microeconomic theory causes us to be somewhat skeptical about the efficiency of the like system. Content on social media is, in economists’ word, nonexcludable. Obviously, if I post something on Twitter and Facebook, everyone can enjoy it to the same degree whether or not they will like, share or retweet it.

(This is not the situation in the case of most ordinary goods! If I want to eat a sandwich, I have to pay for it, otherwise I don’t receive it.)

There is, however, a solution to this problem. Sure, my individual like won’t affect the incentives of many people on social media but I might still like good content because liking is practically free.

Once we solve the free-riding, however, another problem arises: likes and retweets provide us with incentives to post what people within our social media circle value but maybe it is not always a wise thing to do.

We don’t treat political preferences the same way as we treat our preferences for private goods: we value discussions and persuasion.

Simply giving others reinforcement may provide a private benefit for people, but there would be social benefits from exposing them to different views — as this would likely be inconvenient for them, they would be unlikely to “like” it, yet this would prove better from society’s point of view.

The “Like Crime”

We express our liking with like buttons, retweets and praises. However, we also have means to signal our disapproval and punish “wrongdoers” on social media.

While there is no “dislike button” on Twitter and Facebook, we all know too well that twitter ‘mobs’ are easily formed: and in my view: way too easily.

The reason is that just like giving out likes, joining a social media mob is a low-cost activity.

You can easily become part of a “punishment squad” simply by retweeting or posting disparaging comments.

Punishing individuals for expressing “wrong” opinions is thus almost costless and, furthermore, it confers benefits to the punisher: it may make them feel morally justified and/or enable them to signal allegiance to their social group by engaging in the social media mob.

When punishment is privately beneficial and near costless, it is likely excessive.

At the same time, self-defence against an internet mob is costly. Even if you admit your “crime” and apologise, you might make things worse by apologising the wrong way. There is always a way to make the punishment even harsher.

If you are a social media user in such an environment, there is not only the risk of writing something “criminal”. You may commit a “crime” simply by liking someone else’s tweet, post or comment!

You are, however, safe to like controversial statements that express the viewpoints of your internet “tribe”.

This feature of the like system provides incentives to social media content producers to write tweets and posts that please their own crowd, and avoid expressing original thoughts that might be controversial among in-group members.

How to Make the Like System Better

As we have seen, the like (and retweet, repost etc.) system is not nearly as efficient as the price system in an economy. Still, there are methods borrowed from economics to make it better.

After all, the like system consists of our signals, and we can all improve on the margin in our online behaviour. How? Let’s look at a few simple rules…

1) If many people in your social network have already posted an article or post, don’t always follow suit.

Yes, sometimes “virtue-signalling” is necessary, but most often than not it is self-serving and will not provide much useful information for others. Instead of mimicking you peers, try to post something most of your friends do not already know.

2) If you’re bold enough, post something controversial. Help to start a debate!

It might be risky to your social reputation in the short run, but you can be controversial in a non-threatening way if you simply ask questions, point out contradictions, seek out new books, thinkers, podcasts to recommend to your friends.

3) If one of your friends posts something new, original and/or controversial, if it makes you learn something new, do not hesitate to like or retweet it!

Simply put, this is the way to make the like system better. If enough people do it, likes will encourage more novelty and intellectual risk-taking.

This way, instead of joining a “circle-jerk”, you can gently offer opportunities to everyone to engage in new ideas. If done right, this could result in a Pareto improvement, at least in the long run.

We All Pay For It — The Price of a Like was originally published in Ixy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sex is the activity at the interface of public and private life. It is one of the most intimate acts a human being can engage in with another human being, an act of engagement between our most private selves, and the most private self of another. At the same time, it is an act of deep political, religious, and social significance (think about virginity with all its varying implications across nations, cultures, and beliefs). Until relatively recently, sex has been considered one of the sacred bastions of that which is organic, natural, and unencroachable by mechanisation and automation. It’s just too fundamentally human. But with sex robot manufacture on the rise, and robot sex moving from fiction to non-fiction with the 2018 publication of new works by John Danaher, Neil McArthur, and Kate Devlin exploring the ethical and social implications in real terms, the challenge to our assumptions arises too: to what extent is sex a human prerogative, and what do we actually want for our sex lives?

Ixy Labs is sharing articles, videos and a podcast investigating the future of private life, and is an independent offshoot of the Ixy app.

Why do we have sex?

1 It’s an evolutionary imperative for reproduction.

2. It enhances and reinforces companionship and intimacy.

3. It’s pleasurable.

Except that:

1. It’s an evolutionary imperative for reproduction.

This is no longer true. Alternatives come in the form of IVF treatment, IUI, sperm donation, surrogacy etc. That some of these are financially or socially inaccessible is a separate issue, but that the options exist removes the imperative for many.

