The World Needs Individualised, Not Personalised AI
It’s not just semantics. The role of technology in society is evolving to meet the demand for more individualised experiences.
You are different to everyone else. The explicit choices, decisions and actions you take all integrate to construct the world around you — which only exists as you see it. Therefore, your virtual experience of it should not be categorised but entirely tailored to you.
Personalisation is not working
Your life is intrinsically embedded with technology driven by your data: your spending habits, locations and browsing history. But, knowledge derived primarily from big data is hollow and cannot deliver meaningful insight into a human's needs and desires. Big data makes big assumptions. To offer something to genuinely improve human life, you need to dive deeper than shallow analytics.
Personalised technology and marketing strategies orbit around analysing and leveraging your data to offer you a product or service that a business thinks you want. But how can an algorithm that has picked up your online activity know the nuances of emotion surrounding it? A journalist from The Washington Post recently called for Facebook and Instagram to rethink their targeted marketing when she was inundated with baby-related advertising following a stillbirth. It’s individualised, not personalised, artificial intelligence (AI) that will ensure you’re not served harmful or offensive advertising and prevent you from being bucketed into a category that doesn’t represent you.
You are more than your transactions, and your life extends beyond the simplicity of your online habits. It’s what happens in between your online moments that need to be brought into your online world.
Google observes patterns and uses them to serve you information, but it can’t understand the meaning behind what you have searched for or why you have searched for it. Monzo can help you break down your spending habits in a new and digestible way, but it remains stuck in an information layer that doesn’t account for emotional spending habits. It tells you what you’re spending money on but not why. Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa can help you create shopping lists, but it can’t intuit what you need to buy before you can yourself. To inject humanity into your digital experience, hyper-personalisation must evolve.
In the very near future, personalised technology will be left behind in favour of a more individual, holistic experience. We’ll see this in everything, from our assistive AIs, to Precision and Genomic medicine that uses precise genetic, environmental and lifestyle-based information to predict, prevent, diagnose and treat disease. Consumer expectations grow with every experience — we’re evolving to need and expect more from our technology.
The world needs individualised, not personalised AI
Where personalisation commoditises you, individualisation hands you power. If personalisation uses data based on things you’ve done, individualisation helps you assess what you can do, based on your potential choices.
What if you had access to an individual intelligence that could walk in your shoes and see the world through your eyes? If your assistive experience — created for you by you — could step into the future to predict your most advantageous outcomes?
When your technology knows you’re tired, you’ve been working late, and you haven’t exercised in a while, it could suggest helpful lifestyle changes. Those needle-in-a-haystack alterations could improve your life, shift your attitude and markedly change the important variables to make your life incredible. Imagine the value it could add to live in a world where you are not simply understood by the choices you’ve made but by the choices you could make. Even more: the choices you didn’t even know you could make. It will cut across human needs — straight to the silent information that will benefit the individualised experience most.
We’re creating a post-digital future
Conversation is the most natural way to build an accurate understanding of an individual. It allows you to understand intent, emotion and motivation — without simply creating archetypes based on observed patterns. Over time, the emphasis on communication will supersede the functionality of existing digital interfaces, and many of these will fall away: natural language will become the next primary interface. At Constellation AI, we’re refining the interaction between humans and machines through assistive experiences that focus on this individualised approach.
There are many ways to solve the problem of accurate conversational dialogue, but not one of the currently available systems always gets it right. We’ve combined novel deep learning techniques and semantic meaning to generate real, unscripted conversations with an AI that can understand the meaning of your response. Even state-of-the-art technology has so far struggled to understand the meaning behind language and human conversation — until now.
Our technology is not a customisation of an off-the-shelf product we’ve added elements to; no other available technology can understand the context and detail of your unique character facets and capture them in the same way. You’ll benefit from your own available personal data and a new intelligence that understands what’s on your mind, integrating seamlessly and effortlessly exactly when you want to access it.
Individualisation can only grow from your explicit choices, decisions and actions — not those of others. By fully realising your individuality and seeing you as a unique human being, we’re reimagining the current hollow, personalised experience. Your decisions will always be up to you, but when you’re at a fork in the road, your path will become immeasurably clearer.