You are standing in line at your favorite deli and you see that they recently changed the entire menu. There is a long line of people behind you. You feel a slight increase in your stress level as you tell yourself that you have about 20-30 seconds to decide what to order, to be considerate to those waiting behind you.
Your analytical mind immediately strikes out a few items for being too expensive or not in line with your diet, but you are still left with quite a few items to choose from. In the context of your life, this decision is far from “existential” and therefore not very important. You use your gut/intuition/your fast brain (See Daniel Kahneman’s great book Thinking, Fast and Slow) and decide.
Who knows why you might order one thing one day and something else the next. You may not even be sure yourself. Much of your day is spent making those non “fight or flight” decisions, at work, at home, and whenever you’re interacting with the world.
“In reality, to me, a valuable AI system is one that is able to ‘record’ and digitally store a portion of the experience of a specific human, so as to be able to mimic their decision-making process digitally.”
Without you being aware of it, these sets of small decisions can be made into a “signature” that is unique to you. When asked about you, people may say things like “well, that person is conservative in their choices” or “when buying clothing I should be asking that person, they have the best fashion sense,” etc. This “signature” defines you as a person as much as your physical features, knowledge or abilities do.
How do you make decisions? The neural network in your brain uses its vast experience, having been exposed to years of life where events continuously impact it. The sum of your senses “teach” your brain to avoid certain things and crave others. The same process takes place in your professional life. Your accumulated experience means that you know how to approach a problem and determine a course of action without a lot of hesitation and without having to spend too much time thinking about it.
This accumulated knowledge is priceless. We all have these “hidden gems” of knowledge that are unique to us.
In the movies, artificial intelligence is often a self-aware, auto-evolving entity that craves knowledge and is able to harvest data and make sense of it by itself. Often with a British accent, for some reason. In reality, to me, a valuable AI system is one that is able to “record” and digitally store a portion of the experience of a specific human, so as to be able to mimic their decision-making process digitally.
In other words, what if we could have the ability to forecast what Albert Einstein would do given a choice of approaches to solve a problem? What if we could consult Andy Warhol on what color to choose for a school art project? Or ask Sun Tzu how to strategize our next Fortnite game?
A valuable AI system is able to focus on a certain “vertical” of a human’s experience. By using a “fly on the wall” paradigm along with a feedback loop, it should be able, in time, to have the ability to mimic that person’s decision-making process.
In the not so far future you will walk into your office craving breakfast, and your favorite deli’s delivery drone will meet you at the entrance. It will have one of those new menu items it chose for you based on your unique “digital” decision signature. While you enjoy the delicious item you will probably say to yourself “wow, how did they know exactly what I wanted?”