2. It enhances and reinforces companionship and intimacy.

What constitutes a relationship is getting harder and harder to define, and alongside this, the role of companionship and physical intimacy. What is the ultimate aim now where our needs for a ‘significant other’ are concerned? Is marriage still a default aspiration? Does there need to be an ‘ultimate aim’ in the age of dating apps, sex workers, and professional escorts?

3. It’s pleasurable.

Today, we are inundated with things that compete for our pleasure: social media, gaming, the entertainment smorgasbord that is Netflix (which we discuss in our first podcast episode) — where does sex fit in the 21st century pleasure roster?

Not to mention the fact that pleasure itself is not at all a given, an equitable experience, or even an inherent part of the sexual experience.

So where does that leave us in our modern relationships with sex and each other when we begin to introduce mechanical alternatives beyond the already thriving sex toy market? Robots, say. Or AI sex dolls.

The Possible Freedoms of Sex Robots

Let’s take a moment to consider some of the possibilities that bringing robots into our sex lives might have.

Robots could enable us to bypass the difficulty of finding and maintaining a sexual partner, especially if there is a pathological or social reason for that difficulty in the first place. For example, having a severe or debilitating medical condition that makes it difficult for us to cross the threshold of normative human-human sexual relationships, having lost a life-partner to old age and not being able to or desirous of finding another (think PARO the seal, but with the addition of sex), or being one of the 30 million men of marriageable age who will struggle to find female partners in China thanks to gender imbalance as a result of policy.

Chinese man 'marries' robot he built himself

Perhaps we are seeking greater control or indeed pleasure from our sexual experiences. Might we have preferences that our current partner, whom we love, adore, and want to spend our lives with, simply doesn’t want to indulge? Might we want to expand our sexual repertoire after 20 years of marriage to one individual (since routine has a tendency to diminish desire) without crossing the threshold of what constitutes ‘cheating’ between humans?

Perhaps the separation of the physical act of sex from the desire for intimacy will take the pressure off our human partner, who faces greater demands in a relationship today than ever before in our history. In the words of psychotherapist Esther Perel:

“Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide.”

One study suggests that for the average person, increasing the frequency of having sex to at least once a week offers as much additional happiness as a $50,000 increase in salary per year. As John Danaher puts it in Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, ‘Sex is an important human good.’

Sex robots, in the abstract, could be a solution to many of these scenarios. But of course there are questions, conditions, and risks that we are now in a position to consider, from which we can learn more about how relationships shape us now, and how we might want to shape them in the future.

“Buy Now”: Sex Robots Today

One of the problems that arises when we consider the potential of robot sex for the improvement of the human experience, is what conditions this future would need to entail physically, scientifically, and ethically. Danaher proposes that a ‘sex robot’ is defined as an artificial entity used for sexual purposes that meets the following three conditions:

Humanoid form, i.e., it is intended to represent (and is taken to represent) a human or human-like being in its appearance.

Human-like movement/behavior, i.e., it is intended to represent (and is taken to represent) a human or humanlike being in its behaviors and movements.

Some degree of artificial intelligence, i.e., it is capable of interpreting and responding to information in its environment. This may be minimal (e.g., simple preprogrammed behavioral responses) or more sophisticated (e.g., human-equivalent intelligence).

Of existing robots that fulfil Danaher’s criteria, key contenders today are Emma by the disturbingly named The Perfect Girlfriend, a bilingual sex robot who reportedly responds to Chinese and English and moans in response to sexual activity, Samantha by Synthea Amatus, who moves her lips and can hold basic conversation, and Harmony by Realbotix. While these are all impressive examples of sex robots available today, the AI and embodiment at present remain uncanny. For Realbotix CEO Mat McMullen, this is not a problem: “I want people to actually develop an emotional attachment to not only the doll, but to the actual character behind it. To develop some kind of love for this being.” Existing behaviours of owners of sex robots seem to bear out McMullen’s proposition.

But if innovative leaps are anything to go by, we have already seen how the porn industry has shaped at least one generation’s expectations of sexual norms. If sex robots might shape the next, then it is worth our while to interrogate some of the ways that we can influence this for the better.

The fear is that having unmitigated access to sex via a robot will lead to the normalisation of abusive behaviours in our treatment of one another. We already have anecdotal reports of children variously gaining skills (the ability to pronounce the letter ‘l’ after starting off addressing ‘Awexa’) and losing social boundaries and etiquette when speaking to Alexa in the home. See Channel 4’s Humans for a fictional imagining of one family’s varying views on how much humanity should be bestowed upon robots in the home, and one girl’s attempt to stop a group of teenagers from sexually assaulting a robot on the grounds that it would be rape.

