Scott Adams’ User Interface for Reality – Rebirth in AI #3

This is the third in a series of posts meant to record and disseminate the author’s thoughts on how a human personality may be kept alive after death through artificial intelligence

Here, we address the User Interface for Reality which has been developed, kept, and delivered by the hypnotist and political pundit, Scott Adams.

The need for a framework for developing an artificial psyche

The human brain contains many neurons and synapses. The number is so great that we are unable to create an artificial brain with a matching human psyche; the task is too computationally expensive.

Therefore, an alternate approach is needed. A new framework for understanding the human mind must be adopted and/or developed and implemented.

This framework will remove the computational difficulties associated with simulating an exact copy of a human brain while allowing the AI within which this framework is implemented to act as a human would.

The framework must simplify the brain while retaining its decision-making abilities.

The framework might already exist.

Scott Adams and the User Interface for Reality (UIR)

Scott Adams is a minor celebrity who first achieved success with his Dilbert comic and who became a notable political pundit during the first election of Donald Trump. Adams gained notoriety then because he accurately predicted that Donald Trump would win the 2016 election, and he did so at a time when all other political pundits were claiming that Trump’s odds of winning were nonexistent.

Scott Adams’ predictive ability was then proven many times again during the following years, and insight into other predictions which he had made before the election year showed that the man had been predicting noteworthy events accurately and for many years beforehand.

The predictions made by Scott Adams are not always correct, but they come true so frequently that the man must have some genuine prognosticative talent.

In May of 2020, Scott Adams released a video on Youtube in which he revealed the source of his ability: he had discovered the User Interface for Reality.

He asserts that he had discovered a collection of loosely related factors which allow one to accurately and consistently predict human behaviors. Then he reveals them.

The value of the UIR in AI

When Scott Adams revealed his UIR, he wrote it asa  list of factors on a whiteboard in his room.

And we know that it can be used to reliably predict how people will behave.

So the UIR is a relatively simple blueprint for predicting how humans will make decisions.

Adams uses his UIR as a collection of rules of thumb, but these rules can be used to design a system for predicting how humans will respond if they are given a collection of input variables; the system can be modeled as a neural network and tweaked according to psychological rules in order to improve its accuracy.

So the UIR serves as a simple and reliable basis for modeling human behaviors. It allows us to simulate a human brain while bypassing the computational difficulties which its many neurons present.

What the UIR contains

The following factors are used to construct the UIR, and they are presented in approximately the order in which the interface is constructed.

1. The Frame: An objective reality exists. Humans cannot access it. We use filters to understand it, and we create a subjective experience of reality from these filters. These filters are malleable, and the quality of a filter is shown by its predictive ability.
2. Systems Are Greater Than Goals: Success is produced by systems which are designed to facilitate it.
3. Talent Stacking: Accumulate a variety of skills, and each new skill will add value to the previous ones. These talents will eventually reach a critical mass.
4. Affirmations: Write or visualize your goals; this has a real placebo effect.
5. Mating Instincts: Nearly all human behaviors are driven by the mating instinct.
6. Freedom: People will pay dearly for freedom. Try to offer them more of it.
7. Fear: This is one of the most powerful motivators.
8. Curiosity: This is one of the most important and overlooked features of the Interface. Use it at the beginning of a speech in order to generate interest, and use it at the end to keep the audience’s attention.
9. Novelty: Exploit this in order to remain in a person’s memory.
10. Contrast: Place yourself as the obvious better option between two choices.
11. Repetition: People will believe that something is true if it is repeated often enough.
12. Simplicity: People are more likely to remember simple things.
13. Fake Because: People do things for reasons. Not good reasons. Just reasons.
14. Pacing-leading: Convince people that you’re on their side, and then you will be able to direct them.
15. Aspiration: People like the notion that they might become better versions of themselves.
16. Association: If you want people to like something, then pair it with another thing which they like.
17. Pattern Recognition: The human brain is designed to recognize patterns and not for logical thinking. Many patterns are imaginary
18. Visualization: The brain disproportionately assigns value to what is seen. This is likely to be the most important feature of the interface.

The UIR can be organized into system which can process inputs and produce outputs. The Interface is not sufficient for the processing of these inputs, but it can be inserted into a slighty larger framework which is.

The video of Scott Adams’ UIR unveiling

The video below runs four foughly 30 minutes, and Adams presents his UIR within the list presented above shows the important takeaways from the speech.

Conclusion

The human brain is too complex for AI to simulate identically. Therefore, an alternate approach is needed in order to simplify the process. One such approach involves a top-down look at the human psyche which reviews the manner in which people make decisions and then produces an AI which makes decisions in the following way. This method circumvents the difficulty associated with pordcing billions of individual neurons by looking at their aggregate effects.

The framework for such an AI has already been partially established by the hypnotist, writer, cartoonist, and political pundit, Scott Adams. The UIR he has developed can be organized into a system which accurately predicts how a human will behave in a given set of circumstances.

The UIR has been created as a set of rules of thumb, so it must be tweaked for greater accuracy.