The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [83]
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