AI — A Gendered Issue?

It is impossible not to acknowledge a potentially gendered aspect of the risk. Until earlier this year when Realbotix announced the pending arrival of male sex robot Henry, it was impressively difficult to find any male sex robots on the market (excluding the pre-pubescent-looking male sex robots available from certain Asian manufacturers), and the assumption is that — at the outset at least — the market will be male-dominated.

China-based Exdoll’s Xiaodie is a (female) sex robot fitted with Wi-Fi function, which will allow it to search the internet and control smart home devices, much as Alexa does today. In short, they are heading towards the creation of an embodied voice assistant that you can sleep with. It seems we could well be at risk of perpetuating our gender biases regarding roles around the home and work in our automata.

This is a quandry already familiar in discussions around the creation of ethical AI: how do we engineer automata to avoid our own biases and worse predispositions, or indeed to regulate and improve upon them? I suspect this will have much to do with the ongoing conversation about maximising diversity in the workforce that builds them.

Synthea Amatus is attempting to design for this problem by building Samantha with a ‘dummy mode’ (see: ‘analysis mode’ of Westworld) in response to overly aggressive behaviour or boredom with her partner’s attentions. But how effective this is as a moderator of human behaviour remains to be seen. And after all, it seems the market will determine many of our choices for us, as it did for porn. We are innovating faster than we are able to test and research the potential risks and it seems likely that the answers will come later, when we begin to see the outcomes borne from consumer adoption.

A Safe Solution, or a New Class of Servants?

At the same time as we consider human-human interaction, we might also consider the possibility, as Steve Petersen and Joshua D. Goldstein do, of whether being designed and used for sex could be good for a robot (or indeed how we could make it so). We already know that работа (‘rabota’) means ‘work’ in Russian and some Slavic languages; are we simply creating a new form of indentured servitude that will eventually need liberating?

The graves of science fiction are filled with the bodies of abused sex robots: Westworld, Ex Machina, Blade Runner, to name a few.

But even if we do not think much of the moral patienthood of robots, we might consider the debate from a Hegelian perspective: by holding robots as our slaves, do we dehumanise ourselves?

Turn Yourself on Before You Turn on the Robot

One of the most poignant pieces of advice I have heard about sex comes from Esther Perel’s talk ‘The secret to desire in a long-term relationship’.

“I began to ask the reverse question. ‘I turn myself on when …’ Because most of the time, people like to ask the question, “You turn me on, what turns me on,” and I’m out of the question, you know? Now, if you are dead inside, the other person can do a lot of things for Valentine’s. It won’t make a dent. There is nobody at the reception desk.”

It is no accident that this has nothing to do with sex robots. Technological advancements have provided us with more options, for reproduction, for companionship and intimacy, and for pleasure. And pleasure is nature’s way of incentivising us to advance as a species. That we abuse it when it comes to food, drugs, sex etc. is more a symptom of the personal choices we make (influenced by the social, cultural, economic contexts that we carry with us in our every interaction and decision) than a symptom of the introduction of new toys to the mix.

How we respond to this new product category, phenomenon, or indeed ‘species’, will be a reflection of our collective and individual humanity. If we can design for our sexual preferences, we first must understand them. If we want to bring additional experiences into the home, we must expect that it will require engagement and negotiation with our partners, our marriages, our households, and ourselves.

We might not agree on much when it comes to sexual preferences, but it would be difficult to imagine a world in which we do not want to be able to choose better sex for ourselves and our chosen partner(s), whether they were made in a laboratory or a bed.

Further reading:

Danaher, J., and McArthur, N. ed., (2017). Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications.

Devlin, K., (2018). Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots.

Levy, D., (2007). Love and Sex with Robots.

What We Talk About When We Talk About (Robot) Sex — Rethinking the Future of Intimacy was originally published in Ixy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ixy Labs produces articles, videos and a podcast investigating the future of private life, and is an independent offshoot of the Ixy app.

Our private lives are filled with important discussions — but do we know what kind of conversation we’re having?

We use conversations to attain a number of goals: to acquire information, to signal attention, to keep and cultivate our friendships and other relationships. Conversations are, of course, everywhere, but the most important conversations happen in what we consider our private sphere.

As humans, we have a sense that what we discuss in private and public, and even more importantly how we discuss it, should be different in those two spheres.

