The alarm clock goes off but you are already up, making your bed. Two hours later, you’ve come back from exercising, finished reading your novel, and spent the rest of the time working on the book you’ve been writing.
All this before anyone else is even awake.
The rest of the day goes by without any procrastination. Your habits have been perfected to the point where you can move seamlessly from one thing to the other. If you feel yourself getting bored, you swiftly change your environment to make yourself productive again.
After all, the name of the game is productivity. Doing all that you want to do, in the most efficient manner possible. And it’s all thanks to the AI. All you had to do was let it change you.
We always want more. Especially when it comes to ourselves. Whether we have ambitions of starting a business or just reading more novels, we want to be better at doing the things we want to do. We want to be more productive.
In the age of Atomic Habits, Ali Abdaal, and endless streams of youtube videos telling us the right way to be more productive, we’re inspired to change our lives for the better, however we may define it.
One would think that with all this information, we would have all become great at making the best use of our 86400 seconds in a day. A big problem lies in the meta productivity we need, to build productivity. The will, discipline, and motivation we need in order to learn how to form better habits … is not the easiest thing to do.
Maybe we’re going about this all wrong. We are trying to get ourselves to change ourselves when instead, someone or something else should be in charge of ingraining these habits in us.
Our habits and decisions are already massively influenced by other people and entities. Every day we enter a grocery store or browse the internet, we’re constantly being influenced into behaving in ways beneficial to the thing doing the influencing. Hopefully, they are thinking of us too though.
Even our social behavior was molded by the influences and behavior of others around us. Once we realize this, we can try to change those behaviors in ways that better align with our values so that we live happier lives.
So if we are influenced by all these factors without us even realizing it, why not allow something to purposefully control our behaviors, in ways we asked it to?
We do that with animals all the time. Take pet dogs for example. Training puppies is a difficult task especially if you’re trying to avoid pee getting all over your furniture. A very popular tool is the “clicker”. The idea is to associate the click sound with behaviors we wish to see, using positive reinforcement techniques.
Habit-building techniques for humans are essentially the same. We try to associate different cues to different behaviors we wish to modify. So maybe we should have people-trainers, and what better than Artificial Intelligence.
We’re already being influenced by technology
If you’ve ever watched netflix or similar streaming platforms, chances are your behavior is already being influenced to get you to continue to watch netflix. Sure, you only pay per month, but the more you use it, the more likely you are to continue using it.
And let’s not forget about the well known issues with social media influence.
So if everyone else is already using technology to get us to behave a certain way, why can’t we do the same for our own benefit?
All you need to do is give up all your information
Building habits, and changing your everyday behavior requires you to be persistent. You need to be able to recognize when you are behaving emotionally instead of logically, and determine what action to take to “nudge” you into what you actually want to be doing.
Right now, there are a bunch of habit building apps which help you create habits by tracking them, and letting you analyze the data. This works, until you get tired of analyzing the data yourself, or you skip a few days here and there.
Instead, we want something that can monitor for us, and continue to actually change the environment around us itself.
Want to stop eating junk-food? The technology should just hide the snacks from us or continuously monitor our satiety levels, guiding us to eat something healthy before we get to the point where we start looking for unhealthy snacks.
This means that whatever this app or technology looks like, should have access to our physical state, as well as the ability to augment our surroundings and possibly our senses.
It will make use of the most battle-tested habit building, behavior modifying techniques such as positive and negative reinforcement. It’s job would be to give you a dopamine hit every time you did something it guided you to do.
It becomes irrelevant to actually understand why you are doing something. All you would need to do is trust the technology to know how the action would affect you down the line. Think of it like a maze. You don’t know which turns are correct until you get to the end. Now if you had something that could look at the bigger picture, you don’t even need to make decisions yourself. Just know that you will get to your destination.
Yes, the idea is pretty absurd, and could easily sound like something out of a BlackMirror episode. Who would ever want to be controlled like that, even if they could reach their physique goals, finish all their projects on time, and optimize their life.
Although it seems farfetched, the idea that technology and artificial intelligence can modify our behavior is not something new. In the age of information and big data, we have relinquished our data to the tech giants of the world, for more convenience. It is exactly from that data where very personalized recommendations and advertisements pop up everywhere.
One could extrapolate that there would be technology enhances that allow us to constantly monitor not only our heartbeats, but our state of being, and emotional fluctuations. For fitness enthusiasts, tracking workouts alongside the physical state is already a part of training. Similarly, for those hoping to change their behavior, these metrics would be useful.
From there, it will be a short step to technology that hopes to make it more convenient for people to act on the endless streams of data their life is generating. Making it possible to introduce small changes to our lives. Whether its just a popup on your phone admonishing you for doing something that decreases productivity, or encouraging you when it realizes you did something beneficial.
Our decisions will come into play when we decide what being more productive mean to us. To what end are we trying to be more productive, and if we’re are willing to relinquish control for convenience and “optimization”.