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If what I see in movies is true, the greatest perk of being a high ranking executive is the ability to call your assistant and say: “Johnson, clear my schedule for the rest of the day!” And then you pick up your golf clubs and close the door behind you, worry-free, while your assistant Johnson is pulling out his hair trying to rearrange your commitments so that you don’t skip a beat.
Apart from that, I don’t find the life of a corporate ladder climber too appealing (a necktie is really like a noose to me), so I steered my career in a different direction. Unfortunately, that means that when I want to clear my schedule, I’m condemned to playing calendar Tetris by myself.
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Or so I thought.
AI is a bad master — but an awesome servant
The past weekend I got on a binge, watching youtube clips about the Elon Musk vs Zuckerberg clash over AI. Elon is warning us about the impending Skynet scenario where machines take over. Zuck says he’s all wrong. Then Elon says Zuck is not very well informed. And so on.
As it goes with never-ending Youtube playlists I continued watching Machine Learning videos. I got this sense that AI is really like a technological Robin Hood — it takes the privileges previously reserved for higher classes and trickles them down to everyone. The extreme example are self-driving cars: the promise there is that you will have someone else driving you, just that it’s a machine.
But while the best brains on the planet are working to figure out driverless cars, there is a slew of entrepreneurs out there utilizing Machine Learning to solve smaller problems. And lucky for me, one of those is solving my calendar tetris problem.
My robot assistant is making me feel like a boss
Futurenda is a calendar app I discovered which uses machine learning to schedule your day. It resembles a human assistant that keeps track of your commitments, able to constantly update them throughout the day.
Now, making your own plan may not seem to be difficult. You need about 5 minutes to fill out your calendar. So why would you need a machine to do it for you?
Again, for me, it’s because I can rarely stick to my plan 100%. Even if it’s rare that I want to clear my schedule for an entire day, it’s still true that on most days I have to clear it for the next hour or so (and unfortunately it isn’t because of golf). In our fast world our calendars are in constant flux.
The power of an AI assistant is that it can dynamically adapt your schedule throughout the day whenever something unexpected happens to break it. And it does it while keeping track of your deadlines. So it’s not just randomly shuffling events around.
I haven’t been using it for long but I’m really hoping that this app will help me go on with my day without constantly having to worry about shifting my plans.
I also see that the app has the ability to learn from your previous activities and be able to predict how long something will take to complete. This is awesome because I tend to be terrible at predicting how long something will take (I think I am simply biased by wishful thinking). The nature of these machine learning algorithms is that they become more useful as more data is fed into them. It’s like a real human assistant, getting to know you over time.
I’m quite excited about continuing to use Futurenda.
What else?
What are some other apps that utilize machine learning to simplify your life? I’m eager to enjoy the benefits of this technology before it turns against us to ruin our lives, as Elon says it will.