We have all this marvelous new technology: The Facebook I love everyone, the Google I can be everywhere, and the Apple iBrain. There is a commercial on that mocks people for learning this 15 seconds later than their friends.
But what is much of our newly discovered powers of search, find, learn, store, categorize, compare and retrieve. Two things I read over the last week:
1. The NYT Magazine article about how Target targets it's customers. It has the data and it uses it to bring you back into their store. Nothing sinister or illegal. All their brain and computer power goes to get you to spend your money in their store. Things you may want and need, and other things you may just get sucked into. It's all fine with them. Just spend your money.
2. The New Yorker article about the goings-on at the Davos World Economic Forum among the most rich, most famous and most powerful, ends with a scientist and an entrepreneur walking out together. The scientist is intrigued that the entrepreneur has decoded an algorithm of human behavior.
What has he been able to track and predict? He can tell when a gambler has lost so much money that he decides he must quit and leave the casino. But with this new knowledge the casino can send someone up to him, give him a meal or a coupon that will lure him back into the room so that this poor loser will then give even more money that he does not have to the corporation that is raking it in.
Fighting world hunger? Don't see it. Finding out the algorithm for preventing wars between rival nations? Not unless there is a major profit.
Perhaps I'm just reading the wrong articles.
I should be listening to Rush. He wants the new technology just for porn videos.
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