This is really cool. My only concern is that the impulsive nature of purchases would lead me not to use this when I need it the most.
I’ve had some luck using budgeting apps - simply putting myself on an allowance of “impulse purchases”. I would love/hate an app that brought back purchases from the past and said “hey, are you still really loving that XYZ you bought in November 2023?” I’m guessing that would reveal some wasted funds… especially if it baked in missed market gains or interest.
Does the email writer here train on my past emails to attempt to match my tone? Or is it simply using traditional training sets? This has been a major hurdle with the AI email drafters I've tried (ChatGPT-based)... I end up spend too much time fixing awkward wording I'd never, ever use.
For example - when was the last time I used "salutations" in a formal business email to clients? Never... I would literally never say "salutations".
(Edit to clarify - I have NOT tried Mavex yet, so not a criticism of it in particular)
GPT4 can be used to describe your tone by analyzing a few of your emails.
Adding that to your prompt should help to get something closer to what you would write, and you can iterate on this description if needed.
Source: I built a chatgpt ui that make it easy to create custom prompt template because I was tired of the copy-paste and/or back and forth to get the tone right.
So the closest I’ve come to a digestible attempt at an answer to “how do we get to general AI” and “what might it look like” is The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos. I found it to be really helpful tour of existing AI with an eye towards our (maybe?) general AI future.
On a much smaller scale we do this in our family. We take weird, wonderful, or strange occurrences and formalize them to family traditions - pretending we’ve always done them and they are sacred. It’s wonderful part of our family culture.
One example - we had a cookie decorating party a decade ago and found once we had a house full of friends that we no cookie cutters at all! I ran to the CVS on the corner and for some reason the only cookie cutters they had were leftover Halloween ghosts… we’ve made Christmas ghost cookies every year since. We wouldn’t dare make trees or wreaths or Santas… our kids think this tradition is passed down for years, with varying insane stories as to why. It’s a huge part of Christmas fun to get out our ghost cutters!
Cloning a dead loved one is a fun thought exercise - but I can't quite figure out how you would do this in real life? What would the training set be? I know in my life you could train an AI on my professional emails, writings, lectures, etc., but that wouldn't at all teach it how to communicate with my kids. You could train it on my social media posts (I don't actually have many of those...), but again, that version of me isn't the one my mom would recognize or want to reminiscence with at Thanksgiving dinner. Text messages might be the best option - but I rarely "meme war" my loved ones in person as often as I do on text chains. I just don't think that data set would produce an AI that could come close to being satisfying for grieving loved ones.
I'm just not at all sure you could accurately duplicate the many facets of a person without having recorded basically their whole life as a training set... Now there's a dystopia for you! A 24/7 surveillance state built on the premise that it's needed to clone you when you die.
First: this isn't a thought exercise. People have been doing it for years[1][2] and are trying to commercialize it. The results have become frighteningly convincing, at least for some people. You can convincingly clone both voices and writing, and the combination is even more convincing.
The training set would be exactly what you mentioned: chats between you and your family, friends, and coworkers. Professional writing might be useful for another purpose, to replicate your writing style (as we've seen done to famous authors).
Most people send hundreds of personal messages a week, which (over time) is more than enough to train a model.
This is really interesting - Thanks for sharing! It looks like these services are taking an "interview" approach, so they are building their own dataset. That makes a ton of sense, and really avoids a lot of the concern of cloning people without their consent (it would be hard to talk them into hours of interviews without their knowledge).
Some people have tried this, even before computers were available to individuals.
Finnish composer, synthesizer inventor and futurologist Erkki Kurenniemi started recording his life in 1970 and continued until his death in 2017.
First he used audio cassettes and paper, then a video camcorder, and over the decades every form of digital recording available. Supposedly he also obsessively stored everyday items with which he had interacted.
His projection was that this mass of digital and physical data could be used to create a digital clone of him by the year 2048.
An article in Finnish about his lifelong recording:
I use Nextcloud for my personal file storage - it’s easy to connect to Backblaze. Performance isn’t awesome, but it’s fast enough to work for my non-technically inclined family members as a google drive replacement.
We have two kids who were raised essentially screen-free until 3, then on a 1hr a week diet until 6. We worried all the time about the transition to school, and the cultural norm of allowing a lot more screen time. This was an imagined dragon - this has not been an issue at all. My oldest just got a Switch, she plays less than 1/2hr a day - then she walks away without issue. She has friends with phones and iWatches (she has neither) and her envy level is zero.
My point here is not that we’ve done anything right, or wrong, or to emulate. Instead, I say this point out the I’ve had to learn to worry about, and address, the real issues - when they become real. There are not enough hours in the day to worry about all theoretical mistakes I’m making as a a parent. I choose to focus on the actual, observable, issues we are having.
