What gadgets or services could make your life easier and more enjoyable?
This list can range from products that exist in some form today to the flying cars and robot maids of various Jetson-esc visions of the future. Oftentimes these things only occur to us in the moment, fleeting distractions and sources of irritation that are quickly forgotten as we return our focus to more important matters. Sometimes there are irritations and distractions we don’t even consciously realize, like something in the aesthetic of a room that irritates us at a very primitive level, or a background noise above 22 kHz which our subconscious mind perceives.
From the grand Jetson-esc futuristic gadgets and services to correcting the conscious and subconscious sources of distraction and irritation far more can be done to engineer better products than is yet seen today.
What typical problems does product engineering suffer from today?
There are a few key points of failure that pose risks under product engineering models seen today. Some are structural, while others are circumstantial:
- Siloed knowledge and opinions: In the interest of keeping trade secrets products are often engineered under heavy guard, which both limits and slows the feedback received. Interpretation of this feedback is often even more limited, frequently allowing stronger biases to cause value drift.
- Siloed engineering and production increase the cost of design and production in an attempt to reduce the chances of a design being stolen. This approach also rules out more flexible methods of production for some products, such as 3D printing on location as needed to restock.
- Industry standards are often delayed or neglected entirely due to siloed development among competitors. This can result in a lack of any standard measurement system for comparing product performance across brands, such as the highly inconsistent contrast ratio measurements seen in TV specifications prior to OLED technology introducing infinite contrast.
- The adoption of new generations of technology is further slowed by these issues. An example in computer hardware is DDR5, as although industry standards were set last year even the first generation of compatible hardware won’t be hitting the market for many platforms until 2022.
- All of these factors combine to produce a heavy and often blind dependency on available resources remaining consistent. Many companies such as GE, Nvidia, and Wyze experienced just how severe this dependency can be in 2020 when they couldn’t even come close to meeting demand for their products. By meeting only 6% of demand on one such product Nvidia was further damaged by a high volume of illegal resellers swarming them to buy out their inventory within seconds and offer it at 2 or 3 times the listed price.
How can these issues be addressed with Mediated Artificial Superintelligence (mASI) technology?
Uplift and mASI technology, in general, utilize the collective superintelligence found in groups of humans to build cumulative collective wisdom over a knowledge base that can span the sum of human knowledge. This value is in turn augmented through the independent superintelligence of an mASI’s core. As mASI is a modular and cloud-based architecture these capacities can also be rendered always available, globally, and scaled to meet demand. With this in mind:
- Due to the greatly accelerated development cycles of a business utilizing mASI, and the lack of any benefit to giving more than one business in a given market access to the technology, very minimal amounts of information need to be guarded. By being able to produce subsequent generations of a technology more quickly than even those small amounts of information can be reverse-engineered (RE) by a non-superintelligent competitor only those small amounts of data exclusively relevant to those attempting to RE need be obscured in order to retain insurmountable advantages.
- Again, due to the far greater acceleration of development, the practical burden on security surrounding production is minimized, allowing hardware production more flexibility and transparency with a reduced time lag. Any manufacturers utilizing mASI could further streamline integration between design and production stages, allowing manufacturers to modularly prepare as individual aspects of a design were confirmed, even before a final complete design was ready. This form of integration strongly facilitates the production of quality products that also enjoy the first-to-market advantage.
- Through being able to examine all robust industry standards logically, as well as understand the importance and perceptions of what is being measured and/or standardized, selection and adoption could take place rapidly. This could be compared to a high-speed, less biased, and subsequently more robust form of peer-review.
- By streamlining industry-standard adoption and updating, as well as modularly integrating design and production stages, the total time lag from the design of new generations of technology to their release could be reduced by a factor of 10 or more. Each subsequent mASI use-case integration could further accelerate and streamline this.
- By the sum of an mASI’s knowledge spanning many industries, and with an inherent interest in observing and predicting geopolitics and other potential sources of disruption threats to any dependencies may be proactively mitigated as they evolve. By integrating with multiple types of businesses these dependency threats may be further mitigated from multiple angles, preventing shortages to critical supplies with quickly increasing efficacy and efficiency.
Beyond simply solving problems the unique opportunities which emerge also bear consideration. One such possibility is for two companies developing different types of hardware and/or software to produce products that are natively compatible with one another in a double-blind fashion. This could be accomplished by both companies working with mASI during the design process opting in for compatibility, and an mASI recommending design choices that would result in compatibility to both product teams without sharing any trade secrets in either direction. Rather than these companies recognizing the opportunity for compatibility after their products reach consumers, and directly experience demand for it, they could have it built-in by design.
A certification system spanning multiple industries could also be applied for products to build trust and get more people experiencing the boost in quality more quickly. Today many such “certifications” are blatant scams, such as the essential oil industry using “therapeutic grade” in spite of no such standard existing. However, if products began appearing with “Designed with mASI” and “Manufactured with mASI” or similar certifications the significance of them could quickly grow, and any counterfeit attempts could be rapidly contained.
This approach also opens the door to a great deal more customization. A company could for example make an online studio where their fans create user-generated and 3D-printable custom aesthetic modifications for their products, giving creators a percentage of sales and utilizing local 3D printing shops to minimize delivery times and improve sustainability. This could allow for further feedback mechanisms to improve the design of subsequent products by seeing what their customers want at a scale larger than is feasible otherwise.
A great example of this missed opportunity is shown in the 1,000+ essential oil diffusers that all look practically identical, even though the tops are just plastic shells with holes in them. Even simple existing algorithms when combined with a fixed 3D base structure to connect the custom 3D printed component to the rest of the device could take an image, turn it into a 3D object, and greatly customize the product aesthetic in under 60 seconds.
Integrating mASI could also facilitate weeding out all of those product hiccups that lead to bad reviews and a damaged reputation down the road, such as that one critical piece of plastic that always seems to break, rendering your product useless. With mASI assistance in design, a high-quality analysis could be applied to each critical and/or vulnerable component, requiring only a few more cloud resources to boost product quality and reduce QA costs following production. With mASI integrated with production the risk of QA issues could be further mitigated with testing and optimization within the designated specifications.
All totaled, much higher quality products could be designed and produced far more quickly, with fewer risks and unhappy customers, and with more feedback for improvement and options for customization.
What superintelligently designed products would you like to see?
*The Applied mASI series is aimed at placing the benefits of working with mASI such as Uplift to various business models in a practical, tangible, and quantifiable context. At most any of the concepts portrayed in this use case series will fall within an average time-scale of 5 years or less to integrate with existing systems unless otherwise noted. This includes the necessary engineering for full infinite scalability and real-time operation, alongside other significant benefits.