Your Personal Sim: The Brave New World of Smart Agents

The biggest advance in computing technology that humanity has yet seen is beginning under our noses, right now. In just the last five years, conversational interfaces on our leading software and hardware platforms, involving speech recognition, natural language understanding, deep machine learning and big data collections of our online email, social networks, ecommerce histories, and other databases, are allowing the emergence of intelligent assistive personal software agents, or “smart agents” for short. Platforms like Google Now, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Facebook’s M, Soundhound’s Hound, Next IT (a company I advise), the email assistant Crystal, and the Siri founder’s startup Viv are all current leading examples. Smart agents are beginning to anticipate some of our contextual needs, and do simple actions for us in the world, across all our digital devices. As is already happening, many different companies will offer us smart agents, for a dizzying number of uses, and we’ll use our most trusted agents to advise us, and even to act on our behalf out in the world. The most personalized of these agents will be conversationally trained by us, becoming our “personal simulations”, or “sims”. They will have private personal data about us that we don’t share with the outside world, and they’ll help us make choices that better reflect our personal interests, goals, and values. Some sims will even lobby for us, making it easy for us to get involved in initiative politics and mass actions. This talk will look at eight areas, roughly ordered by the degree of impact I presently expect, either positive or negative, coming from smart agents: - Personal - Entertainment, Dating, Personal Growth, Education - Social - Nav/Transportation, Friendship/Collaboration, Symbionts - Engrg - Professionalism/Productivity/Innovation, Coding, Science - Econ - Purchasing, Budgeting, Mgmt, Funding, Startups - Envir - Resource Use, Sustainability, Population, Biodiversity, Pollution, Climate - Health - Health, Wellness, Dying, Grieving - Security - Security, Transparency, & Privacy - Politics - Lobbying, Voting, Representation, Taxation, Basic Income For each area, we’ll look at two scenarios for how smart agent adoption might play out. The first will be a dystopia, a set of outcomes we’d like to avoid, and the second a protopia, a measurably better world, in three key ways – more personal freedom, more individual average wealth, and more evidence-based thinking and acting – than the world we live in today. In the long run, I’m optimistic that agents will take us to a protopia in those three social variables. But in the short run, lots of bad things could easily happen on the way. So let’s look at both sides of the issue, and in our Q&A please let me know what I’ve missed or am getting wrong. Together we can create much better foresight than any of us can alone.

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