For getting things done, we’ve got Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana—your mileage may vary as to just how useful and/or responsive any of them are. But what about an A.I. companion designed to support you spiritually by helping you strengthen mindfulness? A couple of ex-Google employees have recently released Maslo, a “voice journal with personality and smarts” that “interacts with empathy and playfulness.” “We encourage personal curiosity and believe in growing into identities that are bigger versions of who we are now,” say the developers, Ross Ingram and Cristina Poindexter. Could Maslo become your digital bestie?
We’ve been down this road before. Replika is an interview-based A.I. companion app released in 2016 that claimed to be ever-more friendworthy and more and more like you. Hopefully that last part isn't true, because it’s prone to some pretty loopy interaction.
Is Replika listening? Gotta wonder.
Maslo, a free download for iOS and Android, takes a far less ambitious approach than an app like Replika. In so doing, it may actually be more useful. It certainly responds more sensibly.
What using Maslo is like
Maslo is fundamentally a voice journal with A.I. analysis.
The app operates in two modes. In the first, you tap on Maslo’s large, undulating orb and it displays a question meant to help you think of what you would like to record as a journal entry—you don’t actually need to answer the question. If the prompt isn’t doing it for you, you can tap the icon beneath it to cycle through other similar queries. Maybe you don’t even need a prompt. In any event, you tap the orb and a counter appears during which you have 60 seconds to speak a journal entry. Tap when you’re done, and Maslo’s A.I. processes your audio recording through a neural net that analyzes its content for patterns. It spots words that express feelings and references to people, places, and things. For a few moments, it displays “Thinking…” then offers an emotional summary of your entry as well as a corresponding emoticon. You give a thumbs up or down. Ingram and Poindexter say the quality of the app’s insights will evolve as it gets to know you better.
The second mode is invoked by tapping the little list icon in the lower left of the screen. Maslo presents you a word-cloud that reveals the frequency with which you use certain words. It also displays an emoticon tally of the number of mood-related words you’ve used. You can tap Voice Recordings to display a list of, and play back, your journal entries.
It’s a very simple sort of interaction. For this first iteration of Maslo, the user experience is about building trust, an attempt to “build this sense of companionship between machine and the user so that it is this safe space,” Ingram tells TechCrunch. To keep it safe, most of the processing occurs on the phone itself. As one might surmise, the app’s name is a nod to Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and is similarly meant as a tool for personal growth. Poindexter explains what the Maslo user experience is meant to accomplish: "We really want to reflect back to people what they’re saying… [Maslo] holds up a mirror… it’s a sounding board and doesn’t necessarily give you the answers but shows you what you might already know.”
The birth of Maslo
Ross Ingram and Cristina Poindexter.
Ingram and Poindexter had been working at Google when they met at a birthday party. Coder and marketer Ingram had joined Google from robotics firm Sphero, developers of the toy version of Star Wars’ BB-8. At the time, he was working at in Google's Advanced Technologies and Projects group. Poindexter had just helped launch Google Assistant for the Pixel phone and on Google Home. The Yale-educated sociologist had joined Google to address her concerns about the potentially destructive influence of technology in our lives, but she was burnt-out and thinking of fleeing to a farm in Italy.
A few weeks later they reconnected in the Coffee Lab on Google’s campus and found themselves talking about ways to make technology more personal. According to Ingram, “[Poindexter] understood the psychology that drove our love of technology,” a result of her work with Google Assistant. She writes in a blog post, “A lot of these interactions were non-utility queries. There was this need to go in and help people on a deeper level… I have a background in sociology and I look at it from a users’ perspective of what do people need. A lot of these interactions were mulling things over and needing a place to express them.”
Most importantly, Poindexter “was inspired to do more to make technology helpful," says Ingram. The two soon decided to leave Google, move to Los Angeles, and begin work on what is now Maslo.
It’s time for technology to mature. When it engages with us on deeper human topics, we’ll know it has. That’s what we’re building at Maslo: technology that grapples with the existential and that understands the psychological, because our generation will mature hand-in-hand with technology. If it doesn’t relate with us on these levels, we won’t either. So instead of stigmatizing those philosophical, psychological, and existential questions as cliche, our technology dives right in to help us answer the meatiest and most perplexing questions for ourselves. What do we want to do with our lives? How do we identify? Where do we belong? What makes us happy? — Cristina Poindexter
Maslo’s future
Ingram says Maslo develops a “platonic” relationship with users mixed with, as Business Insider puts it, “a hint of intimacy.” Poindexter insists, ”We're not saying Maslo is therapy by any sense,” but, “It can be therapeutic.” She says the app may eventually be even more helpful, helping the user grow by asking more penetrating questions such as, "I noticed you've felt this way lately. Do you want to talk about why it bothers you?"
Poindexter predicts in TechCrunch, “There are going to be different classes of machines that interact and relate to humans on different levels. We are seeing thousands of people using machines for assistant-based things… we know that where this is going we’re going to start talking more to whatever you want to call them… and Alexa won’t help you figure out if you need help.”
“It’s the way we define an assistant versus a companion,” says Ingram. “Assistants help things get done in the external world and companions are going to help us get things done in our internal world.”
Stress in the modern world is generally viewed as a hindrance to a healthy life.
Indeed, excess stress is associated with numerous problems, including cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, insomnia, depression, obesity, and other conditions. While the physiological mechanisms associated with stress can be beneficial, as Kelly McGonigal points out in The Upside of Stress, the modern wellness industry is built on the foundation of stress relief.
The effects of stress on pregnant mothers is another longstanding area of research. For example, what potential negative effects do elevated levels of cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine have on fetal development?
