But why is loneliness a problem? Because evolution; being apart from the tribe was not a good survival strategy so we have developed an intuitive "feel bad when cut off" mechanism. Same with fear of ostracism; being cast out from the tribe was a death sentence. You can to a very limited extent "hack" it - why people carry around photos of loved ones in their wallets and look at them to trigger the recognition response - but a chatbot that could operate at that level would be indistinguishable from a sentient being in its own right, in which case why not make real friends with it?
Because with bot you can just shut them down when they don't behave like you expected or when you dont need them.
I don't think that knowing you can do this and successfully fooling your internal anti-loneliness mechanisms are compatible. You simply won't get the full range of emotional stimuli.
lot of opportunities similar to this. Flag satellite images with villages appearing to be poor. Parachute down donated supplies automatically with drones. Just randomly send bits of wealth across poor villages in africa/india
You could also actually have a safety net and do other things to help improve folks' lives. Actually help folks get out of their current groove. After all, if we are moving folks to places with better opportunities, there is a chance the person will fail and suddenly, they are in an area without their previous support group, friends, and family.
I understand that is a positive so long as it is good, as a change of lifestyle seems to help kick some addiction - but there needs to be something to ensure they don't wind up in the same place in a new city.
It's pretty simple to sart off with php/mysql. Paul Graham does a lot of data mining on it for moderation (he made applying naive bayes to spam filtering famous a while back).
If you don't have programming skills you're better of off just starting a subreddit. The hard part in these is building the community.
A better strategy might be to find a subreddit with a community and try to take over it somehow (communicate with mods or pay them to take over).
Could easily be done with a framework of course - probably something lightweight. I've got competing implementations in Laravel 4 and Slim Framework being worked on right now. I know someone else is working on a HN news clone in Laravel as well, it was mentioned in a thread somewhere.
But yeah definitely, getting people to join would be the hard part. I've seen people build what they thought were the greatest forums ever and just sort of expect people to show up but they don't.
It's really difficult to get hired (I'm 34 and can't get into the system). However freelancing and doing your own MobileApp/SAAS/CAAS (cognition-as-a-service) is a viable activity, it just takes a longer time to get to a decent income.
Seeking Work - remote or Toronto
(python programmer)
Data Scientist - SQL, python, nlp, computer vision, machine learning.
My main skill/passions/value add
- feature engineering of data to increase predictive accuracy
- deriving explanations of data with frequent itemset mining
- managing of complex data (many tables joined for purpose of deriving new features)
also do -
android devlopment (in kivy python-for-android)
web full stack (in pyjamas, webpy, appengine, sql)
Yes/No (it's been 2 weeks, only a couple of email enquiries/telephone interviews).
I've got no job experience and no college education so it's an uphill struggle. I'm trying to innovate with the resume to overcome that (I can code/write etc, but don't have the standard papers/references).
