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Plot Twist: When google's algorithms decided those two individuals should pair, it started showing them ads for the same events in order to increase the probabi
by elzbardico 4y ago
Plot Twist:
When google's algorithms decided those two individuals should pair, it started showing them ads for the same events in order to increase the probability of them meeting.
The goal was achieved by the system in 3 months, exactly as predicted with a 99% probability with a 95% CI.
The system's next goal is to subtly nudge the couple to reproduce within the next year in order to help google meet their user accounts targets for 2034.
- literalAardvark 4y agoThat's pretty disturbing, and not too far beyond capabilities. I think the biggest one missing would be that iirc a date going well seems pretty much random in dating service data, despite a fair bit of effort to find correlations.
- eru 4y agoI don't think randomness would be an issue. Google already assume that people clicking (or not) on ads is a random process. Randomness is fine, just get enough smart people on it to learn about the distribution etc.
- skapadia 4y agoThat's some Black Mirror level dystopia there, and totally within the realm of possibility, if it isn't already happening. Sync that up with Apple Watch 8's ability to estimate ovulation, and poof, declining birth rate problem solved! I'm scared.
- gambiting 4y agoDon't worry, knowing google they would build this just so someone could get their cushy promotion, then the whole thing will be abandoned within 1 to 2 years max. Corporate dystopia falls apart when met with the apathy at google, no problem.
- hardolaf 4y agoThere's no promos in maintaining the dystopian nightmare program so it will be replaced by new dystopian nightmare programs that do the same thing but worse every 2-3 years. Eventually, enough dystopian nightmare programs will be running in parallel that they will actually create a utopia due to unexpected interactions between the dystopian nightmare programs.
- jnsie 4y agoKnowing google they'd have 6 competing dystopian nightmare programs running concurrently. All would have similar names.
- AyyWS 4y agoDystopio is signing off. Find your favorite features in the new Apocalypse Wow!
- sebzim4500 4y agoAnd only one of them would work in Singapore for some reason.
- uni_rule 4y agoUnexpected interactions with the river otters
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago>declining birth rate problem solved Or maybe it declines more rapidly? Women could just use the cycle prediction to avoid fun time on “risky” days.
- totetsu 4y agoOr conversely it increases unprotected fun on “non risky” days according to the apps.
- Tozen 4y agoNatural birth control methods, have been a thing, for a long time already.
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y agoBut they were far more prone to mishaps before a biological monitoring device started to aid in the calculations
- Tozen 4y agoNot really, if "it" goes into a non-reproductive location. No fancy technology required. It's not like such things were unknown, even in ancient times.
- akiselev 4y ago> declining birth rate problem solved! > I'm scared. That is one dystopia I might be able to live with. As long as the watches don't default to Harvey Fierstein.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Bakary 4y agoIt's not much scarier than encouraging fertility via the religious apparatus or just traditional social norms
- andywood 4y agoExactly. If your entire right hemisphere is permanently shut down from making computers the core of your identity, these are exactly the same thing.
- Bakary 4y agoWhat do you mean by that sentence?
- ravi-delia 4y agoI mean if you pay more attention to results than vibe, yeah they are. But you know, less coercive.
- ravi-delia 4y agoThis is like maybe the least dystopic use of advertising data Google could go for! It just has the vibe of dystopia, but ultimately if you hit it off with someone Google didn't influence you, they just made a correct prediction. Compared to advertising to influence you to spend money it's nothing.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoThere was a case where someone was getting ads for pregnancy products before she herself even knew she was pregnant, iirc it was down to search queries but don't quote me on that (or that the story is actually true).
- WaffleIronMaker 4y agoI remember this happening with Target in 2012 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoIt was the woman knew she was pregnant, but her father did not, which sounds a lot more reasonable than the algorithm knowing she was pregnant when she did not know.
- jollyllama 4y agoIt gets worse; to keep people in the workforce they can do the opposite, steer compatible people away from each other during the optimal reproductive window.
- Xeoncross 4y agoIt gets worse, it only steers over-performers and under-performers away from each other so that the majority middle-tier can be used for reproduction.
