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Smart Cellphone Would Spend Your Money
jonknee writes "MobileTracker pointed to an article in the latest New Scientist about some new 3G mobile phone software that tries to learn your habits and start making your decisions for you. This sounds like science fiction, but it's happening now. The phone will be able to make reservations for you at your favorite steak house and then save seats for you at the hot event in town. Neat!"
Sure!
After all, electronics are made to make life easier, but not to substitute you, aren't they?
This type of "smartness" could be of some utility in cases were wrong decisions made no harm, and could be undoed. Like a computer knowing what time to turn off, what do you browse next. For the cell phones I'm remembering something simple but useful: noticing (but just noticing) you that the there's a conference in town you'd like to attend.
KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid!
While us Americans are chuckling and wondering why anyone would want this, as many posts are showing...
In Japan is is absolutely critical for every teenage girl to have exactly the same stuff as every other, or else she faces some rather severe social consequences. It's no secret that these girls/sheep run the Japanese economy.
So once sales of product-X reaches some critical mass all the girls phones can be programmed to detect it and keep up by ordering the product immediately.
In all seriousness, this will relive the stress of keeping up for many girls, and make their lives a bit better.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Yeh, I remember the article about the guy who complained because his TiVo thought he was gay(scheduling programs involving the theme).
http://www.theisociety.net/archives/000217.html
Then, to compensate, he watched some WW2 movies and then his TiVo thought he was Nazi and kept scheduling movies about the topic. I can see it now, some poor guy's phone starts ordering tix for Barbra Streisand concerts just because he once bought a dozen roses for his GF on Valentine's day.
The obvious concern, of course, is if the system is "cheated" by the authors of the sites referenced. What if the system "accidentially" tells the cell phone the wrong price of a hotel by exchanging the dollars and cents or somesuch, but is referenced by ID number and winds up costing $98.24/night instead of an incredible deal of $24.98 per night?
And I sincerely doubt that the company invovled would be altruistic enough to reject deals to make the selector have a preference for certain companies, even if it's not tied for best deal. It would definitely be logging what's used.
It would lead to an interesting opportunity: targeted ads sent to a cell phone, using the n00 shin3y color displays, eating minutes while they automatically download as an "additional cost" to the service- on the discount plan, of course. Imagine the chaos if they didn't disable such a disfeature during, say, roaming or overtime...
Although it might seem people would ignore them, what if your phone forced you to watch an ad before using certain features- and then quizzed you on the advertisement to make sure you saw it?
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
After some months of this person working for you, you begin to realize that calling you on your cell phone while you are away from the office to confirm every little thing gets a little tiresome, so you tell your secretary to use reasonable judgement instead. All the secretary has to do is check your calendar to see what you already have scheduled, and make any necessary appointments based on that. Now the secretary is only calling you once or twice a week, usually when something requires your signature or if authorization is needed for spending money for something or other.
After several years, you finally decide that this secretary has worked for you long enough that they deserve more complete trust, so you grant them signing authority on your behalf.
Now if this secretary abuses the new-found power, charges for embezzlement can fairly easily be made, but if this "secretary" were nothing more than a computer... what could possibly be done?
This is a Bad Idea(tm), I'm afraid.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
A lot of the things here have been modded as funny, but it's a fairly serious point.
There is nothing wrong with using technology to lighten workload, but letting it take away actual decision making is definatly a step too far.
This trend has increased a lot over the last few years - every new iteration of a program seems to take information away from you and just give you a 'summary' to make your choices from, and now they want it to make the decision as well? Sod that for a game of soldiers.
What I want is _more_ information (and unbiased information too, no Fox for me thanks) presented in a clear format, so that I can make good decisions. _That_ would be a good application of technology, a thousand times more worthwhile than this.
Beep beep.
This may be slightly off topic but I think the underlying discussion is the same...
