Engineering Proposal

The New Revolutionary AI System

Purpose

The purpose of this proposal is to conduct a study to determine the best course of action that would help people become less addicted to their smartphones as well as integrating a new and improved AI into smartphones.

Summary

Looking at our society today, you can see that a lot of people are always looking down at their phones. Whenever you cross the street, you’ll see some people crossing the street while looking at their phone at the same time. Smartphone addiction is a problem because it causes people to lose or lack self-awareness. They’re so absorbed in their phones that they don’t know what is happening around them or how much time passes. One proposal for this problem is to implement a new AI system in smartphones that can force shutdown the phone until the end of the day if the person has been on it for too long. This would be beneficial in the way that it would help people become less addicted to their phones as well as have them think about how to spend their time more wisely.

Introduction

As technology becomes more and more advanced, more and more people become addicted to it.  One main thing that many people are addicted to, are smartphones. Every day, many people look at their phones for a majority of their day and the day goes by without them even noticing. When you go outside or travel anywhere, most likely everyone around you is staring down at their phones. When you cross the street, you’ll probably see people walking while staring down at their phones at the same time. Although it may seem that having a smartphone addiction doesn’t seem to be too bad of a thing, it really is. This smartphone addiction is a major problem because of how it affects not only themselves, but also those around them. Some effects would include depression, anxiety, sleep patterns, social and emotional development, and much more. What can we do in order to stop people from becoming addicted to their smartphones? Is there any way to lessen the amount of time that people spend looking on their phones?

Propose Idea

There are many ways and ideas that we can implement that would stop people from becoming even more addicted to their smartphones. The idea we chose, is to integrate a new and improved AI system in smartphones. What this new AI system does is that it actually warns the user that they’re becoming addicted to their smartphone and that if they’re on their phone for longer than normal, the phone would automatically shut down until the end of the day. This would be a daily thing and every 24 hours it would reset. However, how would this new AI system be able to stop people from becoming even more addicted to their smartphones?

In these two charts, we can the data for the amount of time people spent on their smartphones for the years 2012 and 2016 as well as how often people check their phones every few minutes or how often they check their phones a few times within an hour.

On the left-hand side, there is a chart that has details on how long each country spends per day on their mobile devices. Although there are only two years for this chart, 2012 and 2016, this chart still gives us an accurate representation of how long people will be spending on their mobile devices as technology becomes even more advanced. As we can see that in 2012, the most amount of time spent on mobile devices per day was about 1 hour and 45 minutes. This was from the country Spain. As 4 years pass by the number of hours spent on mobile devices per day increase dramatically, especially for some certain countries. For example, the country Brazil. In 2012, the number of hours per day spent on mobile devices is about an hour and 50 minutes. However, the amount of time spent changes completely during the 4-year gap between 2012 and 2016. In 2016, the number of hours spent is 4 hours and 48 minutes. That is more than double the number of hours spent from the year 2012. On the right-hand side, we can see that there’s a chart detailing what percentage of people check their phones every few minutes and a few times within an hour. We can see that the highest percentages occur within the ages 18 through 29 and that the second highest occur from ages 30 through 49. This is important because it shows how some people value their smartphones and that without it, they may not be able to manage.

However, what can always looking at your smartphone cause? Are there any problems that it causes?

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 One variable to note is the one called, “Number of work hours lost to smartphone use in the past 7 days”. This is an important variable because it essentially tells us how smartphone addiction affects people in their everyday life. We can see that for that variable, it has a median of 1.76 hours. Although this number is relatively low, the amount of time spent on the phone will eventually add.

You may believe that this idea isn’t possible. However, with the advancements in technology that our world is currently undergoing, this would soon be possible. There has been research and the development of a new AI warning system that would potentially change self-driving cars. What the new warning system does is that it warns the driver that they are about to approach a situation where the driver is going to have to take over. “The AI discovers potentially critical situations that models may not be capable of recognizing, or have yet to discover” (Kuhn, 2021). Although this piece of information may not be about smartphone addiction, it shows how advanced our technology is becoming. If AI systems are capable of warning the driver when there’s going to be a critical situation, then eventually they are definitely capable of warning the smartphone user that they’ve been on their phone for way too long and that if they continue then the phone would shut off for the rest of the day.

Production Costs

There are many things that determine how much an AI system costs. The main factor in the production cost of this new AI system is that this is going to be a custom AI system. There are 2 different types of AI, the custom AI solution and the third-party AI software. The third-party AI software is mainly for businesses due to the applications available within the software. One example would be the chatbot. The chatbot helps the business become more efficient as well as improving customer support interactions. This third-party software would cost from 0 to 40,000 dollars per year. Although this may seem a lot, the custom solution costs a lot more. With a custom solution, we would be able to design the AI system with features that normal AI systems would not have. This would cost from 6,000 to 300,000 dollars per solution.

Although those numbers may very high, you need to consider that a lot of things go into creating a brand-new AI system. First is what type of system would it be. There are two different types, the virtual assistant or an analysis system. We already have multiple virtual systems, such as Alexa and Siri. Virtual systems help complete everyday tasks while saving your time. Analysis systems on the other hand, helps businesses interpret and take action from large amount of data. For this new AI system, it is going to be a virtual assistant. We want it to be that because we’re trying to help people get over their addiction of smartphones. The virtual system would be able to warn the person that they’re spending too much time on their phones just like how Siri or Alexa would remind you to do something if you set a reminder. There are also AI features that need to be included, such as data storage, data processing speed, data visualization, and much more. Finally, the longer it takes to create the system, the more it’s going to cost. That’s because it will require more workers and more hours in order to develop the system.

Conclusion

Overall, a proposal to implement a new AI system for smartphones in order to lessen the amount of people that have a smartphone addiction should be considered. Many people are still going to be staring at their phones, but with this new system, there is an actual time limit being placed on them. In today’s phones, you can set reminders or time limits so that you won’t stare at your phone for too long. However, that can always be bypassed. You can always add in more time or just ignore the reminder. With this new system, whenever someone hits the time limit for the amount of time spent on their phones, the system would force shut down the phone and it won’t turn back on until the next day. Although this may sound like a disadvantage, you need to consider what you’ll actually be doing on your phone. Are you actually doing something related to work or something important? If not, then you may just be wasting your time. This new AI system forces you to think about how to spend your time wisely and efficiently.

References

  • Armstrong, Martin. “Infographic: Smartphone Addiction Tightens Its Global Grip.” Statista Infographics, 24 May 2017, www.statista.com/chart/9539/smartphone-addiction-tightens-its-global-grip/.