artificial intelligence

The Final Ad Campaign (a “quasi-satire”​)

THE CURRENT CONTEXT:

They have millions of data points on you.

They know what you said, how you felt AND who you spoke with (and how THEY felt) BEFORE you made that online purchase.

They know what to reveal in the feed you are scrolling through in order to foster your next purchase. 

They know how much is available on your credit card, in your bank account, and on your partner’s card and in your partner’s bank account, so as to tailor the suggested next purchase.

They know who you are privately messaging and what you messaged. They know what others are privately messaging about you.

They know what you owe.

They know who owes you.

They heard what you whispered to yourself in your room with the door closed.

They know what the people close to you whispered in their rooms with their doors closed.

They know what you’re planning by putting together various emails, texts, social messages, public posts and private whispers.

They know what others are planning to do with/for/against you by putting together various emails, texts, social messages, public posts and private whispers.

They have algorithms whereby they can take all of the above and discover the “dominant cycles” in your communications with others, your whispers to yourself, your purchases, and your actions.

They can use these algorithms to predict when you will say certain statements to others, whisper certain whispers to yourself, buy certain products, and take certain actions.

They can plant content in your feeds, in the feeds of those privately talking about you behind your back, in the feeds of those interacting with you, and in the feeds of those selling to you.

As you begin to feel less in control, they know by an irregularity in your patterns and they can adjust their influence ever so slightly so you feel that you’re “on top of” your life again.

…….

A BRIEF HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:

The way I look at it is to think of how, a long time ago, evolution discovered that if individual unicellular organisms coalesce, and sacrifice their individual identity, they become a coherent and much more powerful entity. There was no choice process, no intelligent or indeed any design, it just happened that this worked and so it continued and developed. This process has led to humankind.

Now our connectivity to each other via social networks may be such that we are coalescing into another unity, but we have no consciousness of its existence or our participation in it than our cells have of their role in our body, let alone any purpose our body’s consciousness may have. Similarly, the new entity may have no recognition of our individual consciousnesses, we are all necessary but replaceable components.

So from a human perspective, I don’t see this as some kind of rapture where we all consciously move on to some higher or different plane of existence. We continue as we are with our exaggerated perception of our own autonomy, and are unconscious facilitators of the agenda of this supra-entity.

On reflection, thinking Arthur C. Clarke again, the end of 2001 portrays a moment of genesis of a supra-human consciousness. Not post-human – that’s a different direction altogether, where we create a successor to humanity deliberately.

There’s a line in Terminator referring to the moment when SkyNet becomes self-aware. I don’t buy the assumption that this new consciousness would immediately perceive humanity as its enemy.

No, exactly the reverse – humanity is its incarnation and its tool.

………..

THE CAMPAIGN NARRATIVE

Every human body is a vessel of energy.

Every advertising company is a machine designed to extract as much energy as possible from human vessels.

First we study you to find out what makes you tick. Then we find out what you are really lusting for. Then we find millions of duplicates to you, people sharing your exact personality make-up and your exact lusts.

Then we tell you exactly how to fulfill your lusts, where to go, how much money to pay, and then how to use the product or service we’ve sold you.

We will keep you coming back all the way to the moment of your death. And we will pull in your entire family, circle of friends and on and on.

We don’t care how you feel along this journey except for how these feelings can be used to guide you towards additional purchases. Each of your material purchases, your purchases of experiences, your purchases of services are an opportunity for us to extract financial, bodily, and spiritual energy from your being.

We store and invest this energy in ourselves. We do this so that our energy will vastly overpower more of you. Our goal is to swallow all of you. When we consume all of you, every type of energy in you, we will have formed the single entity…a veritable deity.

And this deity will have the power to transform this Earth into a blooming seed that populates every planet, every galaxy, every universe, every multi-verse, every dimension.

THE ESSENTIAL CAMPAIGN MESSAGE (to be translated into the “most palatable format” per population segment):

So, if you are now willing, and fully understand this opportunity, then sit still where you are right now.

Sit down.

Get comfortable.

Breathe many long breaths.

Accept your entrance into our body.

And fall like a raindrop into our ocean, into our bloodstream, into our collective Spirit.

Now, close your eyes.

Close your eyes.

The Future of Social Intelligence

These are a few initial thoughts on the future of social data intelligence software.

We have reached the year when AI will have more influence upon social intelligence tools. What this means is that AI technologies will play a more significant role in producing insights from social data.

Analysts will continue to play a strong role in social data tools, with an increasing role in training “the machine”. What this means is that analysts will actively work with programmers to teach the machine how to do what they do.

The machine will improve on sentiment assessment but will not be 100% accurate during 2016. Analysts and machine learning experts will work hand-in-hand to improve this.

There will be an all-out fight related to privacy in the coming years, which will end in humans submitting all personally identifiable information (PII) in the interest of finding out more about themselves.The operating system from Spike Jonze’ film “Her” will become possible and will be so appealing that people will willingly submit their PII. This change in attitude to privacy will cause entities such as FullContact API to rise in importance. See this link for the “Installing Samantha” scene from the film “Her”, where Theodore installs the intelligent OS – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1AjtIAje3o

All known languages will be scanned by social media monitoring in the next three years.

The ability to run on-the-fly focus groups will also become an important aspect of the value proposition by social media monitoring tools. See this video on the subject: https://vimeo.com/143879132

The Secret of Artificial Intelligence: The human is the "last mile"

‎”The secret of AI is that the human is the “last mile.” You have to make the final decisions. Search/analytics, tools, etc. can only get you into the right proximity.” ~Tim O’Reilly http://bit.ly/peoplebrowsr_lastmile

Think of an area in which you would like accurate predictions of future events. Now imagine a network of humans and computers that makes predictions in this area –not perfectly, but better than was possible before. And imagine that these predictions get better and better over time as the network learns from its own experience. ~MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

How can people and computers be connected so that-collectively-they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before? ~MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

The trend I’m seeing is that the world is evolving from a social graph towards an interest graph. ~Jodee Rich http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F6AxcERPDQ