I'm building a company called Overlord.
As in, "I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords"?
What you are describing is the very opposite of self-control.
'Cause it’s gonna be the future soon,
And I won’t always be this way,
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away
Hello! This sounds like a great extension of some existing tools (from various smartphone-based apps, to things like Pavlok) but with contemporary AI to enable a much wider range of applicable scenarios. As someone who has genuinely considered hiring someone to look over my shoulder all day, I wish you & your product success!
One thing I notice, however, is that the use-case appears to be limited to scenarios in which there is a determined target behavior to do or to not-do. My main struggle, in terms of literal 'control of my self & actions', is determining where to apply my time & energy. This would be true even if I were a single person renting an apartment, as I have numerous "projects" competing for time, but is considerably more difficult because I have a family and a house and debts, which (seemingly) add up to more demands than can be met simultaneously. Though here I may be conflating broader "executive functioning" with the more narrow "self-control".
Not addressing this is not a defect of your product, in any way. I make this comment only to suggest a more tempered language about the product, in part to ensure that your users come in with a similarly-tempered expectation.
Thank you!
In terms of knowing when/where to apply the energy, AI isn't quite smart enough for this just yet. I call this "Hugging the curve" - AI should be able to ratchet up and down the intensity of your challenges (ie, on a meditation kick you may meditate for 30 mins a day, then when you lose motivation, it should drop it down intelligently to a manageable level). The emotional intelligence/memory to plan/prioritise isn't quite there yet, but it should be very soon!
Disclaimer: I'm building a company called Overlord. This is an AI agent that is designed to monitor you 24/7, and encourage you to stick to good habits, and not do bad habits. This is an essay about how AI can pretty much fix self-control very soon (through everyone having AI accountability partners), but of course I'm biased, as I'm building a company in this space.
For the majority of people, self-control is their #1 issue. Most people are drastically messing up in one element of their life due to not being able to control themselves. Thought experiment: If you had a friend following you around 24/7, would you be able to kick all your bad habits? Probably.
Let's take the issue of obesity (40% of Americans right now). If an obese person had a friend following them around each day, they'd likely be able to eat 230 calories less each day (enough to lose 2lbs/month). This would be almost comically easy - your friend will just say "do you need large fries, or are medium OK?", and everyone would be thin.
This can, of course, apply to everything. The following issues (think about these yourself), would be immediately fixed if you had a friend following you around encouraging you: porn addiction, exercising, doomscrolling, drinking too much...
Now, imagine instead of a friend, it's an AI. Of course, you feel no shame towards an AI, as you would a friend, yet. This means you'd need to jerryrig pain into it: It can charge you money (LessWrong - Losing money or completing habits), call you to persuade you, text your friends, call your mum. But if done intelligently - striking a balance between being too nice and too mean - it should be pretty close. And pretty close to a fix for self-control is the Holy Grail for most people.
How far off are these AIs? These will come when the AI personal assistants come, and, in my opinion, would be more valuable to a lot of people. 24/7 accountability partners aren't a job that we can replicate (as paying a human 24/7 is too expensive), so they're not discussed as much as personal assistants, but they will be incredibly valuable. Would you rather have a chatbot who can book hotels and flights for you, or quit smoking?
Now let's talk about how easy it is to overcome most bad habits (of course - I'm not talking about genuine addictions). I have a bad habit of smoking cigarettes - I don't care if I'm drunk, but I can't say no if a friend offers me one when I'm sober. They're incredibly easy to resist, like a 1/10 in the moment, but for some reason this doesn't happen. Let's compare that with some deterrance mechanisms:
Texting my mum telling her I smoked: 5/10 (I wouldn't smoke)
Losing $5: 3/10 (I wouldn't smoke)
Having to spend 5 minutes sat in silence: 4/10 (I wouldn't smoke).
As long as the deterrance mechanism score higher than the negative action, I wouldn't do it. And it takes a shockingly simple deterrance mechanism to counteract a negative action, and therefore break a lifelong bad habit.
Now the deterrance mechanism is fixed, how can we monitor people? We ingest all the personal data (ie, an AI Overlord), and piece it together from there. We spend about 10 hours a day on screens, so that leaves ~6hrs where we don't know what a user is doing. The obvious ones work: Location, credit card transactions, simply asking the person what they're doing.
Crucially, from this, just as a human would, an intelligent AI can piece things together. If I'm trying to quit drinking, and the AI sees that it's 9pm on a Friday, I'm at a bar, and I spend $9 on my card, it can easily suss out that I'm probably drinking. It can recognise patterns and weak points very easily. It doesn't need to prevent you from doing your bad habits every minute of the day, just when you're weak - each minute will have a different "Chance of relapse score" depending on the time of day, how much sleep you had last night, and in general how suspicious this AI is that you're close to relapsing.
Here's what's likely to happen, and why we will need this more than ever.
In short: We will very soon be purposeless, broke, bored, lonely, and a superintelligent, superattractive AI will step in - most of society won't be able to resist. I argue that we simply won't be able to resist - we will need an "AI Iron Dome" to protect from this new superstimuli.
We already have guardrails imposed on us by society: I wouldn't stand up and shout profanities in a coffee shop, as it's socially embarrasing. I wouldn't ignore my boss as it's financially painful. There are thousands of things that you could do at any moment in time, but due to these invisible guardrails we have around us, we can only do two or three. Most people wouldn't even leave the line at the coffee shop as it's a little bit weird. These defence AIs would do the same thing: It would let you set your own guardrails on your life, so you never do something future you would regret.
So, we will soon have two very powerful competing AIs: The AI "Superfriends", and the AI "Iron Domes". They won't be able taking away your agency, just aligning your actions with what you in 24 hours would want you to do. Right now we have 100% control over our actions moment-to-moment, which is disastrous. We should have 90-95% control of what we are doing, and the other 5-10% should be controlled by an AI, aligned with our future, rational self. This seems dystopian now, but we will likely have no choice in the matter.
These are essentially the same as what you may tell a friend to do if they had a certain element of control over you. Here are some examples: