Episode Details

We’ve recently published a set of design sketches for technological analogues to ‘angels-on-the-shoulder’: customized tools that leverage near-term AI systems to help people better navigate their environments and handle tricky situations in ways they’ll feel good about later.

We think that these tools could be quite important:

• In general, we expect angels-on-the-shoulder to mean more endorsed decisions, and fewer unforced errors.
• In the context of the transition to more advanced AI systems that we’re faced with, this could be a huge deal. We think that people who are better informed, more situationally aware, more in touch with their own values, and less prone to obvious errors are more likely to handle the coming decades well.

We’re excited for people to build tools that help this to happen, and hope that our design sketches will make this area more concrete, and inspire people to get started.

The (overly-)specific technologies we sketch out are:

• Aligned recommender systems — Most people consume content recommended to them by algorithms trained not to drive short-term engagement, but to meet long-term user endorsement and considered values
• Personalised learning systems — When people want to learn about (or keep up-to-date [...]

---

First published:
February 9th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/E5XHPNFkbQcTSpxn4/some-angel-on-the-shoulder-ai-tools

Linkpost URL:
https://www.forethought.org/research/design-sketches-angels-on-the-shoulder

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.