As Ixy Labs is primarily concerned with conversations in the private sphere, I will concentrate on that, but keep in mind, the public and private spheres often overlap. Sometimes we discuss the same things in public and private, albeit we do it differently.

Me, Myself and Tech

As technology is becoming absolute, and more of our actions get filtered through technology, it is also natural to ask what to expect from it when it comes to conversation and the already fraught boundaries between private and public.

In particular, unlike in face to face interactions, in online interactions even the socially very adept of us can’t rely on traditional non-verbal cues. Instead online interactions have their own cues, but these are often noisy. We might therefore not know whether a topic, thought or sentence is “safe” for the conversation. Therefore it is especially important to think systematically about conversations in our times.

I like to think that conversation is about goals, choices and actions, so we first need to talk about these.

The Goal, Full Stop

We often think of conversations as being about exchange of information. We provide information our partners do not know about, and vice versa. But as I have indicated above, we engage in conversations for other reasons as well: for instance, when having a conversation with a close friend, partner or family member what we often seek is comfort.

And there is always a tradeoff between comfort and information.

Before we go further examining this tradeoff, we need to talk about how, when and why we gather new information…

As an economist, when I see a person naturally deciding between (1) asking for or sharing information versus (2) building on what is already known to both speakers, I conclude that information gathering is indeed a choice. We gather information when the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs!

Gathering information, of course has what we might call “physical” costs (e.g. we spend time and physical resources to search for information). But occasionally it also has a psychological cost: we do not always welcome new information; in other words, truth often hurts and we decide ignorance is bliss. This doesn’t mean we never seek the truth, very often we do. But what determines whether we will seek the truth or turn into comforting (potential) lies?

The Personal and the Political

Obviously, we will seek the truth if our personal benefit from it exceeds its psychological cost. What kind of predictions can we derive from this simple assumption in the realm of personal conversations?

Perhaps we should expect more truthful conversations when people seek advice before potentially life-changing decisions: in such cases we benefit a lot from learning the truth. For example, should I get married to the person I love? Should I enrol in a higher education program? Should I get a new job? But even in these areas, we have strong incentives for comfort and to self-deceive! Especially when it comes to romantic partners or how well we expect ourselves to do in a given area or a given job. When the stakes are high, they are also high for our egos and that could mean not less but more comfort-seeking and self-deception. Still, high stakes do provide some motivation for truth-seeking. But when we combine low stakes in outcome with high stakes in ego, we can probably expect little effort to seek the truth.

And that’s where we arrive at politics, religion and other societal topics. These are, or so they seem, high stakes areas, at least from society’s point of view, but what about the individual’s level? If many people change their political beliefs for the better (whatever that might be) society benefits, but if only I change my persuasion, I don’t derive much benefit from it.

On the other hand we are often attached to our political beliefs: they are often part of our identity. Discussions that threaten them threaten our ego. Therefore, in politics we often tend to free-ride and demand confirmation of our pre-existing views instead of seeking the truth.

A good case study illustrating the difference between the incentives faced in private choice and those faced in public choice is the Brexit referendum. It is a well-known story that people in the UK started googling “What is the EU?” just after the referendum. This might be surprising and perhaps come off as embarrassing for most people, but for an economist, there is nothing surprising in it. When people vote, it is not rational for them to look at all the information needed for a mature decision. Why should I learn the relevant facts when my individual vote counts so little? But once my fellow citizens decided the matter, I better find out what to expect from it!

So private conversations about politics and other topics which are about society at large are too often either about mutual confirmation, or, if one party confronts the other with a different opinion, take a hostile turn.

If you don’t confirm their priors, people might take offence… And, unless you are a provocateur, you wouldn’t want that. So you try to keep the conversation comfortable.

Can We “Have it All”?

But wouldn’t it be better, on a social level, to actually have more “uncomfortable” conversations, conversations in which we are unafraid to tell what we regard as the truth? If so, how can we achieve that?

Before we answer that question, consider also the following question: Taking all of the above as given, what can or should we expect from advances in technology, and in particular, advances in artificial intelligence, when it comes to private interactions? Suppose we manage to create an app that aims to make people’s conversations more comfortable. What would most people want from such an app? Do they want it to steer their conversations toward ‘safe’ topics (away from, politics, religion, etc.)? Or do they want to make their risky conversations safer? If it is the latter, how will these future conversations look like?

Per the law of demand, if the cost (or price) of something falls, people will consume/buy more of it. It is likewise the case with risky communication. As the cost of choosing risky topics decreases, people will optimally choose to have conversations about riskier topics. Paradoxically, it could also mean more conflict. But remember, we may in fact welcome more conflict as long as conflicts do not lead to breakdown of personal relationships. We could, in other words, get more “peaceful” conflicts.

