You have known yourself consciously for the better part of your life, you spend almost all of your life near you (excluding your drug-fueled out-of-body experiences, I’ve read the news), and, living in this free country, the most important decisions in your life are likely to be made by, you guessed it, you. Considering all of the above, you might come to the conclusion that the the answer to the question “Who knows you best?” is therefore also going to be “You”. However, answering that question with 100% certainty is getting harder and harder. Through deducting information by analysing mass amounts of data, machines are able to predict and personalise every aspect of our lives better and better (Forbes, 2018).
A great example of this can be found in the online shopping domain. We are all very familiar with the ‘recommended’ product section where, based on machine learning, a bunch of products are grouped that we are likely to buy based on the purchases of ourselves and of others. However, Amazon is experimenting with another form of prediction based delivery: Getting the order as close to your house before you actually ordered it. Based on massive amounts of data, Amazon is predicting what you are likely to buy, get it as close to you as possible before you actually buy it, and then deliver it within an hour once you click buy (NPR, 2018). So Amazon might know your shopping habits slightly earlier than you do, does that mean it knows you better than you know yourself?
Philosopher Yuval Noah Harari asked himself the same question when discussing the effect of AI of the job market. He asked himself to what degree AI would catch up with jobs that require high creativity, such as the creation of art, something AI is currently not very good at. Well, more and more AI is starting to play with human emotions, by making music or drawing a painting. After all, emotions are just the result of biochemical processes, and why would an AI not be able to measure just precisely what key hits you right or what palette of colours pleases you most visually. Not before long pieces of art are made, specifically for you. Does that mean AI knows you better than yourself?
It may take a while for this to actually happen, and what is a piece of art, specifically made for you, if you are the only one who likes it? Nevertheless, knowledge of consumers is as valuable as ever and the technology increasingly sufficient. As long as we are aware of the machine, we might actually still know more about it than it knows about us.
Sources:
Koksal (2018) – Forbes Magazine. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ilkerkoksal/2018/02/27/artificial-intelligence-may-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself/#3b86c4784058
Selyukh (2018) – NPR. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/660168325/optimized-prime-how-ai-and-anticipation-power-amazons-1-hour-deliveries?t=1570984172442
Harari (2018) – 21 Lessons for the 21th Century. (book)
