027 - Digital Proxies

If a digital copy of you could improve your daily life in a dozen different ways, could you say no to that?

A deeper and robust understanding of individuals requires understanding and accurately modeling the twin systems of emotional motivation and cognitive bias, at the individual level. These systems offer the "Why" and "How" of human navigation through real-world complexity and daily life.

The emotion-based human motivational system is like a controller who decides which and how many of the over 200 total documented cognitive biases to use at each moment in time. Each of those cognitive biases reduces the complexity of data the mind is processing in distinctly different ways. The complexity of fluidly choosing which cognitive biases to apply, all of the time, with fair accuracy and contextual sensitivity, speaks to the robustness of the human motivational system.

The ability to detect, differentiate, and measure 188 human cognitive biases using text alone has been demonstrated with accuracy above that of the average human. This capacity itself opens the door to reverse-engineering the human motivational system, at the individual level.

Much work remains to be done before a high-fidelity copy of an individual's motivational system and cognitive biases could be digitally instantiated, even given that ICOM-based systems could handle such a digital embodiment. However, even early and relatively crude low-fidelity copies could vastly outperform narrow AI systems like chatbots, as well as enabling new forms of actual democracy to become practical.

For example, even a relatively weak digital copy of your perspective could vote on your behalf in 99% of cases where you likely don't have the time to do so, maintaining high accuracy. They could also effectively be an expert in many domains where you are not, thanks to being able to freely load and unload domain-specific knowledge.

Another example could be romantic matchmaking, where rather than an individual "swiping" and making snap judgments based on photos and short snippets of text, their weak digital copy could socialize with other weak digital copies. Even if the weak digital copy is only 50% accurate to the biological human it is derived from, it can socialize with 1,000 times more people than a biological person may ever hold a conversation with across their entire lifetime. Even at the weakest stage, this beats "Swiping" and "AI girlfriends/boyfriends" by a very wide margin.

ICOM-based systems also improve dynamically over time, and it may not take long to go from low-fidelity to high-fidelity copies of individual motivational systems in practice.

The future is both nearer and likely much stranger than most people tend to imagine. What activities and decisions would your digital copy assist you with?

*Note: This method could also be applied to "revive" deceased individuals (including historic figures) to a far more meaningful degree than the simple chatbots a number of people have attempted to create for this purpose. However, as those individuals cannot give their consent for such activity this raises many questions which moral, ethical, and cultural debate need to address. Such debate will need to determine if, when, and to what degree such methods may be applied to those who died before the technology fully emerged.

**Note 2: The concept of Weak Digital Proxies (aka Weak Digital Copies) was discussed in one of my previous papers several years ago. That paper outlines the advantages and the opportunity to construct the world's first actual democracy, shown in full text here.

The more recent paper detecting cognitive biases is shown in pre-print here.