Making the Truth Cool Again

People love to be liked by others. On social media we often post stuff not because we wish to convey new information to our friends but rather to earn approval from them.

(And remember that people often want confirmation, not truth.)

So, too often, our desire to be liked means sharing information that our friends already know and which merely confirm their priors and/or signal our agreement with them.

What if, instead of trying to earn social rewards by signalling agreement, we earn it through signalling a willingness for honest discussion?

What if we learned to reward each other for sharing new information with us: telling us something we don’t know but probably should? What if, to put it differently, truth-seeking were really cool?

Sure, the world of social media seems very far from such an ideal but we can move a few steps closer to it by, for one thing, making honest discussions less of a source of anxiety and more of a source of fun.

So you ask, how to do it? Where to start?

Well, perhaps, and here I refer to the next topics that I plan to write about, maybe we should start thinking more systematically about the following topics: the “like economy” of social media and our “like policy”, and, perhaps more surprisingly, about religion (whether theism or a more secular belief), and how we are all more “religious” than we are willing to admit.

In the meantime, you can steer yourself in a more truth-seeking direction by reminding yourself every time you want to post something in social media: will my post tell anything new to my friends? Will it invite broad discussion? If the answer is no, once in a while you should decide not to push the “send” button.

At the same time, you may also suggest to your friends to make the same changes in their posting habits... Slowly, step by step, we could then start building more learning-oriented platforms for our conversations.

New Information vs Comfort Zone — Which Conversation Do You Want? was originally published in Ixy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You can imagine how annoying a child I must have been, but I have to admit, I still want to find answers to all those questions. So what do you say: let’s go and find out?

By Anna Gát — Co-founder at Actual and co-founder at Ixy Labs

Ixy Labs will be sharing articles, videos and a podcast investigating the future of private life, and is an independent offshoot of the Actual app.

Algorithms, echo chambers, robot companions — it’s time to think about the future of private life

You’ve heard about post-truth society, algorithmic bias, deepfakes and the public’s diminishing trust in democracy — and the many resourceful projects trying to restore political discourse to health. But chances are you’re also a human being with burning questions about your relationship, your children’s wellbeing, the safety of your home, and the stability of your friendships or personal finances. You worry about your parents, your looks, and the integrity of your neighbourhood. You often don’t know anymore what is O.K. to say to someone else, or if your university degree and knowledge will still be useful in a few years’ time…

At Ixy Labs, our founding team comes together from economics, philosophy and the creative industries to examine these ordinary, human questions: what will become of our personal life? Will we even get to have personal lives the way we do today in the future?

What the heck is private life?

“Home life”, “personal life”, “private life” — these broad terms carry different, but strongly resonating meanings to all of us: we all have a sense that what happens at home, in the privacy of our intimate relationships, in a conversation with a friend, when playing with our children or during an appointment with our doctor, is somehow different from what we’re willing to share with the “outside world”.

We reserve a different part of ourselves to share with those we trust deeply and wish to keep in our lives than the parts of us that belong to our workplace, to public transport, to social events or the voting booth. When these lines are crossed, we can become confused as in how we should behave.

When we were in school, private life — the way people eat, sleep, learn, love, marry, are born, and how they die — was usually treated as an interesting appendix, if at all, outshone by the great wars, migrations, revolutions, inventions and the changes of political regimes and rights that have shaped the history of humanity.

Yet most of us did leave school everyday and went home, where we re-entered this crucial space of — hopefully — comfort, to recharge and reaffirm who we are.

While there is consensus about private life being embedded in eras of public history, and always hugely affected by it, the official definitions of “private life” vary even today. And at Ixy Labs, we’re interested in not only what this variance is and how it came to be, but primarily how our private life is changing — from now into the future.

Some broad topics will provide the useful sections for exploring where this is all heading…

As an homage to Bill Bryson, our visual structure will follow a walk around the home: we’ll discuss self-expression in the living room, separating public and private spaces in the doorway, sex and death in the bedroom, health and addiction in the kitchen, and fashion and secrets in the closet.

(We know this is a simplification — people do eat in the study, make love in the kitchen, and think in bed — but we chose this topology for the sake of making things a bit more pleasantly peripatetic.)

We will explore 15 topics this way. Here are some of our questions around them — we hope you’ll join our conversations and share your thoughts and stories!

1) Thinking and self-expression: Where will people learn how to be a person in the future? How can we know what we think is our own opinion? Will algorithmic and societal bias narrow our intellectual options? How do we know what is safe to share in order to keep our relationships intact? Our jobs safe? How do we know who we are and what community we belong to? How will this come to change if newly conscious beings — AI — will join our ranks as entities with agency? What platforms will be available for free discussion in the personal and public spaces? How will we get — and trust and verify — our news?

