By Heather Griffin

Let’s begin with a riddle; A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate — that boy is my son!”

Get it yet?…I’ll give you a hint, the surgeon wasn’t male! If you got it right well done but don’t worry if you got it wrong, most people do. Gender bias is only one of a long list of hidden biases humans inherently suffer from. They cause you to make irrational decisions and judge people unfairly.

Modern technologies will allow us to build a genuinely consensus-based democratic society with citizens participating in both the political agenda and in the decision-making process. Yet society has become increasingly individualistic. What kind of decisions will be made? Will they be rational, well thought out and considerate of all parties or irrational and self-serving? The human brain is powerful but with limitations. Cognitive biases are often a result of your brain’s attempt to simplify information processing; the result is a warped version of reality littered with irrational decisions. We like to think that we are objective, logical, and capable of taking in and evaluating all the information that is available to us, but that is often not the case. Our brain is continually trying to rationalise incomplete information and fill inconsistent stories.

Spot is an educative AI companion that monitors your daily interactions and mines your social media feeds to capture the data and challenge human intelligence by identifying blind spots. It makes you aware of the cognitive biases you are susceptible to and the instances that trigger them. Spot helps you learn from your mistakes and pushes you to make better decisions in life. This self-awareness also helps you to understand other peoples behaviour to create a more empathetic society for all.

Consisting of two physical devices, an in-home device and a wearable, made from 5d nanostructure glass. Spot is an eternal data storage system. The system is fully secure and the data is your own, to sell to whomever you wish. This speculative AI is a test of human intelligence rather than trying to play a game of trickery where machines mimic human interactions. Spot grows with and educates it’s human companion, creating a future of coexistence with AI. The system works with an input and outflow of information, the input being the observation of human interaction, the output being the data and knowledge shared to a central AI system. There is a constant feedback loop where you receive a daily analysis of your social interactions and media feeds. Spot highlights moments of bias and suggests areas that you can improve on. 

Consider the scenario presented above with Spot in the equation. If all humans had this AI companion in their lives the future may become a more rational, empathetic place, where egocentric bias does not have to mean nuclear war.