On Predictability

May 14, 2016 timothywstanley@me.com

Customisation means having the world adapting to what we need, want, expect, fear, desire, hope, or wish. It is nice and enticing to receive the right discount, at the right time, for the right goods we are planning to buy anyway. And recommendations based on our interests are better than random ones, based on anyone's taste. The risk, however, is that our digital technologies may easily become defining technologies rather than mere identifying ones... No wonder we become predictable: we have been made predictable. Nor do our technologies have any interest in our developments and transformations: quite the opposite. They would like to see a customer who likes something to keep liking that something and anything else that is similar to that something. Cats lovers turning at most into kittens lovers, not dogs lovers. Amazon’s recommendation system can only reinforce choices and tastes and make them more stable, and more predictable. So do the 'smart' algorithms behind the newsfeeds of Facebook and Instagram. Our malleability is used to give ourselves a permanent shape not to enable us to change shape.

Luciano Floridi, "The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy" - http://www.schirn.de/en/magazine/context/the_self_fulfilling_prophesy/