Do we really want to fall in love with a virtual Scarlett Johansson, or HER?
Last weekend I attended Yoshi Vardi’s Kinnernet at Maurizio’s H-Farm in Venice. The Kinnernet Venice is the Italian edition of Kinnernet, a unique 3-day event by invitation only created in 2003 by Yossi Vardi, one of the leading Israeli innovators. Today, Kinnernet attracts the most renowned entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and technology experts of the world.
Kinnernet is structured as an (un)conference, an event format where all the participants give their contribution, by collaborating in the different sessions planned, encouraging discussion, interaction and creativity among the attendees. I committed myself to organize one session on AI and health, but wanted to take a different approach and discuss how AI can help us to create stronger relationships, more specifically how it can act as a predictive marriage councilor. Relationships and Health? According to Harvard Research, meaningful relationships are a prescription for better emotional, mental and physical health.
I prepared the session together with my close tech friend Julie Schmidt who works for a boutique consultancy agency in Berlin called Summer&Co focussing on hacking organizations.
The idea to quantify relationships and apply Machine Learning to create new insights and prevent conflicts, is not entirely new. During the time, where I was organizing the Quantified Self Meetup’s in Vienna, I tracked my relationship by questioning 10 questions on a daily basis. Next to personalized metrics there is lot’s of data we can use to quantify the quality of our relationships. Facebook data scientists have been analyzing the relationship statuses of U.S. Facebook users from 2008 to 2011. The discovered predictors of whether a relationship will last or not. So if we can analyze the patterns that determines if relationships will go bad, or even end, why not applying AI and using it to create better relationships?
We see a strong focus on AI and robotics to replace human to human interaction, to probably address the rising loneliness in our society. We saw Theodore Twombly falling in love with his AI, called Samantha in the movie Her. In Japan, a country were almost 70 percent of unmarried men and 60 percent of unmarried women are not in a relationship, gatebox.ai, launched an a real life version of Samantha. And it is the saddest thing I have seen since months.
Although I am a big fan of technology, I feel that we are losing track and going in the wrong direction. AI should not replace human relationships, it should enhance it, support it, making it more meaningful. It should make our lives more happy & healthy. This is why we choose to discuss this at Kinnernet, a platform with people who are on the forefront of designing the future, a future we desire and do not fear.
For the workshop we prepared a prototype scenario of a standard situation where the partner the AI has access to all communication tools and content and Facebook activities. The prototype focuses on a potential use of Natural Language Processing for advanced text analytics, text-to-speech services, sentiment analytics to define the tone of conversations combined with a set of predictive models that analysis social media data. For the sake of making the workshop more vivid, I strongly exaggerated the scenario. I hope it helps you think how we can use AI on a different way and build stronger human relations.
PS: all scenario’s are fiction
