By monitoring activity in brain areas associated with memory, decision making, and the like, AugCog devices can figure out how to make sure to highlight the information that most matters. If you’re absorbing as much visual input as you can, the system might decide to send an audio alert instead. One trial, according to the
Augmented reality is a booming field, and Gary Hayes, a personalization and augmented-reality expert in Australia, sees at least sixteen different ways it could be used to provide services and make money. In his vision, guide companies could offer augmented reality tours, in which information about buildings, museum artifacts, and streets is superimposed on the environs. Shoppers could use phone apps to immediately get readouts on products they’re interested in—including what the objects cost elsewhere. (Amazon.com already provides a rudimentary version of this service.) Augmented reality games could layer clues into real-world environments.
Augmented-reality tech provides value, but it also provides an opportunity to reach people with new attention-getting forms of advertising. For a price, digital sportscasts are already capable of layering corporate logos onto football fields. But this new technology offers the opportunity to do that in a personalized way in the real world: You turn on the app to, say, help find a friend in a crowd, and projected onto a nearby building is a giant Coke ad featuring your face and your name.
And when you combine the personalized filtering of what we see and hear with, say, face recognition, things get pretty interesting: You begin to be able to filter not just information, but people.
As the cofounder of OkCupid, one of the Web’s most popular dating sites, Chris Coyne has been thinking about filtering for people for a while. Coyne speaks in an energetic, sincere manner, furrowing his brows when he’s thinking and waving his hands to illustrate. As a math major, he got interested in how to use algorithms to solve problems for people.
“There are lots of ways you can use math to do things that turn a profit,” he told me over a steaming bowl of bibimbap in New York’s Koreatown. Many of his classmates went off to high-paid jobs at hedge funds. “But,” he said, “what we were interested in was using it to make people happy.” And what better way to make people happy than to help them fall in love?
The more Coyne and his college hallmates Sam Yeager and Max Krohn looked at other dating sites, the more annoyed they got: It was clear that other dating sites were more interested in getting people to pay for credits than to hook up. And once you did pay, you’d often see profiles of people who were no longer on the site or who would never write you back.
Coyne and his team decided to approach the problem with math. The service would be free. Instead of offering a one-sizefits-all solution, they’d use number crunching to develop a personalized matching algorithm for each person on the site. And just as Google optimizes for clicks, they’d do everything they could to maximize the likelihood of real conversations—if you could solve for that, they figured, profits would follow. In essence, they built a modern search engine for mates.
When you log on to OkCupid, you’re asked a series of questions about yourself. Do you believe in God? Would you ever participate in a threesome? Does smoking disgust you? Would you sleep with someone on the first date? Do you have an STD? (Answer yes, and you get sent to another site.) You also indicate how you’d like a prospective partner to answer the same questions and how important their answers are to you. Using these questions, OkCupid builds a custom-weighted equation to figure out your perfect match. And when you search for people in your area, it uses the same algorithm to rank the likelihood of your getting along. OkCupid’s powerful cluster of servers can rank ten thousand people with a two-hundred-question match model and return results in less than a tenth of a second.
They have to, because OkCupid’s traffic is booming. Hundreds of thousands of answers to poll questions flow into their system each night. Thousands of new users sign up each day. And the system is getting better and better.
Looking into the future, Coyne told me, you’ll have people walking around with augmented displays. He described a guy on a night out: You walk into a bar, and a camera immediately scans the faces in the room and matches them against OkCupid’s databases. “Your accessories can say, that girl over there is an eighty-eight percent match. That’s a dream come true!”
Vladimir Nabokov once commented that “reality” is “one of the few words that mean nothing without quotes.” Coyne’s vision may soon be our “reality.” There’s tremendous promise in this vision: Surgeons who never miss a suture, soldiers who never imperil civilians, and everywhere a more informed, information-dense world. But there’s also danger: Augmented reality represents the end of naive empiricism, of the world as we see it, and the beginning of something far more mutable and weird: a real-world filter bubble that will be increasingly difficult to escape.
Losing Control
There’s plenty to love about this ubiquitously personalized future.
Smart devices, from vacuum cleaners to lightbulbs to picture frames, offer the promise that our environments will be exactly the way we want them, wherever we are. In the near future, ambient-intelligence expert David Wright suggests, we might even carry our room-lighting preferences with us; when there are multiple people in a room, a consensus could be automatically reached by averaging preferences and weighting for who’s the host.
AugCog-enabled devices will help us track the data streams that we consider most important. In some situations—say, medical or fire alerts that find ways to escalate until they capture our attention—they could save lives. And while brainwave-reading AugCog is probably some way off for the masses, consumer variants of the basic concept are already being put into place. Google’s Gmail Priority Inbox, which screens e-mails and highlights the ones it assesses as more important, is an early riff on the theme. Meanwhile, augmented-reality filters offer the possibility of an annotated and hyperlinked reality, in which what we see is infused with information that allows us to work better, assimilate information more quickly, and make better decisions.
That’s the good side. But there’s always a bargain in personalization: In exchange for convenience, you hand over some privacy and control to the machine.
As personal data become more and more valuable, the behavioral data market described in chapter 1 is likely to explode. When a clothing company determines that knowing your favorite color produces a $5 increase in sales, it has an economic basis for pricing that data point—and for other Web sites to find reasons to ask you. (While OkCupid is mum about its business model, it likely rests on offering advertisers the ability to target its users based on the hundreds of personal questions they answer.)
While many of these data acquisitions will be legitimate, some won’t be. Data are uniquely suited to gray- market activities, because they need not carry any trace of where they have come from or where they have been along the way. Wright calls this data laundering, and it’s already well under way: Spyware and spam companies sell questionably derived data to middlemen, who then add it to the databases powering the marketing campaigns of major corporations.
Moreover, because the transformations applied to your data are often opaque, it’s not always clear exactly what decisions are being made on your behalf, by whom, or to what end. This matters plenty when we’re talking about information streams, but it matters even more when this power is infused into our sensory apparatus itself.
In 2000, Bill Joy, the Sun Microsystems cofounder, wrote a piece for
That may often be the case: Machine-driven systems do provide significant value. The whole promise of these technologies is that they give us more freedom and more control over our world—lights that respond to our whims and moods, screens and overlays that allow us to attend only to the people we want to, so that we don’t
