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Commonsense Innovation

Read two articles almost back to back yesterday and was struck by how much can be achieved using common sense and how misguided some uses of technology can be. In the first instance, it was found that dogs can detect covid by smell with an accuracy of 94% and better. Some dogs can be trained to do this job in a few hours. That is simple, clever and exceedingly useful to society. An example to emulate when thinking innovation and value creation. The second one is about using AI to detect loneliness from speech patterns because people will not come out and tell you they feel lonely. 

“Eventually, complex AI systems could intervene in real-time to help individuals to reduce their loneliness by adopting in positive cognitions, managing social anxiety, and engaging in meaningful social activities,” the researchers boldly conclude in the new study

That sounds like using AI to treat humans like they were hamsters in a wheel and needed to be prodded in specific ways to live their lives meaningfully and productively. Would a chat bot pop up as soon as the speech patterns suggested loneliness and try to quell the problem, bring people together like toddlers to a sandbox so they may play together? 

There is something deeply off-putting about the notion that such intervention is needed. There are reasons why people experience more loneliness today than their prior generations did living in multi-generational family structures, in the same town and village for generations, members of the family being the same or similar trades. A chat bot will not replace any of those structural support systems that have disappeared on us. 

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