Individual Empowerment and Agency on a Scale We’ve Never Seen Before

I was listening to the latest Pivot Podcast when Kara Swisher played a clip from Sam Altman‘s keynote at OpenAI’s Developers Day, earlier this week. Spake Sam (at the 35:18 mark),

We believe that AI will be about individual empowerment and agency on a scale we’ve never seen before

Whoa! That’s what we’ve been working toward here at ProjectVRM since 2006. It’s what John Battelle called for last April:

Imagine a GPT chatbot that you own, trust, and control. Let’s call it a genie, because honestly, that’s the most appropriate word for this new entity. This genie has access to everything you do on your phone, your computer, and sure, why not – your Alexa, your car, basically every digital surface with which you interact. Imagine it’s bounded by immutable rules that state you and you alone can tell it what to do, what information to share, what services to connect to, on what terms, and so on. Now imagine you can ask that genie to perform all manner of magic on your behalf – pretty much any question you can think of, it will figure out an answer.

Genie is good. Dare we try riffing off what Sam said, with IEASWNSB? (Pronounced “Eewasnib,” perhaps?) We might have better luck with that than we’ve had with VRM, Me2B, and other initialisms and acronyms.

For fun, I asked Bing Image Create, which uses OpenAI’s DALL-E to produce images, to make art with its boss’s words. It gave me the images above. Here’s the link.

Those are a little too Ayn Randy for me. So I tried just “Empowered individuals,” and got this—

—which is the Ayn Rand translated to Woke.

But never mind that. Let’s talk about individual empowerment with AI help. Here’s my personal punch list:

1. Health. Make sense of all my health data. Suck it in from every medical care provider I’ve ever had, and help me make decisions based on it. Also, help me share it on an as-needed basis with my current providers. (On my own terms, about which more below.)
2. Finances. Pull in and help me make sense of my holdings, obligations, recurring payments, incomes, whatever. Match my orders and shipments from Amazon and other retailers with the cryptic entries (always in ALL CAPS) on my credit card bills. I want to run every receipt I collect through a scanner that does OCR for my AI, which will know what receipt is for what, where it goes in the books it helps me keep, and yearly helps me work through my taxes. The list can go on.
3. Property. What have I got? I want to point my phone camera at everything that a good AI can recognize, and make sense of all that too. Know all the books on my shelves by reading their spines. Know my furniture, the stuff in my basement. Help me keep records of my car’s history after I give it the VIN number I photographed under the windshield, and run all the records I’ve kept in the glove box through the same scanner I mentioned above. Whatever. Why not?
4. Correspondence. I have half a million emails here, going back to 1995. (Wish it went back farther.) Lots of texts too, in lots of systems. Help me do a better job of looking back through those than my various clients do. Help me cross-reference those with events I attended and other stuff that may be relevant to some current inquiry.
5. Contacts. Who do I have in my various directories? How many entries are wrong in one way or another? Go through and correct them, AI butler, using whatever clever new algorithm works for that, supplied by corporate entities whose knowledge of me remains as close to zero as I allow.
6. Crumb trail. What did I buy from Amazon (or anybody) and when? Where do Google and Apple know I’ve been and what I’ve been doing? How about my late model car, which at the very least knows lots about my driving, and may even know what I’ve said, to whom, or even if sexual activity was going on? How about my TV, the maker of which gets paid to snitch on what I’ve watched and when—and may even be watching me and others, sitting and staring at it. All that information is far more useful to me than it is to them.
7. Calendar. Tell me where I was on a given day, what I was doing, and who I was with. Knowing all that other personal data (above) will help too.
8. Business relationships. Look into all my subscriptions and help me fight the fuckery behind nearly all of them. Make better sense of all the “loyalty” programs I’m involved with, and help me unfuck those too since most of them are about entrapment rather than real loyalty. (Bonus links here and here.)
9. Other involvements. What associations do I belong to? How deeply am I involved with any or all of them? Can we drop some? Add some? Have some insights into how those are going, or should go?
10. Travel. I have 1.6 million miles with United Airlines alone. Where did I go? When? Why? What did I pay? Are there ways to improve my relationships with airlines and other entities (e.g. car rental agencies, Uber/Lyft, Airbnb, cruise lines)? Are there ways I can help them that don’t require enduring yet another of those annoying surveys that seem to follow every contact with them?
11. Shopping. We’ve been talking about (and working toward) intentcasting since the late aughts, with lots of developers on the case, but not big breakthroughs. But with AI it’s easy to imagine countless possibilities that begin with one’s intent to buy rather than retailers’ intent to sell. Words to wise sellers: A) Make it as easy as possible for customers’ personal and privacy-guarding AI agents to find what you’ve got and know as much about it as possible, and B) Fire every marketer and marketing system that wants in any ways to trap, milk, coerce, and otherwise fuck over customers. Meanwhile, customers should have AI capacities that keep them from getting screwed, to know when the screwing happens, and to help do something about it.
12. My own personal data collection. There have been many of these, by many names, tried over the years. The current leading candidate (IMHO) is Sir Tim Berners-Lee‘s Solid project.

John Battelle (see above) adds,

How about remembering the password you used once to log into your healthcare provider three years ago? How about negotiating a way better deal with that service by threatening to move to competitors? Done! Once you’re happy with that healthcare provider, can you ask your genie to file  all your claims and make sure you get reimbursed by checking your bank statements? Why yes you can! Your wish has been granted!

Our lives are packed with too much data for our meat brains alone to comprehend fully and put to use. AI is good for that. So bring it on.

And don’t bet that any of the bigs, including OpenAI, will give you anything on the punch list above*. They’re too big, too centralized, too stuck in a mainframe paradigm. They look for what only they can do for you, rather than what you can do for yourself—or do better with your own damn AI.

Personal AI today is where personal computing was fifty years ago. We don’t yet have the Apple II, the Osborne, the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, much less the IBM  PC or the Macintosh. We just have big companies with big everything and hooks for developers.

Real personal AI is a huge greenfield. Going there is also, to switch metaphors, a blue ocean strategy. Wrote about that here.

*Except by pouring all that data into their LLM. Not yours.