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Can we talk for a minute about how well Google knows me? Or i-tunes? Or Amazon? Or Pandora?
It's weird, isn't it? All these assumptions, made by a mess of magnetic dust, a collection of binary 1's and 0's. These 1's and 0's think they got me all figured out. I mean, is this even possible?
And, if it is possible, what in the world does it mean? What does a computer that knows me better than my parents do say about who I am? Which tail is wagging which dog?
Maybe Google and Amazon and I-tunes and Pandora tell us a bit about who we are, but one might also argue that we are who we are because of what we find at Google and Amazon and i-tunes and Pandora. Pandora makes a suggestion, I choose the selection that Pandora makes, and Pandora then suggests something else. And pretty soon I'm picking what Pandora thinks I'll pick, and it's a bit creepy, don't you think? Pandora sometimes chooses better gifts for me than my wife does.
And what about the one-sidedness of it all? I never once bought anything for Pandora. I never once asked Google what it might like for its birthday. Incidentally, Google just had its birthday, and I didn't even notice until I called on Google for other purposes. There was the cartoon of the Google cake staring at me on the Google search engine page, and I felt like such a schmuck. I'm sorry, Google. You've always been so good to me, and I totally, totally forgot your birthday.
Hal is Watching You...
All this got me a bit anxious. In fact, all this got me thinking about HAL. Remember HAL, from 2001? Remember "A Bicycle Built for Two", sung creepily by a soggy collection of vacuum tubes that are slowly turning to mush in the deep space of Jupiter's orbit? Google could be HAL any day now. Or Amazon could. Or Pandora. They all could turn on me someday, and I am officially frightened to ignore their suggestions, because they might just cut me off. All those 1's and 0's might arrange themselves into something nasty and vindictive, and suddenly I won't know who I am anymore, because I am only allowed to be what a computer tells me to be. That would suck. I'd like to think I have more independence than that.
Still, the suggestions are often so spot-on, so damn accurate, so...well...thoughtful, that I find it hard sometimes to understand where I end and the computer begins. Is this the Singularity? Is the singularity really about shopping?
And then, thank goodness, Pandora finally screwed up. It was so striking, so startling, so utterly inducing of neurotic anxiety that I actually looked away from the screen. I turned my head and everything. There's a whole world outside of those bounded pixels...who knew?
Here's what happened:
I put in my song selection so Pandora could choose for me a proper playlist. And, per usual, Pandora was spot-on. Pandora played music that was bliss to my ears, my toes tapping, my lips mouthing the words. I perused the Internet for a while, read about sports or something, and then went back to Pandora to read about the artist that was playing for me now. There, on the right-hand side of the screen, Pandora told me, based on my music, that I am interested, that I MUST be interested, in dating "eligible men over 50." The men were handsome, I'll admit, and if I were in fact interested in dating eligible men over 50, these are probably the guys I'd choose or at least hope to get a hold of.
But I am not, in fact, interested in dating eligible men over 50. I'm not interested in dating anyone at all, for that matter, as I find myself quite happily married. But there was Pandora, assuming because of my music that I was the kind of person who might date eligible men over 50.
OK, so I was listening to Joni Mitchell. Plenty of men listen to Joni Mithcell. Just get a few beers in them and they'll admit to it pretty easily. "Both Sides Now" and a good micro-brewed ale almost always yields tears as the night wears on.
It took three AC/DC songs and one run of Neil Young to get the good people at Pandora to stop offering me handsome Stepford men and to start with more appropriate advertisements, like the Major League Baseball channel, or Life Insurance for my family. It seemed Pandora was really, really committed to telling me to date those guys. They all looked like variations of Rex Morgan, M.D. But apparently no one who listens to AC/DC would date Rex Morgan. Pandora taught me that as well.
And that, my friends, is binary pattern recognition, programmed as 1's and 0's, assumptions and bias and even old fashioned prejudice hiding at your fingertips whenever you open your lap top.
I don't worry so much about privacy with the Internet. I figure the Internet already knows me pretty well. But if the Internet goes all HAL on me, tries to get me to date those eligible men, then I suppose we got us a failure to communicate. And that, I'd argue, is the most insidious risk that hides in all of our enamored technology. Not that the technology knows us so well, but rather, that it tells us things that it feels we should know about ourselves. And if it gets us wrong, then it can be funny at best and surreal at worse.
So teach your children to know who they are before they go wandering around Amazon. And teach them to question Amazon just as they'd question their own parents when their parents get them all wrong. Then we have a chance at being the dog instead of the tail when all that wagging takes place.
Then we have a chance of knowing on our own who in fact we happen to be.
Steve Schlozman's first novel, the Zombie Autopsies, was published in March.
