The mediator app, which will listen in to conversation with parents talking to kids, people talking to people, homeless people arguing over sidewalk real estate, and analyze their speech patterns and offer different ways to communicate. It will help people to be kinder parents, more gentle partners, better at productive arguing, sharing their view, standing their ground with grace.
Who knows, we way as well harness the AI future with open arms. There’s no reason to suspect it will back down at any point. Let’s optimize our human faults, the repeated, fetid, sewer pipes of conversation. Of co-dependent, abusive, half-truths that somehow never get resolved and instead are pulled out like daggers at the most inconvenient time. In steps the app collects feedback, to remind us of our humanity, to offer a gentle nudge in the right direction while we’re going astray, or afterwards? Reminds us how fragile and cyclical we are, tied to nature, hormones, yearning, the seasons.
If only a few turns of phrase were dropped, a barb replaced by an olive branch in that split second, how many downward spirals avoided? How many little bad words, mannerisms, or flashes of ego add up to disaster in any one group of human interactions over time? We’ll never know, but it’s definitely all documented, and has been for a while as the phones just sit judging.
Siri is cringing as the emotional abuser withholds love for the thousandth time, and the wife is caught in the moment, and later goes to be consoled by her friends. On second thought, would that really help? If people knew the damage they were doing would they stop, or change a few salient words?
Every great tyrant had a mirror, but also had yes men who wouldn’t clean it for him or else they’d be kicked out of the hive. Would a normal, fallible, powerless man or woman be ready to accept their faults if laid out by a prescient counselor robot, sitting there having a drag while the air reeks of falsehoods, black and white thinking, over generalization, projection, etc. etc.?
We’d have to ask ourselves if we want to be better humans or want to be righteous. Seems like an easy answer.
Wanderthoughts 