AI Household Staff and Why Only User-Held Data Models Deliver It

When we talk about the Internet (or Web 3) ten years from now, what will it look like? At Prifina, we are building a personal data engine that allows individuals to extract more value from their data. We are building an entire ecosystem around that. In this post, I’d like to spend some time talking about data sovereignty, NFTs for households, and the household staff of the future.

Let me come back to that in just a second. I want to start with a simple proposition: we see that in the near future, all of us will have our household staff. However, it will be slightly different than we might suspect. It will be the future where each of us will have our own personal doctors, our therapists, sleep and nutrition coaches, and our meditation experts. They will curate what we read and how we live our lives.

This is ultimately inevitable, we will quite simply run out of humans to specialize in each domain of expertise (e.g. PTSD therapy) and those humans will run out of hours to serve all the demands. We simply do not have enough scale — with humans.

The New Data Economy Will be Centered Around the Individual

When we talk about the Internet (or Web 3 — however you dress it) ten years from now, what will it look like? Let’s take it back a little bit and recall how the Internet evolved. Nowadays, the entire world is exploding with data. And we have seen signs of this shift towards the increasing role of data in the past decades. However, the most recent explosion is in smart devices, sensors, wearables, online accounts, all the apps we download to our phones, etc.

As we are thinking about harnessing all this sensor-generated data, it is essential to be mindful that it should be utilized in the right way. Data can be harnessed to power the best-in-class services across many different verticals. It can be used to power those services in different media, such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and metaverse. Data will play a vital role in powering various types of headless applications or individual AI.

We see how data is becoming centered around the individual. From the stakeholder point of view, three major groups are especially interested in utilizing data in a new way: we refer to them as the “trinity” of consumers, developers, and businesses. At Prifina, we propose that it’s individuals themselves should own their data and can reap the benefits of this data. Companies and app developers can get access to utilize this data to build different types of applications on top of user-held data. However, those applications will be decentralized and will use the data on our (individuals’) side. Businesses can step into the future by offering a competing edge in data sovereignty by providing value and respect to the end-user and the individual who truly benefit from their own information and their own data.

The model that we at Prifina are developing is centered around the notion that the individual has all of their data in the personal data cloud, and then we have an entire application layer that is built on top of that.

Your Personal AI: From Ideas to Practical Use-Cases

Let’s go back to the personal AI and the household staff. Take an example of an AI knee doctor. Your personal AI knee doctor is a simple algorithm that looks at your walking data. It compares your stride length, cadence, ankle tilt, and the degree of how you step (do you step on your toe or your heel?). Then, this algorithm establishes the baseline about you, after looking at this data for a period of time, say a month.

Then, your personal AI knee doctor complements the data with multiple data sources (e.g., your historical Amazon shopping data) and can find when you have changed shoes.

Actually, this type of an AI application already exists. When it notices a deviation from your baseline, it can suggest an action. For instance, it may say that:

“You, Markus, bought your shoes on this or that day. The shoes should be already worn in. However, you are leaning more on your left knee over your right. Maybe these shoes are not for you?”

Very simple, right?

These types of algorithmic household staff applications, if you like, your personalized AI, are really what the personal AI future might look like.

When we are talking about “household staff”, we’re actually referring to an individual’s personal household stack of personal algorithms. So it is really about having these snippets of your data — data that only you have access to and control over. Then, that data ends up powering those algorithms.

Derivative Innovations Based on Your User-Held Data

What about the agency that materializes through this data? As for individualized applications (which, by the way, you own), they end up representing you. They’re looking after your knees; and not looking after big pharma’s interests. If you start thinking about how many applications like this you can have — there can be millions of those. It’s an entirely new market.

Another example would be your AI scientist. If your AI scientist could look at your data, it could also create innovations on top of that data. For example, in that AI knee doctor example, what if you find that the heel strike is better in some shoes than the others? I don’t know. But if you have these algorithms running on top of your data, they are not only working for you but also inventing for you.

There are some fascinating questions in relation to NFTs. What if your own algorithms create proprietary “IP” under your own supervision, powered by your user-held data and under your control? This becomes a new type of “household IP”.

Take that one more step forward. If you own such user-held data, you might also own such derivative innovations created based on your user-held data. And you may also be monetizing such data.

What if you could also create a great way of preventing injuries, improving sleep, or improving health? Could you license this model to some other algorithms? Would it volunteer alternative hiking routes that others could benefit from?

The Internet in 2031

This type of ecosystem approach to training various types of IP to monetize data. This is also something that has to start from the individual. This is what we see at Prifina. If we can deliver these big promises revolving around Web 3.0 — that data starts from the individual — we can craft this entire ecosystem from the individual outwards. Then we can really open up a new market where we have new types of applications, new types of individualized uses.

Thinking about the future of the Internet, the future is a choice. We live in a world where we share our data with application developers and cross our fingers, hoping for the best outcome. This brought us to today’s environment dominated by a few tech companies and constant surveillance.

What if we could have AI working for our interests? How do we get there? We do not get there by using old-school legacy models. That is where I see that the future of the Internet is a choice: a choice of how we build applications. If we want to monetize various “derivative IPs”, we need to start from the individual.

We have seen that user-centric data models are already visible in the health and wellness space. What if we could derive models for broader societal interactions? That would be an exciting economic growth opportunity.

Connect with us and stay in touch

Prifina is building resources for developers to help create new apps that run on top of user-held data. No back-end is needed. Individual users can connect their data sources to their personal data cloud and get everyday value from their data.

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