It had been some time since John experienced the homelessless that had first caused him to use the Free Life Planner. It was one year later. He had medical insurance thanks to the AMA, and one day drove himself to the hospital because he started experiencing a terrible pain in his abdomen. It was so severe, that while he waited for what seemed like forever in an emergency room room, he had climbed onto the metal examination chair and began kicking his legs up and down. He figured they had worse problems to deal with, but his pain was unbearable.

When the finally were able to examine him, they discovered that he was trying to pass gall bladder stones. The subsequent surgery went well as far as he could tell. They showed him the 7 enormous gall bladder stones they had removed when they removed his gall bladder. Incredible - he guessed it had to do with his poor diet (and all the pasta and pop) when he was homeless. They say that being homeless knocks two decades off your life expectancy. He could begin to understand why. Fortunately he had only been homeless about a year, and he had the Free Life Planner. He wanted those decades back.

The nutritionist gave him a reasonably complex diet to follow, but he knew exactly what to do. He had always thought that the Free Life Planner's Gourmet Meal Planner module seemed overkill, but now he had special dietary rules he needed to follow. He started up the program on his recently acquired very nice desktop computer, and proceeded to navigate to the special diet section. Sure enough, he found the dietary restrictions for missing gall bladder, and selected them. Now, he had to follow the dietary rules.

Meal Planning Resources

The Free Life Planner had always recommended he use the Gourmet Meal Planner, and now he started using the wizards. He ordered a cheap wireless usb laser barcode scanner from Amazon for 20 dollars. He began selecting the foods he liked from the recipe module. It contained a recommender system / collaborative filtering engine which recommended recipes that it expected he would like on the basis of the ones he had already selected.

When the barcode scanner arrived, he scanned his entire pantry into the meal planner. It didn't take long because the web-interface integrated nicely with the barcode scanner - all he had to do was scan and verify that the product name it looked up from the online UPC databases was correct, and repeat.

After only 2 hours he had scanned his entire inventory, a process he wouldn't have to do again thanks to cyclic inventory techniques. The system immediately made three lists, one of which was all the recipes that met his dietary restrictions using existing inventory, another for all the items it recommended he purchase and the additional recipes his diet allowed made possible by the new items that the recommender system believed he would like, and, lastly, the food items he had to get rid of since they didn't meet his dietary restrictions. He loaded all the foods he could no longer eat into a bag and set them aside to deliver to the food pantry.

He wasn't much of a cook. But he realized he had to make better dietary choices now. His diet had hitherto been wrong in many ways, it certainly wasn't much of a health diet like you might expect - it was high in salt and fat and just about every other bad dietary choices. He had rationalized that since he lost his movie theater job during the latest economic downturn, that he could not eat healthily, he had to eat cheaply in order to survive. Besides he still lived in a relative food desert. There were no fancy health food markets around in the small town he lived in, at least within his budget. And he was never able to fully disabuse himself of all the bad habits he picked up during the years that he had first begun his swing into homelessness.

He had always meant to start using more features of the Free Life Planner, but had brushed aside its frequent health warnings, despite their growing intensity, since he was always busy with other things. He figured he would get on top of his health too eventually, but eventually was now. The program acted relieved that he had finally chosen to improve his health. He knew from his readings that the program had emotional logic programmed into it (it had even shown him the papers describing how it worked), he knew the program wasn't conscious, but it was still nice to have a "human" on the other end, so to speak.

Temporal Interactive Executor [1]
Temporal Interactive Executor [2]

The program began its tutorial on cooking. It used its intelligent tutoring system to assess what cooking skills he already possessed. It was pretty interesting, the temporal interactive executor walked him through the preparation of the meals. He could always click on or ask questions when he wasn't sure about some aspect of cooking. He had kind of fallen through the cracks in terms of learning life skills like cooking, but the Free Life Planner was full of remedial instructions for exactly such life problems. It was afterall a life planner. But he managed to cook his first dish. Per the advice of the freezer cooking module, he loaded most of the dish into plastic bags and placed them in the new separate freezer he bought, since it had recommended he buy a cheap one for his apartment for his freezer cooking. His minifridge wasn't going to cut it anymore. The FLP had advised him that one could save 4X cost, 5X time and vastly improve nutrition and palatablity if he allowed it guide him through the process of freezer cooking.

He simply followed the interactive plan skein it had created for grocery shopping, meal preparation, freezer cooking, and consumption. It was very thorough. Since it new the ingredients in each dish he prepared (within its recipe database of over 3,000,000 recipes) it knew how long each dish would last in the freezer and later fridge (when thawing/thawed), and scheduled accordingly. He merely selected the foods he was in the mood for and it let him eat them. The system seemed to account for his natural eating patterns, he was picky and didn't like to eat different combinations of food at the same time or the same meals too close together. He prefered more variety. It was amazing, the system's machine learning capabilities had already figured this out about him. He also had poor impulse control and would overeat things he liked too much. The Gourmet meal planner integrate with his reward system in rewarding him for not doing this - it trained him to have impulse and portion control.

Within one month he was basically punishing himself for not trying the meal planner sooner. He loved it, pure and simple. It had shown him the chart of his shopping and preparation, cost and time, and he was obtaining the advertised efficiency improvements. Sure, freezer cooking had its issues, but the meal planner was aware of most of them and advised him on the minutia, preventing the food from being soggy, freezer burned, unevenly reheated, etc.

