📹 Video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/wdREzLFE9yg
What do ChatGPT and Meta Quest do to you? Do such digital services improve your life? What needs do they satisfy? Which services do you intentionally choose to forgo? Measuring your heart rate and fitness? Social media such as Instagram and LinkedIn? Cash-free payment?
Will digitalization ultimately make us happier or unhappier? The media give us partly utopian, but mostly dystopian visions of digitalization. Perhaps we can arrive at a more realistic assessment of potential opportunities and risks if we examine the impact of digital services on the 13 needs of the quality-of-life model. Maybe we can recognize what truly matters? Let’s try it with the following two examples of ChatGPT and Metaverse.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT and other generative AIs have, on one hand, awakened huge expectations that have, for instance, drastically driven up the share price of Microsoft and related companies. On the other hand, these services have sparked tremendous fear, leading, for example, to the EU’s Artificial Intelli-gence Act.
What does ChatGPT mean for the architect Tom Bieber in his professional and private life?
Capital
Tom Bieber can have ChatGPT generate a first draft of the text he needs to submit for an architec-ture competition. This cuts down on working time or creates breathing room for participation in other competitions.
A recent graduate in architecture may find it more challenging than ever before to find a paid intern-ship, as ChatGPT takes on many of the typical tasks of a young professional.
Community
For Tom Bieber, conversing with ChatGPT might simply be a relaxing pastime. He might even prefer conversing with artificial intelligence over his life partner, Eva. However, this also means that an im-portant aspect of his relationship with Eva is lost.
Knowledge
ChatGPT can suggest design concepts, room concepts, materials and aesthetic elements that have proven themselves for operating rooms. It minimizes the time and effort spent searching for and linking building regulations and technologies. By communicating with ChatGPT, Tom can update and broaden his knowledge. Large language models such as ChatGPT can only process language-based knowledge, and as such cannot handle structural analysis algorithms or building information models, at least for the moment.
ChatGPT can review Tom’s design for potential issues and make suggestions for improvement. How-ever, ChatGPT occasionally hallucinates in an attempt to find a solution. There is also a risk that the proposed solutions may be manipulated, for example by favoring a particular building material in the interests of certain suppliers. However, the responsibility for the quality of the design ultimately lies with Tom.
Appearance
The generated text excels through extensive references to successful projects, such as with operating rooms in Sweden. In any case, the texts produced by ChatGPT are superior in terms of orthography and style to those of an average writer.
Power
At the moment, Tom Bieber can still demonstrate his value to the architecture firm by taking inno-vative paths.
Rank
Tom can distinguish himself amongst colleagues and customers by using ChatGPT to ensure the qual-ity of his work. If he expects to improve his competitive edge over colleagues, he will probably use ChatGPT.
Self-esteem
If the generative AI outperforms Tom in specific areas, it may affect his self-esteem.
Energy
ChatGPT initially means that Tom has to expend time and effort learning and experimenting with the new digital service. He is confronted with the typical human resistance to innovation, which dimin-ishes the value of his painstakingly acquired knowledge and costs energy for learning.On the other hand, ChatGPT relieves Tom of routine tasks, thus conserving his energy, which can also be described as comfort or efficiency.
Virtual Worlds
The Metaverse is triggering a similarly heated discussion as generative AI. Online games such as Fort-nite and devices such as Meta Quest or Apple Vision Pro provide a glimpse of what spending time in a virtual world could look like in the future. The enormous user figures for games show that a signifi-cant proportion of the population already uses spending time in a virtual world for relaxation or dis-traction. For many people, life in a virtual world such as the one described in the novel “Ready Player One” presents a horror scenario. But why? Would it be the worst thing for someone to escape into a world in which they feel comfortable? Does returning from the metaverse to the real world cause a hangover-like effect similar to drugs?
Does a young girl attain higher self-esteem when she climbs from level to level in an online game? Does she neglect her real-world responsibilities that are vital to her existence? Does a virtual world possibly even expand a player’s imagination? Are friendships formed within the game lasting and thus a contribution to psychological security? Does spending time on a games console lead to poor eating habits and a lack of exercise?
Consequences
Just as with ChatGPT and the Metaverse, we can analyze the impact of each digital service based on people’s needs. We can also choose digital services that save working time based on a need such as convenience. The proposed rough needs model can serve as a checklist.
Many research projects are trying to assess the impact of digital services on people. The databases of digital services, machine learning algorithms and the growing capacity to train algorithms are increasingly enabling us to achieve a better understanding of the impact of digital services. Ideally, we will be able to objectively measure the impact on quality of life using the automatically recorded data. With this knowledge, life engineering must endeavor to influence or steer the development and use of digital services to improve quality of life.
Questions 🤔
Which online games for minors should be banned or restricted by law?
Why could virtual reality be a way to a happy life?
Which digital services waste the most time? Which services help you save time?
When would you have a chip implanted into your brain to make you permanently happier?
Messages 📩
Digital services generally impact multiple needs.
The 13 needs can help us to better understand human behavior in socio-technical evolution.
A well-founded needs model can steer digitalization for the benefit of humankind.
Data collection and machine learning improve our understanding of quality of life.
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