Artificial intelligence at the service of the consumer: will chatbots help you quit drinking and smoking?

Rospotrebnadzor is concerned that currently the legal status of artificial intelligence is not legally defined and it is not clear who is responsible for the creation and dissemination of unreliable or inaccurate information that ends up in open sources. Therefore, its use may contribute to the spread of false information and violation of privacy. Here they plan to discuss with authorities, consumer organizations and businesses how this relates to consumer trust in electronic assistants of those who offer them goods and services – “chat bots” with artificial intelligence, which are widely used for customer support services and imitate human communication.

However, I also see in this motto a reason to think about how “fairly and responsibly” the natural intelligence of each of us acts in determining our consumer preferences and actions. Simply put, how well did we consume before the advent of artificial intelligence and consume now?

To answer, we must first agree on “what is good and what is bad” in consumer behavior, which practices deserve public encouragement, and which ones should be gotten rid of. If we put this kind of information into AI training programs, it could become a tool for protecting us from “natural” risks, rather than just another threat.

What is bad is more or less clear: everything that harms us, immediately, as in acute poisoning, or gradually undermines our health, peace of mind, and well-being. But I think many will disagree with recognizing as good everything that there is no reason to consider bad. Because in addition to the general benefit in the long term of his entire life, a person needs specific pleasure now and subconsciously strives for it, displacing from consciousness information about the harm to him from the source of this pleasure.

For many people, such sources have long been smoking, alcohol, excessive consumption of sweets, salt, fats, communication on social networks and YouTube videos, and cars. Don’t they know it’s not healthy? They know, but every time they choose not between benefit and harm in the long term, but between pleasure and refusal of it, which requires effort and causes suffering now.

To prevent the conflict between feelings and knowledge from leading to a nervous breakdown, you can tell yourself that with the sensations “tasty”, “beautiful”, “smells good”, “pleasant to the touch”, my senses signal that the source of these sensations is useful for me. The opposite ones are about its harm. So I will listen to these signals, and not to the theorists of a healthy lifestyle.

Personally, I came to this at a “very old” age, having to overcome the grave misconceptions of my senses. For most of my life, I enjoyed smoking, and, fully aware of the harm it was causing to myself, I was able to finally give it up only when a puff began to cause a noticeable heart spasm. And I love fatty foods, but for many years I have maintained my usual weight, only a few kilos above the recommended weight. But I’ve lost interest in sweets, and I almost never use the salt shaker. But I am happy to meet my daily goal of ten thousand steps.

My children have never smoked and hardly drink alcohol – I think not because of concerns about their health, it just doesn’t give them pleasure. But for my children and grandchildren, the norm is the consumption of fast food, which for me has never become “tasty”.

People like me are very conservative in consumption and little sensitive to advertising that attracts attention to new products and convinces us of the need to constantly update our wardrobe, device, car in order to keep up with fashion and remain a worthy member of our social group or rise higher in their hierarchy. . However, we are in the minority, otherwise the business would not invest a tenth of its income in promoting its products – and this is on average; among the world’s giants there are those whose marketing costs amount to more than half of their turnover. This is beneficial for them, because when buying, we pay not only for the product or service itself, but also for the fact that we were convinced to make this particular purchase.

What can be opposed to marketing, which is already preparing to use artificial intelligence as its tool to more effectively persuade us to buy more and more? I think it is useful to explain to consumers, starting from school, that a person needs about one hundred and fifty items of goods to satisfy his basic needs, while the assortment of the average supermarket is a hundred times larger. It’s advisable to experiment by comparing competing brands or models and ranking them on your personal pleasure/price scale, but once you’ve made your choice, it’s best to stay true to it. Unless, of course, the product becomes clearly worse or more expensive.

However, we see a lot of people around who obviously abuse things that are harmful to them and those around them. The question arises: to what extent does society have the right to limit them in satisfying such needs? And how effective are such restrictions?

At one time, I was interested in how European countries achieved a multiple reduction in the proportion of smokers in the last quarter of the last century, and I realized that the main role in this was not played by the frightening inscriptions on cigarette packages and restrictions on the places of their sale, or even their significant rise in price due to high excise taxes, but an increase in the well-being of the vast majority of citizens who now have the opportunity to receive more pleasure from consumption. Its consequence has been a mass awareness of the value of their health, problems with which threaten to deprive them of these pleasures. And then, in the minds of millions of people, the abstract truth about the harmfulness of smoking to health became a powerful incentive to give up cigarettes.

This pattern, although less pronounced, was also evident in alcohol consumption. However, regarding its effect on health, science is not as categorical as with tobacco. Perhaps because it is difficult to find among smokers who limit themselves to a pack of cigarettes a week – as a rule, this is their minimum daily requirement. Whereas the vast majority of alcohol lovers consume it in very moderate quantities, which do not entail negative consequences. However, they also have risks of alcohol poisoning and the formation of alcohol dependence, which vary greatly depending on the type of alcoholic beverages consumed.

Russia in this regard is very different from other countries. According to the WHO Regional Office for Europe, the level of alcohol consumption in absolute terms in our country is only slightly higher than in the European Union. But in terms of structure, our consumption differs radically from European consumption: the average Russian consumes 2.5 times more strong alcohol, about the same amount of beer and 2.7 times less wine. In 1995, these differences were even more significant: our people drank on average 3.5 times more strong drinks, 5 times less wine and 3 times less beer than Europeans. The result is a much higher alcohol mortality rate.

One could refer to the Russian tradition, but it is powerfully supported by the state with excise policy and administrative restrictions. For now, a gram of ethyl alcohol in vodka costs half as much as in beer, and three times less than in the cheapest wine, and you can only buy beer and wine in the same place where vodka is sold, and not in a small shop, beer or wine bar near home at an affordable price, it is difficult to expect a significant reorientation of consumer demand, and therefore a reduction in the scale of alcoholism and the losses it causes to society.

A reorientation from strong drinks to wine and beer would also open up the prospect of their replacement with non-alcoholic drinks of these types, which is already noticeable in some countries. I am sure that if brewers begin to jointly promote their “zero brew”, shaping its perception by young people as fashion, it will occupy no less a place in the market here than in Spain and a number of other countries.

As for winemakers, non-alcoholic wines are still exotic for Russian consumers, but I think they have good prospects for promotion if they have government support.

I would like to direct the growing potential of AI to solve such problems. Alas, the music is called by those who are willing to pay for it, and these are by no means defenders of consumer interests. So we can only wait for more and more sophisticated attacks from advertisers and tune our natural intelligence to resist pressure on it using AI.