#22: The AI Resort, Personalised Books, Documenting Peoples’ Life Stories

Ian Bowie
Hello and welcome to AI unfiltered with me, Ian Bowie, and our resident expert, Michael Stormbom, where we will be talking about everything to do with AI in our modern digital society and what the future holds for all of us.

Ian Bowie
So as the summer’s coming, yes, I’ve had a little thought about this. Would it be possible to create a completely AI controlled resort? Okay, let’s take it from the very beginning. Imagine you know that this resort exists, or AI knows that you exist. So what they do is they push the idea to you that hey, wouldn’t you like to come to a resort? Where you are not disturbed and where everything is optimized for your own individual personal pleasure and enjoyment?

Michael Stormbom
So sort of continuing on from the automating your life episode in a way?

Ian Bowie
Yeah. But but you know, the idea is that okay.

Michael Stormbom
But an entirely individualized experience.

Ian Bowie
This is a completely… so it’s a resort and it will be full of different people. And they would all get different experiences depending on you know, who they are, how old they are, what gender they are, what perhaps health issues they might have, what interests they have, what social background they come from, what educational level they have.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, but everyone would gather in the same place but still have an individual experience.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, yeah.

Michael Stormbom
What do you do if someone has an interest in deep sea diving, and the other is interested in skiing, how is that…

Ian Bowie
Well no this is a summer vacation, or holiday, so of course you know, you know, you’re going to sort of a summer kind of resort. But I mean, you know, it could incorporate augmented reality.

Michael Stormbom
Or virtual reality.

Ian Bowie
Virtual reality. So all of these things.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, robot butler, and…

Ian Bowie
Yeah, this is the whole idea. This is what I’m saying. Does the technology currently exist today to create a fully automated, no human contact holiday resort?

Michael Stormbom
That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure, I mean, of course, there are those hotels where you can go without any human contact whatsoever. But a fully automated resort.

Ian Bowie
Let’s call it like a spa complex. Of course, it’s got to be an environment that you can control.

Michael Stormbom
So you would have a robot masseur as well.

Ian Bowie
Well, yes. Why not?

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, why not? Indeed. Yeah. So it’s might even be better if you’re deathly afraid of human contact.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. But you know, your food is maybe even 3d printed in the morning. Get your 3d printed English breakfast. You can do it.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. What about room cleaning? So is it just a Roomba robots, yeah.

Ian Bowie
Robots, easy, oh that’s easy peasy that.

Michael Stormbom
How do you get the robot to make your bed.

Ian Bowie
Well, I mean.

Michael Stormbom
Maybe you can actually, maybe you can. Yeah, yeah.

Ian Bowie
And of course, you know, you get a robot drone to come up and just clean the windows. No problem at all.

Michael Stormbom
Yes, and a drone delivers. You’ve ordered room service and the drone comes.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. An individualized holiday experience.

Michael Stormbom
We have to try it out.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. But of course, you know, it’s like the robot lawnmower, that they have to map out the parameters of the garden first before they can send all that to the robot, but of course, you know, you would have to have a mapped out environment in which the holidaymakers had to remain within.

Michael Stormbom
You know, I think this could also make the plot for like a horror thriller movie, you’ve been invited to the perfect resort, with a dark secret.

Ian Bowie
They’ve already done it. Well, yeah. There was that program back in the 1980s Fantasy Island, where all your dreams come true, or don’t haha.

Michael Stormbom
So putting that in the digital era? Yeah, yeah, no, why not? I guess. I guess the biggest question is like how individualized can you make it, can it be made fully individualized before different individualized experiences start interfering with one another. Yeah, for the sake of argument, like, I want peace and quiet and then the next door neighbor wants to go on a bender. Can you automate it so that the drunken people are as far away from you as possible? It’s a kind of optimization problem, I guess?

Ian Bowie
Yeah. Well, I mean, of course, I’m not saying there wouldn’t be teething difficulties.

