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flxapps / DetoxDroid

Use your phone rather than letting your phone use you.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Reinforcement Learning #31

Open xloem opened 3 years ago

xloem commented 3 years ago

Many of these services, for example Facebook, use reinforcement learning algorithms (AI) to sustain people returning to them. Would you ever consider including algorithms of our own, to influence our phone behavior differently?

The usageDirect app has code for getting detailed app usage data on a phone: https://codeberg.org/fynngodau/usageDirect

The openai gym leaderboards have some inspiration regarding reinforcement learning: https://github.com/openai/gym/wiki/Leaderboard

flxapps commented 2 years ago

Hi @xloem! I like the thought, but I am not quite sure what to make out of it specifically. I could see how an app could motivate us to put our phones away more often by posing challenges granting achievements. DetoxDroid does not quite fit into this category of gamified nudging though. It is more about just making the phone less distractive and stripping away unwanted features, rather than "guiding" the users into a specific direction.

Please feel free to share what you think about this.

xloem commented 2 years ago

It's your decision what your app is. I think sometimes of all the data our phones collect, and how services can use that data to train us to keep using them, and even put a lot of research into this.

It would help me feel safer to know something was working to do the opposite. For example, if an algorithm could learn to identify from my touch patterns or the accelerometer or app usage habits, when I am more likely to be willing to put the phone away (or even better, when I am most susceptible to changing my behaviors for the long term), to display a prompt asking this, things like that could really help protect us from digital addictions. Timing matters a lot.

Doing that takes research, but that research does exist.

Simpler algorithms could even identify basic things, like what apps are most dangerous to enable screen color or notifications for, for example.

I feel very helpless regarding use of digital devices, and this app is kind of a small beacon of hope for me. It's saddening the scope of the app is limited, but I am very happy it exists. It is like a friend in a dangerous place. I hope we keep finding ways to improve it in the future, however small.