An AI-Enhanced Future
The risk of developing ever-smarter AI is becoming a more and more current topic. While it’s worth considering risks, we might be overemphasizing risks and underemphasizing the possible benefits. AI could greatly improve everyday quality of life. Here is a sketch of what a typical day could look like in the future.
06:00
You wake up well-rested. Your assistant reports that you slept 7 hours and 53 minutes, and it was pretty high-quality sleep. You check your plan for the day. It’s hovering in your peripheral vision, and you swipe it into focus. It includes your recommended optimal meals. First is your breakfast. You are currently aiming to build muscle, so your dietician, working with your personal trainer, has planned a breakfast of steak and eggs. Next, you are scheduled to drink 6 ounces of black coffee at 7:30 AM.
This has all been determined to be optimal for you. You can always deviate, of course, and give feedback to your exercise and diet team that the plans aren’t quite right for you. But they give you good plans every day without much work needed from you. It’s really nice. You eat well without having to think about it much. Your diet and your exercise program are as well-optimized as those of a world-famous athlete in 2023. It all costs you the equivalent of 5 minutes of work a month.
07:00
The next item on your agenda, your morning workout, materializes in your peripheral vision. You do the workout in front of cameras to get live feedback on your form. At the end of the workout, you can check a detailed report. These advances in home workout tools have made good exercise routines and fitness much more common than they were twenty years ago.
12:00
Your assistant asks you if you would like to have lunch now since it’s about when you usually have lunch. It offers a choice of healthy, tasty meals that can be delivered to your home in about 30 minutes. There are highly automated commercial kitchens that deliver with autonomous drones, making it cheap, easy, and fast to have good food delivered to you.
19:00
You’ve finished dinner. Your assistant reminds you that you have been going to bed later than you should lately, and suggests a time to get ready for bed.
These are not the most mind-blowing possibilities, but they show some of the more down-to-earth everyday benefits we could get from this kind of technology. As long as we balance caution and courage well, we can have all this and more.