Hi,
I’m building a Personal Companion inspired by the movie “Her.”
The idea is that you’d have an AI in your browser that helps you navigate the web far more intuitively than we do today with our regular browsers.
We’re still developing the MVP and doing product research.
Your feedback would be deeply appreciated as this product could help make the web far more humane.
Please answer the following questions:
1) Assuming our AI worked very well, would you use voice to navigate the Web? If not, why?
2) Do you think browsing the Web today works well, or do you think it could be much better? If yes, how?
If anything else comes to mind, please share it. I’m also open to jump on videocalls with anyone who wants to discuss this project. We’re hiring and looking for early adopters wanting to be a part of the future of the Web. DM me if that’s your case.
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how do you think browsing the web could be better?
One of the promises of RDF data and Solid is that if used reliably and at scale (this is an enormous if), search engines could be a lot more specific. E.g. instead of searching purely based on terms, the engine can search based on properties to answer general-purpose queries like “find me a book on the subject of economics which wasn’t written by an economist. But it mustn’t have a blue front cover or have been written by an author who I haven’t read from before”
Why not use AI to browse the web
I would wonder how your AI was being scored in its’ fitness function. Beyond answering exactly what I’m asking, how can the AI know what is good for me?
Error can be quite useful to finding something new, and there could be problems with majority-rules suggestions, with clustering and with using past behaviour to predict future behaviour. I’m not sure if the AI could be trained in multiple ways and have the behaviour selected along these lines (e.g. to find something new, to find something specific, to be challenged)
One instance where Google was pretty effective for me recently was on a day when I realised I didn’t really understand what debt was. I searched “what is debt”, it came back with some definitions of what debt means in a national economy. I searched something along the lines of “no, what is debt, really?” and it came back with David Graeber’s book on the history of Debt, which is a great book and just what I was looking for 
I haven’t seen the movie Her, so apologies if I’m missing the point
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By chance just yesterday read about the movie, which I haven’t seen either. It raises interesting questions in the relationship between humans and future AI. I won’t pass spoilers but in the movie a lonely man who divorced his wife falls in love AI-based operating system that is quite human-like. As the movie progresses this some fundamental and philosophical issues are touched upon.
Why not use AI to browse the web
I have a broader issue than @calummackervoy and that is that I have just lost all trust in companies that nowadays offer these kinds of services. Mostly having the wrong VC-driven corporate culture and participating in the Wild West mealstrom of surveillance capitalism. Anyone offering an AI would have to really give it their all to prove their trustworthiness to me.
In general taking the example of “her” again… the AI’s and the Metaverse’s seem to me to be offering a kind of ‘plastic’ social. It is tech replacing actual human-to-human social interaction.
There are of course many good applications for a more natural ‘behaving’ personal assistent. I used to be very excited about such innovations at younger age.
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