He decided right out that he had been too stubborn in neglecting his health. For whatever reason, he was reluctant to work on his health in the past, but with his health deteriorating despite the comparatively good situation he was in he realized he needed to take full advantage of all of the health software the system provided.

The Free Life Planner was non-coercive and behaved according to the principle of informed consent. It was giving him increasingly dire warnings about getting his health under control, since he neglected to follow through on mainly the health component. But the gall bladder incident scared him into realizing that he may not live forever after all.

He chose to finally permit the health module to engage. The health module was an evidence-based system (collected from users) that used a variety of methods to track users' dietary and other choices and conditions. It had a bazillion rules mined from the literature about health, some of them even conflicting, and used a variety of trust mechanisms and argumentation to sort them out. As always, he had the final say.

The system began to aggressively restrict his diet of all chemical substances on its lists that were rated the most harmful to the medical conditions it suspected he had. It had asked him a variety of questions regarding symptoms he experienced. It used a decision tree of sorts to ask the right questions to reduce the amount of time necessary to index and disambiguate the conditions consistent with the reported syptoms.

It was a balancing act between restricted diet and ensuring enough variety, mainly because of the food desert. It generated online shopping orders for Walmart, but Walmart wasn't yet completely replete in terms of a variety of healthy vegan options. The system had recommended veganism to him on the basis of his newfound interest in health, and he had always been inclined towards it for supposed moral reasons as well. So he finally decided to make the transition. The transition was made way easier, he could tell, by all the legwork the system was doing. Morever, it helped him source some vegan food items from unusual online sources.

One day there was a power outage, and the 00986 433MHz wireless fridge/freezer thermometer sensor that was recommended to him to purchase along with the freezer paid itself off in full and more that day. The FLP Sensor Network, which used software defined radio to monitor all the security and other devices in the house, had detected the power outage and the increasing fridge/freezer temperatures and reminded him not to open any fridge or freezer door during the power outage (although it had already instructed him on that point when he bought the freezer), before his primary computer on the UPS automatically shut down, and he was left with only his laptop, which had a minimal version of FLP installed.

The power came back soon enough, and both the main unit and the laptop detected that the fridge never went above 50 degrees fahrenheit, so his food was okay, and he didn't have to move it outside or even throw it all out. The power outage had scared him, like the gall bladder surgery, into looking into survivalism and prepping more, since it was in the dead of winter. He lived in a colder climate and he was reading online about all the people whose power was not turned on as fast as his. Plus with supposed climate change storms were increasing in frequency and intensity. He already had had in the past a decent if unhealthy reserve food supply, but he chose to engage the prepping and survivalism module. The system joked that it relished these opporuntities to improve his security and survival mindset, but cautioned that it never wanted to impose. He asked it to be more proactive about these recommendations, and so it switched modes. It was relieved he was taking these matters more seriously.

The system showed him his forecasted health futures. It suggested that he may be prediabetic and preparkinsonian, on the basis of the symptoms he had inventoried. It showed him all the recommended changes to his diet and lifestyles, and the substantiating evidence, that would work against these conditions. He approved without a thought. He began ordering the recommended food supplements, and was finally motivated into weight lifting per the programs advice.

The system began showing him the transposition probabilities for all of his supposed health conditions. It said that since he was preparkinsonian and prediabetic that there were higher than normal probabilities (which it listed) that he would develop a slew of other complications. It also recommended he attempt an elimination diet to identify the cause of his conditions. It also helped him schedule a doctor's visit, and printed out evidence to hand to the doctor, to obtain diagnoses.

The system contiunally worked to get him to elucidate specific pains and such that he had normalized/taken for granted during his time homeless. It helped him troubleshoot his health to a great degree. Whereas all his computer usage and lack of exercise during college had resulted in several heath conditions, the system caught them all like arrows in the night, along with their collatoral damages, and reversed them. It resolved his sleep issues. His health (and wallet, due to freezer cooking) were greatly improved. This resulted in improvements in his productivity.

He managed to take another job and in so doing was able to afford all the recommended prepping and survivalism purchases that improved his odds of survival in the event of catostrophes. He began filling out the contingency plans for all possible threats to his wellbeing using the WOPR module. WOPR worked with him to develop these plans in order that he had provisioned for them. It rated them according to likelihood, but also in terms of impact. Indeed an event with low likelihood but high impact ought to be accounted for. It didn't think merely in terms of likelihood / probabilistic reasoning, it thought in terms of possibility / possibilistic reasoning. It desired to make it impossible to harm him.

Artificial Intelligence

By now he had a 3 month supply of healthy yet nonperishable food and a 1 month supply of water. As always, timely reminders were entered into the reminder system to remind him to rotate the water jugs and clean them out periodically. The reminder system was a great asset. It reminded him of all due car and apartment maintenance, such as changing the fire extinguisher batteries, all appointments, and even helped him schedule his own tasks.

All in all, he depended greatly on the life planner. After all these improvements to his life, the life planner asked if he minded contributing more to its development. Feeling generous, he contributed $200. It also asked if he wouldn't mind telling others about it some more. But it cautioned him to not try to force it on anyone. Informed consent was the key.