AI as a fortune teller.
Your new palmist need not be human
Fortune telling can be traced back to 6000 years ago.Prophetic dreams and oracular utterances played an important part in ancient religion and medicine.In Chinese society, fortune telling is a respected and important part of social and business culture. Thus, fortune tellers often take on a role which is equivalent to management consultants and psychotherapists in Western society.
However, as time has gone on we have seen fortune tellers and palmists losing credibility, globalisation has affected this too, with more people living away from their birth places, they are far away from the traditions and culture which also includes astrology and other ancient metaphysics.
However, this is likely to change, with the rise of new age palmistry and astrology apps like Faladdin, the app has close to 20 million downloads, mainly from the persian gulf region, with most of its users in Turkey. What started of as a hobby app for his mother after her retirement soon spiralled into a full fledged business where they could barely match the demand.
Six years after launching, Sertaç Taşdelen decided to scale up. “On Binnaz, we had limited resources,” he said. “A real fortune-teller can deal with one customer at a time. We wanted something like a self-driving Uber; we’d get rid of the driver and only keep the vehicle.” That vehicle is (perhaps optimistically) described as an artificial intelligence (AI) engine.
Faladdin collects data from users and then draws language from a pool of preformulated interpretations. These readings are produced by a group of 30 contributors, including a dramatist, a psychologist, an ad director, and an author.
This trend has also picked up in countries like India, with apps like Taaraka and Bhrigoo foraying into the market. According to the CEO of Taaraka,
“Taaraka is a product of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Every insight is rated, and accuracy level is standardised. The algos detect patterns and map it to the output. Traditional ways are time consuming and also prone to errors”
It is indeed quite ironic that astrology and horoscope, being such inherently human things, are being automated for higher accuracy.
Co-star is an AI-powered app that takes horoscope, personality analysis, and compatibility to a whole new level. What makes Co-star different is that it uses data from NASA. The company claims that the app’s powerful natural-language engine uses data from NASA which are equipped with methods of professional astrologers, to algorithmically generate insights about your personality and your future.
The company has raised $5 million in funding.It doesn’t matter if users are true believers in astrology or not — it’s the accessibility of the pseudo-science and its personality predictions that have made it a hit with millennials.
A user also documented her experience with the app, claiming that it was vague at times and absolutely spot on at others. She felt like it knew her better than she did herself.
AI and astrology almost seem out of place together, but weirdly, it tells us a lot about what AI as a technology is for us, it can be whatever we want it to be, do whatever we want it to do, it is a representation of how far humans have come in a sense, that we have developed technology so advanced that it can do things that are indeed very human, in a way better than humans. Without getting into the debate surrounding Astrology and horoscopes, we can appreciate that AI as a technology that 6000 years later we don’t need a human to read a hand.