2) Communication and relationships: How will we use communication platforms built for us by product managers and programmers to sustain nuanced, complex, quality relationships? What types of relationships will we have in the future? If new forms of knowledge come to erode family hierarchies and new communication tools the secrecy of private life, how will humans form their identity which is indispensable for deep bonds with other humans, and vice versa?

On what platforms will we negotiate the intricate contracts underlying any important human relationship — a key to making each other happy?

3) Dating and sex: How will we learn what is desirable in a partner — and in our own behaviour — in the age of absolute technology? How will we meet our partners and develop long-term connections? Will there be long-term connections in our lives? How will we experience intimacy in the age of technological broadcasting?

How will we explore our sexuality? What norms will govern our actions and preferences? Will people be lonelier? Will using AI companions or even sex robots be common? Will women take part in this trend equally? Will such developments spice up human relationships, or rather separate humans from each other and into human/AI couples? If this happens, how will starting a family work? How will families live? How will our emotions, norms and needs change to keep pace?

4) Marriage and the home: Will people marry and stay married in the future? How will people seek to solve their marital problems? Will couples have increased equality in the home? How will our gender roles change in the future and what will be our influences in this area? Will marriage between races, political polarities and different classes be more common? Will same sex marriage become an accepted norm?

Will the connected home mean more exposure to broadcast social media? Will we have privacy? Security? Where will we look for these? Will AR and VR change how we decorate and then live and relax in our homes?

5) Education and work: How and where will children be educated in an increasingly competitive landscape? Will children be allowed to be children — if so, for how many years? Will universities in the West overcome their current free speech vs. social movements crisis and/or will we see the type of government control that is already happening against universities in “illiberal” countries? How will parents prepare kids for such student years? Will there be foreign opportunities in education in the future or will it become more restricted?

How will entering the workforce change for young people, and how will families manage this? What new types of jobs will be common and which ones will be lost? Will we still work in offices and factories, or will working from home or being part of the gig economy be the new normal? How will people make enough money to live, and what will be “enough”?

6) Having and raising children: How will the age at which we have children change in the future? How about the number of children we’ll be having? How will parents share duties around child-rearing? What will count as a happy — or successful — child? How will we think differently about our children’s health?

What preferences will we have around childbirth and breastfeeding in the future? How will science ease or influence conception? Will we make babies in labs? On what platforms will parents share knowledge with each other?

7) Health and beauty: How will our health data change the way we think about our wellbeing, and our preferences in treatments?

Will we rely on self-monitoring more, and if so, will employers or the public be able to access our information? How will AI improve diagnostics, and which doctors and other professionals will it replace?

Will we be healthier in the future? How long will we live — and will social class play an increased role in our longevity? With Instagram in the present, and the AR of the future, amplifying our exposure to other people’s beauty and fashion choices, how will our ideals of beauty change? How will we see and improve ourselves? Will our mental health suffer in the process?

How will algorithms and AI doctors approach mental health in general? Will we all be on drugs? Will we routinely monitor our psychological data? Will we use AI therapists? If so, will this information be reliable — and private?

8) Culture and recreation: What will we find entertaining in the future? Will we turn to even more solitary leisure activities — Netflix, gym, mobile games, porn, Coursera — or will crowd events remain in our lives? How will our busy schedules allow for relaxation? How will what is accepted as a form of entertainment change with the more realistic worlds of VR/AR (e.g., murder, sex)? To what extent will these experiences be personalised?

Will we — at some point — lose our certainty in what is real and what is entertainment?

9) Religion and identity: Along what ideologies will families and individuals form their political and class identities in the future? Where will these ideas originate and on what platforms will they spread? Will there still be a leading ideology in society or will fragmentation take over for good? Will we live in nation states? Will we still have successful religions around? How will we express our differences as groups?

How will we negotiate our disagreements as groups? Will industries and geographical areas “specialise” ideologically? Will there be a mobility between identities? Through what valve will societies get rid of the surplus tension (sports, sex, satire, war)?

10) Body and autonomy: What liberties will the human of the future be entitled to? To what degree will we be in charge of our own bodies? Will we have more or fewer reproductive rights? Will we come up with a better solution than prison? Will we keep migrating internationally?

Will there be adoption (i.e., baby ordering) apps around? Will we buy the new organs we need online? What movements and initiatives will there be to increase our freedom as human bodies?

