We’ve all been there at least once, and the feeling is reoccurring for many. That moment where you wish someone else could take charge, be in control, and make all those never-ending life decisions. What if I told you that technology is being developed to eradicate that feeling from your life forever? With the constant advance in technology, we have reached a point where it isn’t hard to imagine a world where machines can pick out what we should wear each day, choose a meal, or find us the perfect mate. For a fleeting moment, this sounds like the solution to all your problems. As participating members of society, our mission should be to explore and understand the endless uses of this technology heading our way.
You own and create data even if you own and create nothing else in life. And while it is tempting to think of locking down your data, it is more likely that your data is being used by organizations whose business model is manipulation and exploitation. Suppose you have doubts about the legitimacy of this idea. In that case, I challenge you to read The Circle, written by Dave Eggers, and then try to convince yourself that the “dystopian” society created in his novel doesn’t feel oddly familiar and is not the least bit dystopian at all. We live in a world run by machines, and most of society has already committed to investing their data to benefit those companies mentioned above.
Since you are already allowing your personal data to work for the benefit of others, specifically large corrupt organizations, why not let your data work to your advantage instead? That is what ooverse offers— investing your data for individual and societal benefit. For users of ooverse (pronounced “oo” as in “oops” and “verse” as in “universe”), the return on investment is an opportunity to train an AI advisor by feeding it with data that enables it to understand your life enough to offer you quality advice and, ultimately, make decisions on your behalf, when you want. And with the data available and the magnificent, if slightly disturbing, advances in machine learning, your AI advisor will probably make a better decision than you ever could.
For example, your AI could analyze your current medication, genetic information, current lifestyle and recent food orders, and pick the lunch option that provides you the best nutritional value at this particular time. Or imagine that your AI advisor finds you a perfect date, composes a message based on her interests and your sense of humour, and starts a conversation with her on your behalf. Sounds like a dream—a dream some might call bold and brilliant! The path to that dream—the path to building “the ooverse universe”, as its founder, Abed Awuah-Gyawu Rosen, refers to it, clearly taps into a whole new type of user benefit.
Phase One- Area Manager
It all begins with creating an engaging social media and social network. This phase is familiar to the users as social media has become an integral part of our society. Within this phase, people in ooverse will share wide ranging content and discover whole new ways of developing connections. The first iteration of Phase One will soon be available to Android and IOS users: a social app with which you can share stories with contacts and others in ooverse, based on their live locations.
Phase Two- Process Manager
In Phase Two, an operating system for two-sided marketplaces will be developed, to create a general medium for exchanging value among users. Crowdsourcing is the goal here. In other words, in this phase, users can use the wide-ranging content they share and consume in ooverse to exchange wide-ranging products and services. Thus, the ooverse app becomes Amazon + Uber + Fiverr + Airbnb + Robinhood + countless other apps used across the globe daily. To put it simply, anything you need, you can crowdsource from other users.
Phase Three- Outcome Manager
Phase Three is the more bizarre phase. In this phase, your AI advisor, knowing the nature of your connections and your activities in ooverse’s universal social marketplace, will help you set specific objectives and achieve them. By applying social physics, machine learning and epigenetics, your wide ranging activities in ooverse will systematically feed an AI so profoundly knowledgeable of your circumstances that it would, at some point, possess God’s-eye view of your life. The more activities you do in ooverse, the more you feed your AI advisor with data, and the better the advice it can give you. Once you feel that your AI advisor’s “training” is complete, you could relinquish control, allowing the machine to “take the wheel.” Forget about your self-driving car; we are talking about a self-driving life! And it is within this phase that we must stop to recognize that we are stepping off the cliff’s edge, with no fundamental understanding of where that next step will lead. However, this leap of faith is precisely what is needed, and has been proven, to advance our society in ways that have immense benefits for all.
The vision statement of ooverse invites us to “Imagine knowing which mixture of music, movies, or books can improve your mental health…” or “Imagine knowing which careers your personality and natural affinities are best-suited for.” Currently, we can learn this information without the use of AI, but the methods and means of obtaining data to support those decisions is a painful multi-step project. We have therapists or life coaches that may recommend some media to help improve your mental health. We have career experts who can support your search for the perfect career after completing several draining aptitude tests. These are options we currently have, but with the launch of Phase three, a user can obtain that information with one click of a button. With the abilities of machine learning and AI technology, your AI advisor will have better, more accurate knowledge to make those life decisions appropriately. So you can put your life in ooverse in self-driving mode.
Moreover, as the ooverse universe expands, it has the potential, on a macro level, to impact public administration and public policy, making governance more transparent and accountable and creating a more democratic and equitable society. As a society, we struggle with agreeing upon socioeconomic issues that range from fundamental to life-altering. A lengthy debate regarding the current state of our planet comes to mind when we think of societal issues which have strong support on both sides of the proverbial fence. Some claim that we should take specific steps to maintain the planet as it is the only one we have. At the same time, others support the idea that we will find a way to live elsewhere when Earth ceases to exist. Perhaps Abed puts it best when he says, “Our mode of survival, as an advanced species, should be better than going from planet to planet, sucking them dry of resources and viability, like a bunch of Marvel villains.” With ooverse, society may finally be in a position where we can put these vital decisions in the “hands” of AI advisors and solve the most debated global issues.
Ground-breaking US startups so often move fast and break things. So we need to ask ourselves if the bold and brilliant dream of ooverse’s rad founder and architect is not also bonkers. But then, again, we may ultimately decide, as he maintains, that “We are within our rights to pursue omniscience in our own lives, just like the omniscient being in whose image and likeness we are told we are made.”
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