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!"

Comments

Japan

[Duncan3]

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.

The Obvious Problem

[SmartGamer]

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?

Think through this rationally

[mark-t]

Okay... imagine you're a wealthy busnessman who has a personal secretary. Your business relationship would probably begin with your secretary confirming each and every appointment with you before making the appropriate calls to the appropriate people, which may end up billing either yours or your company's account.

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.

Technology is about making decisions easier

[Realistic_Dragon]

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.