Whilst there are downsides to revealing an idea too early, there are downsides to not doing so.
I was doing some meditation and breathwork in the garden this morning, since I woke up feeling sluggish and had these annoying repetitive negative thoughts whirling around. After doing some journaling to get some of it out of my system, I knew enough to go and do breathwork, which can completely knock out negativity.
I realised what I needed in that moment, and for many times in my life, is I needed a ‘companion’ to mirror my positive thoughts, rationally look at negative paradigms, and provide genuine motivators when it looks like I was going off the rails, off-path, or beginning a down cycle. In short, I needed some sort of non-judgemental ‘guide/assistant’ that could help when friends and family could not. They aren’t always available and people have their own challenges going on. Likewise, a lot of well meaning advice can be defeating.
I thought about self-help books and the authors who make millions out of them. I realised that eventually those authors will want to supplement their own coaching programs with AI. These will effectively be avatars carefully trained with detailed prompts to allow for the LLM to identify specifically what mental state the people are in at a particular point, and to be able to respond in kind.
For instance, I can clearly see a Brian Tracey avatar, trained across all his books, 3D modelled so a person can login to that website pay some money and all of a sudden they get to talk to Brian Tracey. That in itself is probably going to be something that all celebrities do, and it’s probably already happening in some form. And the key thing is, that these coaching programs are done over time so its about keeping context of what’s going on with the user. Imagine having Brian Tracey alongside you, giving you the value of his books, linking with practical tools, etc. Or if you aren’t a fan of him, take anyone that you regularly read – maybe it could be a famous stock trader or investor, maybe it could be Peter Thiel or any of the Dragons Den lot. What about an Alan Sugar branded avatar?
To be clear, i’m talking about a complex, well thought out piece of software. Well trained, and tested. Not some generic drivel which of course will emerge from these markets.
Branded Virtual Agents / Avatars
These are literally branded virtual agents. I can clearly see an online store, maybe amazon, where you can just download these virtual identities of celebrities, famous book authors, film writers, and when implemented well, people will be able to interact with them in fairly meaningful ways. Some will be funny, some will be educational, some will be motivational. And to take it a step further you could then get them all to communicate with one another and see what madness unfolds.
Mental Health Personal Motivators
My initial flutter app that I have been building was focused entirely on obtaining wellness metrics from the user, and being able to track those metrics. Along the way I realised that it would be key for users to be able to journal in written word, verbal… and for those notes to be stored and interpreted back to the user at the appropriate moment.
Prompt training – things like if the user is showing signs of excessive and irrational negativity; you want to not overwhelm them with feedback, but assure them that there are ways out of it, they just need to pick their battles. So rather than reel off 10 top tips for dealing with mental health, the assistant has to mimic being empathetic toward the user.
I can clearly see that some famous breathwork practitioner might be interested in such a thing, if he is not already doing it. I can clearly see that gyms will have some sort of branded virtual assistants, that could also potentially monitor the attendance of a customer, check in on them if they haven’t been around for a while. Basically anyone who already writes books or has training courses can convert those into avatar driven special AI training programmers.
Privacy
Whilst you don’t want to lose the humanity entirely, one of the benefits of using an AI therapist/coach is that (data storage concerns initially aside) you can be assured you are working with a non-judgemental system that you really can talk through your inner most fears with. For instance, abuse victims can open up with a strength of anonymity; or severely depressed people can at least bounce their ideas off a well trained language model.
I watched a video on AI where the guy was saying LLMs were scoring just as high a rating as clinical psychotherapists… I would have to triple check this, but this is the sort of reality we are now moving into..
It doesn’t have to be mental health specific, that’s just a clear niche market (or relatively pervasive right now). Ultimately it comes down to what i’ve been saying for a while which is everyone will have a single Virtual Agent that will follow them through life, motivate them, guide them, research for them. It will know them intimately.
The only thing I would say is there are likely to be many brands and variants of personal assistants that people can choose from; and it may be that people have multiple agents; although I still think there will be some sort of of overarching single agent managing them.
Personal Development Market
The personal development arena will be supercharged by this sort of thing. When you get beyond the ‘soft skill’ guidance, meaning the psychological aspect, there is still the entire remit of having an assistant guide you through your goals, projects and idea creations.
So, todays idea is just an extension of what I’ve already been thinking – that the personal assistant is probably to be the main piece of software that a human uses, and everything will connect into that. I am probably not quite right there, but I am along the right lines.
Healthcare for elderly
The NHS is clearly under pressure for a variety of reasons. We desperately need to avoid privatising it at all costs because it is a wonderful thing to have and we should all be incredibly grateful for it. When things go wrong the NHS is there no questions asked. Compare this to the American healthcare service and if you have no conception of that, go and educate yourself on the insanity of it.
Anyway, I can clearly see that AI driven caring, empathetic, humorous and encouraging avatars can play a part in supplementing a hospital ward, senior living, hospice, etc. The AI can work around the clock, and I suppose with OpenCV it can assess a patients visual signs, along with any streamed healthcare data.
In no way am I encouraging departments with zero human contact, but there is room for supplementation. The same AI that goes and talks to patients, can be the same AI that reviews and talks to doctors, giving reviews (scaled sentiment analysis) and alerting to any critical incidents.
The Foundation Is Still ChatBots / Conversational AI
One of the main goals I will now setup is something thats obvious but well needed and thats getting a chat bot on my own website, trained properly. There’s a few options already and im most likely going to work with text.com
Part of me wonders where I’ve been the last couple of years as the rise in the obvious solution has come about. I suppose thats the problem when you do client work for a living, you just lose focus on the opportunities happening all around.
Anyway enough for now.
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