What can the AI do to help us age better?
Certainly new applications and technological devices emerge as abundantly as summer weeds. The products with improved chips satisfy all imaginable needs. Warnings from your smart refrigerator tell you to buy more milk. With a voice command, the music is played to facilitate meditation. Thanks to its intelligent assistant, listening your order from a container on the counter in your kitchen. You know, the one who has a voice and a woman’s name.
In this excess of offers, how do you select what is really useful from what is simply the ultimate “intelligent”? And with intelligence, I mean to be able to follow instructions, solve problems, answer questions and learn on their own. Smart products depend on algorithms designed by engineers to create artificial intelligence, also known as AI. And to be clear, artificial intelligence is also fundamental for the collection of big data and industrial configurations.
Predictions on AI
If all this seems confusing, it may be because most of us are not engineers. Who create solutions for problems we did not know we had. Firstly; How do we separate the right from the modern? Secondly; How do we know if a thing helps our memory or simply replaces our thinking? Thirdly How do we say if a new application makes our life easier replaces our own efforts to maintain a strong brain?
For those of us who are Gen Xers, boomers or beyond, we have the additional question. What technologies we could adopt to facilitate healthy aging, which do not seem to sponsor us. A good example is the smart watch that tracks your whereabouts and your pulse. But sometimes it looks like a monitoring device that escaped from a hospital room. Older adults usually do not want to use it. Products can also make life so much that they slow our growth or degrade our intelligence, and that is not useful.
Consider an “intelligent” exercise partner who recites the number of repetitions of exercises, as if he had forgotten how to count. And as we move into our future driven by chips and with increased intelligence, some have already chosen to have implants inserted under the skin to facilitate the unlocking of the office door or start the workplace.
If you want to consider the logical result, you can read Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, in which the author has some direct predictions of AI about human life in the near future. According to the historian / philosopher / writer Harari, by the end of the 21st century we will probably be more humanoid machines than humans. Are they good or bad news? It depends on who you ask. If engineers do not consider the ethics, the consequences and the philosophical / psychological bases of their designs and inventions, who should do it ? harari asks.
