Follow the cruel and unyielding demands of your phone in order to stay fit on a custom jogging route! Bonus feature: allows the user to participate in the “sharing economy.”

Background:

It’s easy to live a sedentary life in today’s world of modern conveniences.

The issue:

Unfortunately, this is not ideal. While there are already apps that remind you to periodically stretch or walk around, people tend to just dismiss the notifications if they’re busy.

What is needed is an app that has “teeth” and can motivate people to really get some exercise.

Proposal:

The idea is that the phone would hold your ability to respond to text messages “hostage” until you walked around to its liking (Figure 1).

1-blocked-text.png
Fig. 1: In this case, the orange “BLOCKED” text message will not be displayed until the phone’s owner has done the phone’s bidding.

This kind of phone-enforced demand could be as simple as a requirement to hold the phone in a specific way (to show that you’re standing up / stretching / whatever), or as complicated as a multiple-waypoints jogging route (Figure 2) that the phone requires you do go visit (thanks to the GPS, this would be difficult to fool).

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Fig. 2: In this case, the phone requires that the user go visit waypoints 1 and 2 before it will deign to show text messages again.

The blocked services on the phone could also include other apps, such as the web browser / videos / podcasts, and more.

Conclusion:

If the phone can require the user to walk to various places, perhaps this could also be part of the “sharing” economy: the phone could refuse to unlock until the user performs some commercially-valuable action, such as;

  • Delivering groceries from a store to a nearby neighbor
  • Walking someone’s dog on a specific route.
  • Going door-to-door on a route in support of a political candidate or religion of the phone’s choosing.

If humans are going to be ruled over by cruel machines in the future, this would be a good way to ease into it.

PROS: Allows a phone owner to get exercise and stay fit.

CONS: May cause the future from Terminator 2 to occur.