Michael Stormbom
There might be… Yeah, we have to beta test. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And what if I mean, if you want the water in the pool to be at a certain temperature, then you have to gather with the people who want the temperature at that level and the people who want this warmer or colder to go somewhere else? Yeah. Yeah, I guess it I guess it becomes a question of how individualized and can you?

Ian Bowie
Yeah, but I think… don’t you think that’s the way it’s gonna go eventually, I mean, that everybody wants a completely individualized…

Michael Stormbom
I think everyone wants an individualized experience, except maybe when it comes to advertisements. We’d rather avoid them, but…

Ian Bowie
But the nice experiences in life then, of course, it’s happening, isn’t it? You know, for example,

Michael Stormbom
I mean, of course, if you use anything, it’s a form of flattery in a way that, isn’t it, an experience individualized, just especially for you. Yes, it becomes an ego thing.

Ian Bowie
That’s quite nice. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. How about I mean, we’ve talked about AI writing books, but how about writing like personalized books, like fitting to your particular tastes and interests?

Ian Bowie
Yeah. Well, I mean, that was actually an idea that I had quite a few years ago was was creating individualized books for people putting them as characters into a book that they can be the hero

Michael Stormbom
I mean, of course there is that concept you know, you can put… you see advertisements you can put in you like your name, they’re like yeah, Michael goes forest. Yes. Yeah. Kind of thing, but a perfectly, completely individualized story.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, well, that was my idea. But of course, because it was going to be me writing it and having to research it, then it was going to cost a lot of money to whoever wanted it.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. We’ve been talking about text generation algorithms now quite a bit on the show. So why not like an individualized story? Just give it some basic facts, and then it will write a story for you around those facts. Yeah.

Ian Bowie
That would be nice

Michael Stormbom
Wouldn’t it? Yeah. That would be the ultimate ego trip. Like I’m the main character of the story.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, it’s all about me. That shouldn’t be too difficult to do.

Michael Stormbom
No, I mean, I think you can partially do that already. With what’s available.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. There’s plenty of people who would sign up for that, especially if it was cheap enough.

Michael Stormbom
I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I think there might even be a service out there. I don’t know. We have to check.

Ian Bowie
I mean, there are certainly human writers.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah but I mean just completely, completely automatically created.

Ian Bowie
I don’t know if anybody’s offering a service like that commercially.

Michael Stormbom
I don’t know, either. No, but I mean, there are, for example, automatic text generation of product descriptions, for example. Yeah. So I mean, why not take it to the to like, yeah, right. Right. Get a story about yourself and it’s completely automatically written because it’s the same principle basically.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. Yeah, that’d very cool.

Michael Stormbom
Well, that’s how that relates to the individualised resort, I don’t know but, I guess we all want we are all the main characters in our own stories, I suppose. But anyway.

Ian Bowie
Such a profound statement.

Michael Stormbom
That no one has ever said before.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, I mean, that’s, you know, I mean, I am a storyteller. That’s why I do, you know, so of course, anything like that interests me. But of course, it kind of, well, we talked about this once before about, you know, getting a AI algorithm to start writing bestselling books.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. But if you take it in the other direction, which is a completely individualized book experience. You sell exactly one copy of the of the book. But it’s exactly tailored to your particular…

Ian Bowie
Yeah. But then, you know,for it to become commercially viable, you’d either have to charge a huge amount of money for that one book or sell a hell of a lot of individual books.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah because I mean, of course, just running the algorithm which is itself not that costly.

Ian Bowie
No, no, no. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
And then you charge 100 bucks for the book.

Ian Bowie
Well, yeah, I was gonna say if you can get 1000 people a year just to spend 100 euros on a book now. You’ve got a little business, haven’t you? Yeah, quite nice.

Michael Stormbom
And then you can have everything, you can get itprinted on nice piece of paper and, you know, cover art, possibly also automatically generated.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, so that’s $50.

Michael Stormbom
But yeah, and then a distribution for your Kindle. No one would buy it, but you can.

Ian Bowie
You can tell the friends I’m on Kindle here. Yes.

Michael Stormbom
Yes, I’m a published author except I’m not because it’s actually the algorithm.