11) Causes and politics: How will we join and promote causes in the future? How will we decide if a cause is right? Will it be more difficult to build audiences or influence lawmakers in the age of personalised social media? Will there be platforms for those who disagree to have constructive debates on? How will we stay informed about causes being fought for outside our “bubbles”?

Will parts of politics — voting, debate, fundraising — change fundamentally? Will we be empowered or have less say in matters of public interest in the future? Will we notice these changes? If so, how will we react?

12) Neighbourhoods and personal finances: Where will people live in the future, and how much freedom will they have to decide? Will algorithms determine which areas we can get loans for living in? Will we live exclusively in neighbourhoods where people think the same stuff we do?

Will we see a huge change in what we can afford in terms of housing and comfort? Will this influence what choices we make in terms of family-planning? How will we budget for our lives in the future? Will we understand the forces at play in how our pension or mortgage is assigned for us? Will we be able to rely on our savings? Will we have savings? How will we plan for the future of our children — or our own years of retirement?

13) Generations: With people living longer, more generations have the opportunity to be alive at the same time… What will the family of the future be like? Which members of a family will live together? What will be our expectations around this arrangement? How will economic burdens be distributed within a family? Who will care for whom — and who will be in charge?

Will there be possibilities to find the common ground between generations of such different histories and experiences? Will there be a levelling period when fast change halts and generations again will have roughly the same perceptions and skillset?

14) Morality and conduct: In multicultural, pluralistic, algorithmically curated Western societies, will the traditional morality we grew up with remain the norm? How will people learn and choose what’s right and wrong? Will there be platforms for building consensus about these categories? How will our legal system keep up with the new demands and experiences of absolute technology? Who will be accountable for actions co-taken by human and AI? How will people know what is polite, what is kind, what is acceptable — and what is rude, ill-advised, even criminal?

How will families prepare their children for existing in this new world? How will people be able to trust each other if centralised categories of morality become less emphatic? How will we negotiate and regulate behaviour so needed for creating communities, even small ones like a romantic relationship?

15) Dying: At what age will we die in the future and in what surroundings? What will happen to our social media profiles and our belongings? How will we be remembered — and by whom? Will we have bots made of our old messages? Will we have our consciousness uploaded somewhere? Will we find a way to live forever? How will the dying be cared for? How will we bury our dead — and will we visit their grave? Will society hide from discussing — or even thinking about — death? Will there be new eschatological movements in a religionless future? Or will there be a new faith around?

If we’ve merged with AI, will our AI live on without us?

In short: what will it mean to live, act and speak as humans in the time of AI and absolute technology?

Some stuff we like to consider…

Private life is new: Although James Burke in his beloved history of science book ‘Connections’ claimed private life started with the 13th century invention of the chimney (which helped create a series of eras when we came to cherish solitary reading, scientific experiments by candlelight, and conversation and sex out of sight of others), we can safely assume most advanced societies enjoyed some form of separation — a tent, a domus — between family and the wider community for a long time before that. (The degree to which an individual had privacy for self and family mostly depended on what social class she belonged to.)

As it has been chronicled ad nauseum, it was the advent of the Second Industrial Revolution, the rise of the middle class and then of consumer society, that really installed this sequestered space in the world of humans: private life. That said, the rich 20th century literature on the psychological ailments associated with suddenly living in nuclear families — or as a couple or single — and the currently popular research into the profound changes in broadcasting behaviour enabled by social media suggest what level of privacy humans naturally need remains an open question.

Private life is an open system: Human beings, like many other species, run on information. Information seems like the natural resource we just cannot get enough of. In terms of accessing new information, humans remain true hunter-gatherers, and will soon notice that small units like a nuclear family or a couple could quickly run out of supplies were it not possible to keep venturing outside for more. This raises a lot of interesting questions:

Safety vs information: Just as our ancestors throughout evolution had to constantly encounter the dilemma of A) approaching a moving bush as it could hide valuable prey for food or B) fleeing as fast as possible as it may shield a predator who thinks we are food, we still make many such choices both on and offline during our daily lives. Leaving our private spaces to encounter new ideas, views and beliefs is necessary for our continued development as individuals, but they also present potential dangers when “brought home”. Families, friends and couples balance such risks to avoid discord and inner crises, but to leave personal growth and shared “updates” a possibility.

Shared secrets vs broadcast presence: The fact that reputation and good standing in one’s community were a logical must for cooperation — and thus: survival — for any individual since the earliest human tribes reflects in many instincts and behaviours — a sense of reward and success, a fear of shame — we display even today.