A new study, published in the Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, investigated a very specific aspect of stress on fetuses: does it affect sex? Their findings reveal that women with elevated stress are twice as likely to give birth to a girl.
For this research, the University of Granada scientists recorded the stress levels of 108 women before, during, and after conception. By testing cortisol concentration in their hair and subjecting the women to a variety of psychological tests, the researchers discovered that stress indeed influences sex. Specifically, stress made women twice as likely to deliver a baby girl.
The team points out that their research is consistent with other research that used saliva to show that stress resulted in a decreased likelihood of delivering a boy.
Lead author María Isabel Peralta Ramírez, a researcher at the UGR's Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment, says that prior research focused on stress levels leading up to and after birth. She was interested in stress's impact leading up to conception. She says:
"Specifically, our research group has shown in numerous publications how psychological stress in the mother generates a greater number of psychopathological symptoms during pregnancy: postpartum depression, a greater likelihood of assisted delivery, an increase in the time taken for lactation to commence (lactogenesis), or inferior neurodevelopment of the baby six months after birth."
While no conclusive evidence has been rendered, the research team believes that activation of the mother's endogenous stress system during conception sets the concentration of sex hormones that will be carried throughout development. As the team writes, "there is evidence that testosterone functions as a mechanism when determining the baby's sex, since the greater the prenatal stress levels, the higher the levels of female testosterone." Levels of paternal stress were not factored into this research.
Previous studies show that sperm carrying an X chromosome are better equipped to reach the egg under adverse conditions than sperm carrying the Y chromosome. Y fetuses also mature slowly and are more likely to produce complications than X fetuses. Peralta also noted that there might be more aborted male fetuses during times of early maternal stress, which would favor more girls being born under such circumstances.
In the future, Peralta and her team say an investigation into aborted fetuses should be undertaken. Right now, the research was limited to a small sample size that did not factor in a number of elements. Still, the team concludes, "the research presented here is pioneering to the extent that it links prenatal stress to the sex of newborns."
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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."
What is the price of peace?
Or put another way, how much better off would we all be in a world where armed conflict was avoided?
Around $14.4 trillion in 2019, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) which crunched the numbers. That's about $5 a day for every person on the planet.
To give some context, 689 million people - more than 9% of the world's population - live on less than $1.90 a day, according to World Bank figures, underscoring the potential impact peace-building activities could have.
Just over 10% of global GDP is being spent on containing, preventing and dealing with the consequences of violence. As well as the 1.4 million violent deaths each year, conflict holds back economic development, causes instability, widens inequality and erodes human capital.
Putting a price tag on peace and violence helps us see the disproportionately high amounts spent on creating and containing violent acts compared to what is spent on building resilient, productive, and peaceful societies.
—Steve Killelea, founder and executive chairman, Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)
The cost of violence
In a report titled "The Economic Value of Peace 2021", the IEP says that for every death from violent conflict, 40 times as many people are injured. The world's 10 most affected countries are spending up to 59% of their GDP on the effects of violence.
Grounds for hope
But the picture is not all bleak. The economic impact of violence fell for the second year in a row in 2019, as parts of the world became more peaceful.
The global cost dropped by $64 billion between 2018 and 2019, even though it was still $1.2 trillion higher than in 2012.
In five regions of the world the costs increased in 2019. The biggest jump was in Central America and the Caribbean, where a rising homicide rate pushed the cost up 8.3%.
Syria, with its ongoing civil war, suffered the greatest economic impact with almost 60% of its GDP lost to conflict in 2019. That was followed by Afghanistan (50%) and South Sudan (46%).
The report makes a direct link between peace and prosperity. It says that, since 2000, countries that have become more peaceful have averaged higher GDP growth than those which have become more violent.
"This differential is significant and represents a GDP per capita that is 30% larger when compounded over a 20-year period," the report says adding that peaceful countries also have substantially lower inflation and unemployment.
"Small improvements in peace can have substantial economic benefits," it adds. "For example, a 2% reduction in the global impact of violence is roughly equivalent to all overseas development aid in 2019."
Equally, the total value of foreign direct investment globally only offsets 10% of the economic impact of violence. Authoritarian regimes lost on average 11% of GDP to the costs of violence while in democracies the cost was just 4% of GDP.
And the gap has widened over time, with democracies reducing the cost of violence by almost 16% since 2007 while in authoritarian countries it has risen by 27% over the same period.
The report uses 18 economic indicators to evaluate the cost of violence. The top three are military spending (which was $5.9 trillion globally in 2019), the cost of internal security which makes up over a third of the total at $4.9 trillion and homicide.
Peace brings prosperity
The formula also contains a multiplier effect because as peace increases, money spent containing violence can instead be used on more productive activities which drive growth and generate higher monetary and social returns.
"Substantial economic improvements are linked to improvements in peace," says the report. "Therefore, government policies should be directed to improving peacefulness, especially in a COVID-19 environment where economic activity has been subdued."
The IEP says what it terms "positive peace" is even more beneficial than "negative peace" which is simply the absence of violence or the fear of violence. Positive peace involves fostering the attitudes, institutions & structures that create and sustain peaceful societies.
The foundations of a positively peaceful society, it says, are: a well functioning government, sound business environment, acceptance of the rights of others, good relations with neighbours, free flow of information, high levels of human capital, low levels of corruption and equitable distribution of resources.
The World Economic Forum's report Mobilizing the Private Sector in Peace and Reconciliation urged companies large and small to recognise their potential to work for peace quoting the former Goldman Sachs chair, the late Peter Sutherland, who said: "Business thrives where society thrives."
Reprinted with permission of the World Economic Forum. Read the original article.