Ian Bowie
That’s what you do, because people who would have a book like that, they wouldn’t just buy one copy for themselves. They would buy several because they would want to give them away. Absolutely they would. So, you know, I mean, you’re going to sell a minimum of 10.

Michael Stormbom
So it could be like a birthday thing. So there’s a big birthday coming up and like, here’s a book looking back at your 50 years of…

Ian Bowie
So it would be like a 100 dollars for the first book and then 25 for every subsequent book after that. Yeah, yeah. Perfect. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I can imagine lots of…

Michael Stormbom
Nice little individualized gift there. Yeah, for sure.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. People buying for their partners. Perfect.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. And personally, I’m too lazy to write an autobiography. So I will just ask the algorithm to write the autobiography, not ghost written by an AI.

Ian Bowie
Too lazy to write your own autobiography. And too poor to afford a biographer. So, but yeah, I mean, I’m sure, of course. Well, there are. I mean, there are lots and lots and lots of people out there, who would love to have a copy of their own autobiography. But you know, well, they haven’t got the skills or maybe the time to write it themselves. And of course, biographers don’t work for free.

Michael Stormbom
And of course, I find also the sort of the interesting like the…. Well, I mean, if we go into completely different topic, but you know, in looking at historical eras, so like, so I mean, we know about, you know, the kings and so forth and the politicians, and so forth, but the life of the average citizen. Yes. So who tells their life story?

Ian Bowie
Nobody. No, actually, I mean you know, this is something that again, you know, I have thought about because in my personal opinion, the lives of ordinary people are the most interesting. Oh, yeah. Because they are the least documented for sure. For sure. Yeah, absolutely. You know, the these so called celebrities. I mean, who cares about them? They’re actually basically plastic people, in my opinion.

Michael Stormbom
And their experience is not representative of the human experience.

Ian Bowie
Not at all, no. There are projects out there. I just wish I could remember the name, but there’s a huge one in America, where they get two people to talk to each other about their lives. I think one interviews the other like, you know, you get a son to interview a grandparent, and they record all this and they’re storing it in their national library.

Michael Stormbom
Oh, that’s interesting.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, it is, and I think there’s something also in the UK going on about this. But this is all spoken word. But you know, I mean, my grandmother before she died, they tried to write down from her own memories, you know, her life story. But it’s better than nothing. It’s not what I intended. But of course, I lived here and she was in the UK. But you know, even my grandmother’s story, and it only runs to maybe 25 pages, but it’s just fantastic. It’s fascinating. You know, how they lived and just the experiences that she personally had, the people that they interacted with, and it was all going on, there was even a murder.

Michael Stormbom
A murder?

Ian Bowie
There was even a murder. Yeah, no, I mean, the story was the postman had gone round to one of their next door neighbors, who they knew personally. And he’d had to call the police because he’d knocked on the door. There was no answer, I think he had a parcel or something for them. He looked in the living room window, and there was the wife’s head in the fireplace. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
That’s grusome.

Ian Bowie
So the husband had murdered the wife, and yeah, and then that was, you know, part of my grandmother’s life. Absolutely incredible. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Ian Bowie
And then later in life, and another very, I don’t know if we’re going to put this out on the on the podcast, but my grandmother lived to be 94. Well, when she was about 80, she remarried. And she remarried a lifelong friend. So this chap, and his wife and my grandmother and my grandfather, they’d all been friends together, right? And the wife had said many many, many years earlier to my grandmother, that if she died first, and my grandfather died first she hoped that my grandmother and this man would get together. Well, of course, my grandfather actually did. He died young, unfortunately. And my grandmother was a widow for many, many, many years. But then eventually this lady did die. And some years after she died, this guy and my grandmother got married. I mean, I think, like I say she was about 80 or 81. And he was already about 85 or so you know. It was quite funny, but anyway, I remember going to visit them with my father, and we were in it was his house, the chap’s house. And my dad actually said, you know, it’s very strange sitting here, and this is when my dad was about 60 something and he says, you know, because I used to come here as a child, because when I was playing in this part of town, and I needed to go to the toilet. I would go to the toilet in this house when he was about nine years old.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, it’s just stories like that. So this guy had you know they’d lived in that house all their lives. And now suddenly, it was my grandmother’s house as well. You know, it’s quite. Yeah, it’s not a massive story. You know, it’s not going to make the front pages of any newspaper.

