Guilty pleasure bot is a new interventionist algorithmic system, which intersects with monitoring and tracking technologies to provide increased agency to its users and protect a sense of control over their life and unique pleasures.
As our population ages and AI systems are continuously improving, from machine vision to medical tracking, constant health monitoring is increasingly being used in predictive monitoring for illnesses and cognitive deterioration. A lot of care oriented sensor systems seek to support wellbeing of patients by monitoring their lives and responding to interruptions and unexpected events such as a fall or a sudden critical health condition.
In addition, they might aim to encourage healthy and beneficial behaviour that would support the health and physical well being of their subjects, such as regular movement, healthy nutrition choices and mindfulness practices. Within these recommendation systems, tensions can arise between what algorithms consider normatively healthy behaviours and moments of pleasure, endulgement or coping mechanisms which are not in line with what is considered healthy.
Humans however are notoriously unpredictable and behave in fickle and idiosyncratic ways. On one hand, we engage in behaviours that benefit us in the short term and bring us pleasure, while ignoring the long term effects and “sensible” choices. On the other hand, these behaviors have their reason to exist, and might provide benefits that are not possible to capture within a generalised system. A certain food connects us to our family, a certain coping behaviour is tied to a memory that provides security and stability. What happens when these behaviours are inherently incompatible with the care support systems we design? Do we design away the margins in behaviour for guilty pleasures? And what does that mean for our perceived quality of live?
Inherently, the question is what defines a high quality live, and which trade offs are we willing to take between potential improved physical health and the emotional meanings that behaviors might have for us? Criticising certain behaviours from a high minded stand point without providing alternative behaviours or addressing the social and emotional ties to certain behaviours can lead to feelings of resentment, shame, guilt and resistance for the ones affected over their perceived “guilty pleasures”.
Guilty pleasure bot is a bot that can be trained to hide and protect your guilty pleasures from doctoral oversight. By teaching the bot about your unique set of comforting behaviours which you treasure, guilty pleasure bot acts against the mainstream of optimisation by valuing your personal moments of quality of life and defending them against paternalistic recommendations ignorant of what influences your quality of life.
By overriding data inputs and manipulating evaluative measurements, this bot acts like a virus which corrects the image of your medical footprint to be in line with your emotional and social experience, which might otherwise not be captured accurately. It is like a virus within the paternalistic algorithm of monitoring care. Rather than tailoring each component of generalised systems to adapt to individuals, individuals meet the generalised system with their own intervention.
- Protects your private space and intimate experiences from external review and judgement
- Fully contextual and situational control: Privacy and solitude in the times you need it, without missing out on holistic care surveillance
- Full control about your representation to your care network, without shame or guilt
- Undetectable data altering algorithm for free communication
- Easy and simple to use, so you don’t need to rely on external support and remain in control
The user is fully responsible for the outcome of their actions. Guilty pleasure bot is not liable for any resulting health harms as consequence of covered behaviour.