In a few years’ time many people will have a Personal Life Mentor application in their smart phone or even implants in their brain. These applications will be much more sophisticated than the current Google’s Personal Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa. How could it help us in selecting a more representative Parliament and protect the voters against an extreme populism?
Well, this is the concept that I have developed in the last 10 years, and which has been discussed with one of the London Universities and an AI company. Knowing how fast the market operates it will probably not be me, who gets the product on the market. The important message is that such a product will certainly be developed most likely in less than 5 years’ time. So, I am using the features offered by my prototype as if it had been available in the future product.
In a nutshell, such an application available on a smartphone or other medium would communicate with the user in a natural language, which Personal Assistants can do quite well even today. But of course, it will be a much more sophisticated Personal Life Mentor that would acquire through a series of long structured conversations with you, an almost absolute knowledge about you. It would know who you are as an individual, your psychological profile, your character traits, your life goals, objectives, and daily tasks, your strengths and weaknesses, your opportunities and threats, your skills, education, friends, family members, your detailed life journey with pictures and video. And it will also know your political preferences.
Since such a Personal Life Mentor would of course know more about politics and the world than an average Joe Blogs, it would be able to give an impartial advice, on which party he should vote for, taking into account his preferences, and justifying to him its selected choice. Now, you are a free man and you can ignore the advice and rather be guided by your emotions. We are not robots; we are humans and as the Roman philosopher Seneca rightly said Errare humanum est– to make an error is human. And that’s the first part of his motto, which would nicely go along with your emotional choice, against the wisdom of your Personal Life Mentor, which would probably add the second part of Seneca’s motto: Sed in errare perseverare diabolicum – but to make errors persistently is diabolical.
So, in the end the choice will still be yours. Sometimes, the difference between your gut feeling for which party or a candidate to vote, your intuitive choice, and your Personal Life Mentor’s choice is between what is good for you in the short term and in the long-term. The prototype that I have proposed almost always takes a long-term view because after all you want to fulfil your life goals, which are very long-term. But you can discuss with such a Personal Life Mentor the best options for you if you just want to consider the consequences of your vote in the short-term.
But back to serious matters, one way of overcoming the plague of populism, xenophobia, and to some extent racism, would be to make such Personal Life Mentors freely available as part of a standard software on a smart phone. It will not only guide you on making your political choices, such as party membership or voting in elections. It will also advise you in the most effective way to achieve your objectives and life goals consistently and just help you sail across the ocean of your life most effectively, with a dose of spontaneity, randomness and some bad choices thrown in, to add some spice to your life.