Michael Stormbom
No, but it’s documenting experiences. I mean, compared to, like, 19th century like to what extent are people’s daily lives and experiences documented versus now, when everything is documented here on social media. Well, of course, there’s a certain social media filter so that is not an accurate representation of reality, either, but at least there’s something here. That’s like, how did people live their lives? Yeah, not just the kings, the politicians and the queens and the whatnot? What was actual life like? Was it really, really like?

Ian Bowie
Yeah, not the dramatized part that you see maybe sometimes in television programs or? Yeah, no. Well, of course, I mean, people like Charles Dickens did. Document ordinary people’s lives.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, and retold it through his stories. Yes. Yeah.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, he I mean, he did. And I think Thomas Hardy a little bit did as well, or actually did. So I mean, you know, there are from certain times some documentation, but it’s still fiction. It’s not real people. It’s prose, you know, it’s still not from the horse’s mouth.

Michael Stormbom
So filtered through the author.

Ian Bowie
Through the author. Yeah, yeah.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, yeah. Well, that I can can you have an unfiltered story in that way? I mean, of course, there’s always some sort of filter. Yeah, if I mean, if I share a personal experience with my biases and subjective…

Ian Bowie
Exactly. Yeah, you would need to have everybody who was there and their perspective, and then you might be able to build a…

Michael Stormbom
Like the Kurosawa movie, Rashomon, with the different viewpoints.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah. But no, I mean, I think absolutely, AI could be a tremendous help in documenting ordinary people’s lives.

Michael Stormbom
Documenting and summarizing.

Ian Bowie
Very much so yeah, yeah. Because it also relies on getting enough people who are interested in spending the time to…

Michael Stormbom
Well you need to actually document the thing.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. I think there’s a learning curve, you will probably still need a human being to be there to say, right, okay, you know, you speak into this, and you just tell the story. And then when we’ve got 100 hours, then we can run it through the AI and it’ll create your story.

Michael Stormbom
I mean, of course, data has been collected on us all the time. I mean, carry your cell phone, or in our pockets on the so forth Yeah, yeah. I wonder if we’ll get all the data that’s being collected. Could you, can you create this like a story of that person? Of course, there’s no like secret audio recordings or the like, or is there? But yeah.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, you see, that’s another problem because…

Michael Stormbom
You might want to leave some bits out.

Ian Bowie
I was just thinking about, talking about recording ordinary people’s lives, but you’re only recording a very small segment of the total world population. Alright, so you know, I mean, but of course I mean, you know, it’s all relative. I mean, of course, it will be interesting for us, let’s say here in Finland, to know what it was like to live as a peasant in the countryside 200 years ago. Yeah. And then 100 years ago. Same with the UK.

Michael Stormbom
Oh, absolutely. I mean, because the What life was like, of course, it’s an important part of our history. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I can say one thing about life stories as well, because I mean, they’ve been digitizing the, you know, the newspapers here in Finland. So the old newspapers that are from the turn of the century and so forth. So it’s been fun to, now that they’ve gradually been adding, like, for example, the local Turku newspapers there, to look up for example, about my great grandfather, because he was actually a football player, he played in Åbo IFK, when they won the league in 1920 and 1924. So that was fun. So wow, like reading up. So 2020, 2 years ago, then was it the 100 years. So that was fun, too. Wow. To look up. There are a picture of him and his brother who also played into I think so. So it’s pretty cool. But of course, yeah, of course. Again, not everyone is a football player and get it featured in the newspaper. Yeah, so that’s pretty, pretty cool.

Michael Stormbom
This was the resort, we started with the resort.

Ian Bowie
Well, the idea of having a totally autonomous resort, if people completely individualized personal experiences, and we ended up with writing people’s life stories.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai