Life Engineering

Many types of machine intelligence are changing all areas of our lives. In this context, machine intelligence refers to digital services of any kind that relieve humans of mental tasks or reinforce human intelligence. This can involve administering a bank account as well as managing a supply chain, counterterrorism, home automation, autonomous vehicles, an active exoskeleton, and all apps on mobile devices or internet websites; in other words, everything that supports our lives now and in the future. The areas of life concerned range from communication and medical therapy to financial provision for retirement. Does machine intelligence make us happy or are we becoming unhappy slaves to technology?

In 2030, we shall not yet have a universal life assistant for all aspects of human life but instead an individually compiled hodgepodge of technical assistants to cover needs ranging from home security to therapy and round-the-clock entertainment. This chapter picks out and examines individual areas of life to a degree that makes it possible to identify the broad outlines of fundamental trends, starting with the status quo and extending up to the year 2030. The few areas of life selected and the associated digital services available reveal the extent to which machine intelligence has already changed our lives, and the fact that connecting the findings currently available will accelerate that change. The examples cited show that digital services bring together as many sources as possible to form gigantic data collections that can be used to derive ever more patterns and rules. As a consequence, the services will become smarter and more active, and take over ever more tasks from humans.

Machine intelligence is already assisting humans in all areas of life with today’s technologies. Digital services expand the intellectual capabilities of humans, either by relieving people of routine tasks such as the administration of a bank account, performing traditional services like management of an appointments calendar or navigation, or by organizing photo and video archives including descriptions of the images. Machine intelligence amplifies human intelligence. The enormous potential for technological development up to the year 2030 lies in the convergence of a number of developments: Gigantic personal and factual databases that are automatically filled with detailed and up-to-date information from digital services and above all from sensors, the capabilities for machine learning, the necessary IT performance, intuitive man-machine collaboration, and the increasing execution of decision-making and actions by machines will transform our lives by 2030 to a far greater extent than imaginable today. A generalized artificial intelligence, the long-term goal of AI research, will, however, by no means have been achieved in 2030.

Scientists, representatives of information technology companies, and politicians are increasingly recognizing the opportunities and dangers of machine intelligence for the quality of people’s lives. They therefore repeatedly call for the use of technology for the benefit of people, but do not say what constitutes people’s well-being. Even happiness research provides hardly any guidance for a desirable use of the technology. Evolution controls us according to the principle of homeostasis through happiness and unhappiness. Humans strive for actions that lead to perceptions with positive feelings and avoid actions that cause suffering. Evolution, on the other hand, is aimed at progress, not at human happiness. Quality of life, i.e. happiness and unhappiness, is a relative and fleeting quantity: We measure ourselves against our demands, compare ourselves with our peers, and accommodate to both positive and negative situations. Hope seems more important than the actual achievement of goals. Since Plato, people have been striving not only for short-term satisfaction of their needs (hedonia), but also for lasting satisfaction with themselves and the environment (eudaimonia). As the rapidly growing datasets increasingly contain indicators for the well-being of people, data collections and pattern recognition make the quality of life more and more objectively measurable. Even if our knowledge about the use of machine intelligence for the benefit of mankind is still very modest, it would be grossly negligent, in view of the enormous changes, not to use the existing knowledge for the benefit of mankind.

Where does technological development promote quality of life and where does it endanger it? The instruments of evolution, above all homeostasis, are aimed at progress, not at quality of life. Happiness and sorrow, joy and pain are only the control instruments of evolution. Satisfaction is an enemy of progress; dissatisfaction drives development. People, companies, and states with the highest technological and social level of development determine the direction of development and dominate the less developed. Therefore, we must try to be leaders in evolution, especially in technical and social development, and at the same time use progress for the quality of life. Evolution puts us on the treadmill of differentiation through the needs for power, recognition and self-esteem. Convenience leads to a renunciation of privacy. Digital services generate an addiction to news and information and an ever less manageable complexity. Psychology, medicine, and religion can lead to quality of life, for example with healthy nutrition, drugs, brain stimulation, or virtual reality. A personal, digital happiness coach can be the goal, but will still be a long way off in 2030.

Data analytics and learning algorithms evaluate the data of billions of people to identify patterns and build a world model that links personal data with geospatial data, product data, and company data. In the year 2030, active digital assistants will use this data to relieve people of many more tasks than they do today and to give individualized recommendations for action. The human needs for income, power, status, and self-esteem drive evolution and steer people to technological progress by means of capital. The more the services know about a consumer, the better they can support him. The more the consumer uses the services, the better they understand her. This is a welcome situation as long as the goals of the service provider and the consumer are the same but dangerous if the goals diverge. Capital controls the market economy in the sense of socio-technical evolution and must therefore be supplemented by a quality of life control mechanism. This is a task for the individual, the company, and society.

The Business Engineering discipline uses information technology to increase the value of a company; a Life Engineering discipline uses information technology to improve people’s quality of life. We need an engineering approach to the development of the digital world with the goal of quality of life. The short-term goal of Life Engineering is rules for digital assistants for the benefit of people; the long-term goal is rules for superintelligence. The minimum goal is to translate the moderate existing knowledge about information technology and quality of life into recommendations for individuals, companies, and politicians. The tasks of Life Engineering are a world database, i.e. a collection of personal and factual data, that is freely accessible for research, a world model as a collection of all patterns derived from the world database, an objective, and, as far as possible, automated happiness measurement, a quality of life model, and, finally, a happiness coach that transfers the findings into daily life.

Increasingly powerful digital services relieve people of tasks and competencies and develop from passive helpers into active assistants with suggestions and automatic actions. These services, combined with the sensors and actuators of the Internet of Things, measure and document billions of individuals. Algorithms derive patterns from the resulting gigantic databases, which ultimately lead to recommendations for people. Whether people use these growing capabilities of machine intelligence for their own benefit or to their detriment becomes the greatest challenge facing mankind. A discipline of Life Engineering should understand the technology, quality of life, and the control of society and guide its development.