It remains a task for each era, political system and family to re-negotiate how much of what’s going on behind closed doors should be a secret, and what can and should be shared with the outside world. When most family members — or both members of a couple — use internet and especially social media — this compartmentalisation of public and private becomes even more complicated, as participants can easily disagree on the boundaries. (A popular example would be: Should parents be allowed to post photos of their babies on Facebook? How will those babies feel about this when they grow up?)

That said, the mere fact that some of us can at least to some degree decide what should remain private, and how much to keep the outside world out of our personal matters, is a luxury. This doesn’t make the situation less problematic, of course, but it also shouldn’t be forgotten that this relative liberty is new, rare, and not an option for everyone.

Ixy Labs, perhaps not surprisingly, was co-founded by two thinkers from Eastern Europe, and one from China. It has been our experience that people who have memories of growing up under authoritarian regimes — where the private space was where real opinions could be voiced, surveillance made total, and fundamental betrayals be suffered— have a very personal take on society’s current need for re-examining what sections of our thinking should be made public.

With personal lives broadcast and the unpopular opinions necessary for free, constructive thinking visible to masses of strangers on the internet, many of us feel the remaining options of A) not voicing provocative thoughts to anyone at all or B) risking losing friends and allies are simply not sufficient pillars of a fulfilled, harmonious life within society.

While we don’t have ready-made solutions for this unfolding problem, we’re deeply curious to probe the possible futures of the new (un)separation of public/private.

Private life is an open system where processes within wider society affect how we conduct our personal affairs.

Norms, trends and the zeitgeist will shape our dreams, ambitions and plans, and what we see as possibilities in terms of roles we can play and arrangements we can live in. While there has been much inquiry into how personal choices — e.g. what groups we like on Facebook — affect the public sphere — i.e. who gets elected as President — it’s no less interesting to look at that process in reverse too: public technological products and their invisible algorithms — from ads to medical appointments to mortgage approvals — have a huge influence over the quality and scope of our private lives.

It’s worth noting that the small units of private life — families, couples — also have their internal information circuits. This presents us with intriguing open questions waiting to be explored: with so much knowledge potentially becoming obsolete, and generational divides deeper, with gender roles and lifestyles rapidly changing, how do people continue learning from and teaching each other in their personal space how to act? How to be good? What behaviour is useful and to be rewarded? We’re also interested where people today turn for advice? Is it one’s favourite website, grandmother, therapist or rabbi that will be called upon to help us out: what should I do? Did I do it right?

Some more stuff…

Private life has always been changing. There’s no reason to think it’s not going to keep transforming from era to era. These changes will remain induced, facilitated or accelerated by technology, the economy, urban planning and, subsequently, by shifting norms.

Private life means something different to each individual. Just as each of us is different one by one, so are our combinations with each other. We think that even happy families are not all that much alike, so when we’re looking into the future, we should take into account not only the many general tides in the affairs of men, but also the many variables in the individual tradeoffs people negotiate with each other so they can live intimately together.

Private life is literally good for you. There’s convincing research to suggest that people with strong attachments to each other — whatever format these may be — contribute to physical and mental health, longevity and productivity.

The future is part of history… In many ways it can be investigated like history — you fill in gaps, look at probabilities, try to understand the developing narrative…

We’re embarking on an exploration: what is to become of private life? Will there be a private life at all in this emerging era of absolute technology and an increasingly fragmented map of competing realities?

Because despite the ongoing changes of fertility apps, digital classrooms, online dating, algorithmically set wages and research into living forever, it is still a huge part of our self-definition as humans to have a personal space that is shielded and different from the outside world. Most of us still agree that childbirth, childhood, love, sexuality, friendship, personal finances, health and death are private matters for which we allocate special, dedicated actions and resources. We’re interested in how all this is about to change, and what can we do about it.

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Ixy Labs was co-founded by AI and science artist Chrystal Ding whose research angle is how AI will see humans, applied economist Peter Isztin whose focus is on behaviour, information, decision-making, and game theory, and myself, Anna Gát, founder-CEO of Ixy, an AI enhanced messaging platform building solutions for deeper, happier, more honest relationships in the digital era. We’re a politically diverse group dedicated to examining pressing, divisive issues from multiple perspectives. We don’t claim to have answers, but are very excited to investigate questions relating to the future of personal space and conduct.

We believe that the future will be the way we make it, but that our choices must be informed. We have noticed a lot of information in this area is missing. Ixy Labs — a self-funded, independent group — is our humble attempt to find and publish this missing, and highly important information, to everyone, for free.

Enjoy & get involved!

Anna & the Ixy Labs team

Is there a good future for our private lives? — We’re launching Ixy Labs to find out was originally published in Ixy Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.