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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

"On a long enough timeline, everything is a discrete game." (With apologies to _Fight Club_)

Personally, I look forward to the day when the software I own works for me to the extent of optimizing the decisions I make during the day, even many mundane ones. Properly executed, such a system could make a big difference in my quality of life. I believe that a big piece that is missing is a solid life-model, a life-representation, that can be optimized. Once that is defined, an RNN or MCS can optimize it and I can reap the benefits.

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If it is optimising all your decisions, even the mundane ones, is it really your life any more? If it plugged into your brainstem and took over, by definition nobody else would notice the difference (you always did what it said anyway, or you’d be suboptimal), so why not just flood the 20 watt carbon-based neural network with bliss drugs and let the silicon-based neural network be the person instead?

I think sometimes it's hard for us to zoom out and solve bigger problems that we might not see. Like, if I don't enjoy the chore I'm doing, I can make it easier, or I can eliminate it. (Paying a bill in person is a good example). Or, maybe there is an object that is generating a lot of work for me, like a house, and there is an alternative object (an apartment). Heck, sometimes it would be nice to have a record of all the things I enjoy and just have an AI path-find to maximize revisiting those things.

Or just replace the brain completely with the computer, like in Greg Egan's jewel stories. http://will.tip.dhappy.org/blog/Compression%20Trees/.../book...

You set the destination, it sets the route. Maybe you tell it you feel like you aren't getting enough exercise, or you need more time at night for a friend. It schedules the mundanity around those goals. I would love that.

Sort of like Surrogates: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/

well if you chose and modified the representation of the world yourself, and set it so it would be making decisions based on a heuristic you provided it, then at the end of the day, it is not so different from how our biological circuits work, to the extent we have control over them

Complete with creepy predictions like "Predicted optimal life path: $120,000 net worth, 63 year life span".

Site : https://betterself.io/ GitHub : https://github.com/jeffshek/betterself

I do this similarly but with supplements and medication. I track a lot of my supplements that boost productivity and sleep and disregard anything that's negative. I've been continuing this over the course of a year.

I haven't added anything like a RNN to it for recommendations though. Some fears about missing up the gradient descent component scare me :)

This may interest you, AI as an artificial belief system. http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593...

My interpretation is that AI can allow you to rapidly load and unload mental models so that you're free to devote 100% of your mind to what only you (a human) can do.

Replying late (a day is ancient history in HN time) but I liked your comment a lot. My view is that our belief system is encoded in our behavior, not our words. So an AI could provide us with the first honest measurement of morality, according to our own standards.

What if everybody uses the same software by a handful of companies, maybe only one? It will be interesting to see how it resolves conflicts between goals of different customers. More interestingly, how does it regards the goals of its company compared to the ones of its customers?

Based on human nature and history I don't expect anything good coming from that.

I don't know why you're downvoted. It's an interesting thing to think about. Personally, I'd be eager to try it out for a year or so. I set the goal, my computer tells me what to do.

I seem to get a lot of upvotes, and then a lot of downvotes all in a flurry. I'd be curious to look at the data, to be honest, to see if it's a cohort. (No idea why they'd target me in particular)

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