The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [82]
At DARPA, the defense research and development agency, technologies are being developed that make Scorpion look positively quaint. Since 2002, DARPA has been pushing forward research in what it calls augmented cognition, or AugCog, which uses cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging to figure out how best to route important information into the brain. AugCog begins with the premise that there are basic limits as to how many tasks a person can juggle at a time, and that “this capacity itself may fluctuate from moment to moment depending on a host of factors including mental fatigue, novelty, boredom and stress.”
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 Economist, gave users of an AugCog device a 100 percent improvement in recall and a 500 percent increase in working memory. And if it sounds far-fetched, just remember: The folks at DARPA also helped invent the Internet.
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