An app to help you think straight

25 May 2015 - 02:17 By Tanya Farber

Whether you are considering snitching on your friend's cheating husband or euthanasing your terminally sick cat, a new Apple app will help you make life-changing decisions at the click of a button. The app rates the different solutions at your disposal.It does not need details of the problem but asks the user to consider each "solution" and rate it on five criteria: utility, virtue, rights, justice and the common good.Users then assign a weighting to each criterion.According to The New Scientist magazine, the categories are simplified versions of five different frameworks developed by moral philosophers over the centuries.The app, however, works based on the customised moral framework of your choice, so if you give justice more emphasis than the others it will score the solutions based on that.But this is not the only tech innovation that could take over from brains when it comes to how we behave and the decisions we make.Another app, called Crystal, allows users to write e-mails using the style of their recipients - and even enables devices to edit as users type.The new innovation "analyses" recipients based on their social media activity and content, then tells users which words, phrases, styles and tones their recipients can relate to. Leanne Stein (not her real name), a South African doctor living in Sydney, Australia, said Crystal has simplified communicating by e-mail in her new country because until it came along she always seemed to get the tone of her e-mails wrong."I sometimes ruffle feathers without meaning to. It is just some small nuances that I need to tweak when I communicate with people here," she said...

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