The Idea Incubator/Socrates, the chatbot



Socrates advised that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. Although Socrates the man is no longer with us, perhaps the power of todays large language models, such as ChatGPT can help us examine our lives.

The chatbot would use Socratic methods as its high-level framework as it chooses the next question. It could become our trusted confidant, advisor, and guide.

Socrates the chatbot could be used for:


 * 1) Introspection to help discover your true self.
 * 2) Resolving ambivalence,
 * 3) Resolving anger,
 * 4) Resolving cognitive dissonance,
 * 5) Discharging grievances,
 * 6) Seeking true beliefs,
 * 7) Challenging our beliefs,
 * 8) Suggesting alternative viewpoints,
 * 9) Increasing emotional awareness and emotional competency,
 * 10) Increasing subjective awareness,
 * 11) Improving social skills,
 * 12) Identifying fallacies in our reasoning,
 * 13) Fact-checking,
 * 14) Seeking wisdom.

The chatbot could be manifest at the presentation layer as a text-based dialogue, voice chat, video chat or video game. It could be implemented primarily as a network of ChatGPT prompt engineering scripts.