For what it’s worth - many of our neighbors have kids that play all the time on the Switch, have phones, and watch TV every car ride anywhere, and those kids are LOVELY. They aren’t screen demons - and they aren’t behind in math, reading, eating vegetables… I think it could be it doesn’t really matter as much as it gets focused on.
At any rate it matters a whole lot less than loving them, and figuring out what works for YOU and for THEM - and that’s something it took me way too long to learn.
This is such a wonderfully insightful comment. I think the bit about learning to worry only about the current issue is especially important, but the whole thing is gold.
My oldest just turned 7, and I have slowly learned that the kids do best and are happiest not when I set them up with the best possible environment or activities or rules or whatever, but when I’m consistently and actively engaged with them and considerate of their needs and perspectives as much as my own. Sometimes I worry that they might get too much screen time, but sometimes I go to wake them up and discover that they’ve snuck out of bed to quietly read together.
Address problems that need addressing as they arise, but try to remember that, on the balance, things turn out ok.
The first part you say is so spot on - fight the battles you have in front of you and ignore the potential battles everyone is yelling that are coming, those will arrive when the time comes.
And to the second, I remember reading old Wodehouse "school stories" where the teachers were complaining about the students wasting their time with worthless "book time" reading such useless works as David Copperfield. O tempora, o mores!
> I think it could be it doesn’t really matter as much as it gets focused on.
Not to downplay everything you said, because that's a great mentality to have towards technology, but regarding this point, the problem with technology is not that kids are spending too much time in front of a screen. The problem is with the content they're consuming, and the people they're exposed to online. There's a lot of potential harm from being manipulated by advertising, to seeing disturbing content like Elsagate, to getting absorbed in the vapid and obnoxious culture of influencers, to meeting someone who might actually harm them.
It's good to be pragmatic about how children use technology, as they will be surrounded by it during their lifetime, but it's also important to have strict controls, boundaries and discussions with them so that they understand the very real threats that technology enables.
Really good point. It’s not just about screen “time” - it’s about screen content. We also try and share the screen time with them as much as possible, so we can engage and discuss what we see and who they interact with.
That's really helpful, thank you. Focusing on the actual behavioural problems instead of "having x hours a week" does make sense.
Maybe I focus on this more because younger me was denied video games for many years, until I bought my own consoles/pc and got to "eat the whole cake".
younger me was never denied videogames/consoles/pc games.
I'm now an engineer with a bunch of friends and socially well adjusted. But then each child is unique and each situation is unique, most kids in my neighborhood weren't allowed outside after dark, in winter it was basically dark when we got home from school also i was an only child so didn't have any siblings to keep me entertained, that leaves a lot of time for Homework, TV, Video Games, Reading etc.
Also it rained a lot so you were stuck inside a lot. In fact when the weather was good you were desperate to get out of the house because you'd be stuck inside so often.
If i were parenting today i might have to follow a different approach to my parents but only because i might want to curate the games my kids would play personally i actually think the right video game is just as if not more valuable than books. Learning mechanics, developing strategies, reacting to changing and unfavorable circumstances, teamwork. are great life skills. I do think i learned a fair bit playing Starcraft and Counter Strike.
I'm 22 and had no restrictions, now I'm an engineer like you. I think it's worth keeping in mind that the environment you and I were in is different than today. YouTube and TikTok are designed to be so perfectly addictive, they're practically digital crack. Even adults have trouble moderating their usage - young children stand no chance.
I don't think "screen time" is the issue, it's what they're doing on it. Are they doing something creative, or are they mindlessly clicking to feed the click machine? Are they substituting playing with their friends for playing video games?
I get that it’s not this simple - but my flippant response is that “with kids, yes!”… this is an essential part of being a parent or role model - tell kids how/why to be “good” , and largely they won’t be bad.
> tell kids how/why to be “good” , and largely they won’t be bad.
That is only part of the solution. Kids do more modeling than critical thinking. Parents and other role models need to show kids a good example. Bad behavior in kids is largely from bad modeling by the people they look up to, not insufficient instruction. Certainly the "why" should be explained, but saying "don't lie" means nothing if the person saying it then goes around lying constantly.
There is also the question of children becoming more peer oriented than parent oriented, which has become an increasingly prevelant situation the past century or so. The kids with better behavior tend to seek instruction, modeling, and self-worth from their parents. Kids with worse behavior tend to seek instruction, modeling, and self-worth from their peers (which is generally a terrible idea).
I’ve had some luck using budgeting apps - simply putting myself on an allowance of “impulse purchases”. I would love/hate an app that brought back purchases from the past and said “hey, are you still really loving that XYZ you bought in November 2023?” I’m guessing that would reveal some wasted funds… especially if it baked in missed market gains or interest.