Ebills (for those who may know it by a different name) are basically automated online bills which automatically get deducted from your bank account if you choose to have them setup that way (e.g. your phone bill)
I've noticed this for quite a while now, companies wishing to automate the buying/selling process such that monetary control of an individual is completely eliminated. Worse yet, when mistakes happen, the burden of proof falls completely on the individual and the company's responsibility is non existant!
What I haven't been able to figure out is how these things schemes continue to survive (some would even say 'thrive').
No thank you to ebills and smart phones! Smart and Convinent for whom?
I work at Circuit City. I'd say 80-90% of the cell phones we sell (Nokia, Motorola, Sanyo, Samsung) with a service plan come back broken within the first year. No data on ones without service plan.
barzelay.net
Well... first of all, the phones, unlike humans, have no motivation to deliberately abuse their power (unless you have evil service providers).
If the phones misuse their newfound power, what could be done? Well, you either tell it not to make any more decisions for you, or you continue to train it some more until you actually like the decisions it makes.
Imagine this: First, after using the phone for a few months of good behavior, you trust it enough to give it a little bit of freedom. You would allow the phone to enter the initial phase of purchase automation, and you would set an upper limit of, say, $50 per month that the phone has available to spend.
In the first few weeks after you start using it, it would display a list of POTENTIAL purchases -- a list of items totalling up to $50 that it believes you would like. You have to manually confirm each of these purchases. Let's say the phone will ring, you answer it, and a list of items comes up. You select whether you want each one to be purchased or not by simply pushing the Yes or No keys and going through the list.
After a few more weeks of use, you move the phone to the next phase of trust. Now, the phone is (hopefully) smart enough to seperate your purchases into categories -- like stuff that you buy on a regular, recurring basis stuff that's not so predictable. For example, the phone learns that you take your family to the same restaurant every Friday night, and that this behavior has been occuring for the past 29/30 weeks. Now, because of its additional freedom, it would call in a reservation, but at the same time, it would also ring to display a message "I have placed a reservation for 3 people at the Happy Geeks restaurant, at 7pm Friday night. If you would like me to cancel this appointment, press No now or cancel it from the Orders menu within 24 hours." Meaning, it automatically placed the order for you, but you're still able to override it within a certain timeframe if you're so inclined.
At this stage, the more unpredictable purchases will still require confirmation. Let's say you go to the movies every other Saturday night, but you watch a different movie every time (which is completely normal), but this pattern of behavior has only occurred 4 times out of the past 12 weeks. That's still a rather "habitual" event, but not as certain as the Friday dinners. In this case, the phone would still confirm it:
"Would you like to see a movie this Saturday? Here's a list of what's available at your favorite theater from 7pm to 10pm:
0. NOT INTERESTED - CANCEL
1. Nemo Almighty - 7:10pm
2. 2 Dumb 2 Furious: When Harry Got His Car - 8:20pm
3. X-Men Reloaded - 7:10pm"
Eventually, it would learn what genre of movies you prefer -- if any -- which critics' reviews you trust the most, what your favorite actors/writers/directors are, and recommend a movie for you based on that. Like "I have reserved a ticket for you for a showing of Lady of the Rings at 9:20pm, Saturday. If you'd rather see another movie or none at all, press No now or do so from the Orders menu within the next 12 hours."
After years of use, when the phone (or perhaps your user profile, if it needs to be migrated from one generation of phones to the next) truly "understands" you, it might have access to say, 5000 dollars instead of 50. At this point, if you really trust it enough (most people probably wouldn't, so this phase is entirely optional), you would allow it to use all of that money (at least on certain categories of items) that cannot be reversed. Say you've been bidding on a fine piece of art on eBay for the past 6 days, and when you've been outbid, you always incremeted your bid by $100. The current bid is $4150, and 20 seconds before the close of the auction, the phone connects to the net and checks the status: You've been outbid by 50 dollars, at the current price of $4200. The phone, knowing that you've constantly raised your bids over the past 6 days, determines that you must really want the item