- bmn__ 4y ago"And here is the weirdest part — I never see another employee the entire day. The way it makes me walk, I never run into anyone else. I can go for a full shift and never see another employee. Even our breaks are staggered. Everyone takes their breaks alone. We all arrive at staggered times. It’s like Manna is trying to totally eliminate human interaction on the job." – Marshall Brain, "Manna" (2007) <https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1>
- tut-urut-utut 4y ago> Sync that up with Apple Watch 8's ability to estimate ovulation, and poof, declining birth rate problem solved! Will never happen. Children are expensive, and once you have them, you'll never ever again be able to afford most of the Apple products. Obviously, the incentive for Apple (and Google) is that you don't have children, which can explain the low birth rates in developed (rich) markets. > I'm scared. Now I'm also scared.
- zasdffaa 4y agoThe author chose to use google tech and let it capture everything. She chose to. She let it happen. If you don't want that, you can choose not to like I do. But the great majority of you will choose (by omission) because it's easier, then complain about it. Every time you'll do what's easy, and encourage the surveillance society you pretend to despise.
- badwolf 4y agoSomewhat related, I had high hopes for Facebook Dating to be a great product and a dating site/app disruptor. FB has all that data, why not use it to play matchmaker? Unfortunately, like many other Facebook ventures, it's nothing as expected, and is just a "Here's people in your area. Kind of. Sometimes."
- lmm 4y agoFacebook once started showing me a whole lot of updates from one particular friend-of-friend for a few weeks, to the point that I wondered if it was trying to hook us up.
- zo1 4y agoThey probably aren't allowed to use that data. Something something privacy. And imagine the uproar from privacy fear mongerers if Facebook tried to make such a product. That is why we can't explore things that we "might" consider nice. A product that might have been.
- fy20 4y agoThere is nothing wrong with using whatever data for matching as long as it is specified in the terms the user agrees to by signing up for Facebook Dating. Privacy laws prevent you from using data for other purposes or selling it to third parties. Most likely they tried this and realised the results are biased. Imagine what data Facebook has about you, they know you live in X1 city, have visited X2 & X3 places recently, have attended X4 & X5 events, have interacted with X6 & X7 pages. Then if they try and match you with other people who have similar profiles, we get headlines such as "Facebook Dating only matches <insert minority> people with other <insert minority> people" as it's biases on hyper-local location. Using other data such as "Person A likes band Y, we will only match them with other people who like that band too!" doesn't really make sense, as that isn't a requirement to have a good relationship... Unless by liking a band page, you really mean "I religiously go to every concert and could not date a person who does not also do that". So they might as well just do the same as Tinder / Bumble / etc and show anyone within X miles of your location. The only advantage they really have is your friends circle, so they could use that to suggest friends of friends (of friends?), but I imagine that would quickly be exhausted if they only displayed matches from that.
- nova22033 4y agoThis is plot of a Black Mirror episode...sort of..
- shagie 4y agoHow about an old DUST short? A Date in 2025 https://youtu.be/NZ8G3e3Cgl4 https://youtu.be/NZ8G3e3Cgl4
- newZWhoDis 4y agoWest world season 3 in a nutshell. It’s definitely going to happen some day.
- simooooo 4y agoAlso a great way to find all their past relationships
- dqpb 4y agoUntil one of them inadvertently triggers a TOS violation, at which point it will orchestrate their breakup and then deactivate their Google accounts.
- muzani 4y agoMeanwhile, Facebook matches people to those they're unattracted to, despite having all the attraction data. Except for the occasional moment that someone reads a WhatsApp story from someone they haven't seen in years, and then FB spams their feed with each other.
- WaitWaitWha 4y agoWait, wait... Throw in Google Maps re-routing and you have a dystopian movie. (It is talked about that Google Map re-routes to odd paths to check if the path is still open.)
- andywood 4y ago
- nonrandomstring 4y agoOhh my poor Cassandra. Prophecy and foresight are so cheap. Everyone already knows where we are heading, even those in the deepest denial. The Gods only stipulated that nobody would believe you. For what is to be done, belief is maybe not so important.
- andywood 4y agoTrue words.
- bitL 4y agoCare to leave another prophecy we can check in a decade before you go please?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andywood 4y ago10 years from now I live in a farming community, most of you have cel phones in your heads and live in panopticon minority-report smart cities pre-policed by AI, many of your relatives live in a bed, and every last one of us believes in God. And now to scramble the pw to this account as well. That's it for me. No more socks left.
- bombcar 4y agoIt's a funny "joke" but for a large percentage of people, their college decision and entrance exams were the determining factor in who they married; where you put yourself has a huge effect on whom you meet.
- gumby 4y agoIt's funny how predictive that is. There was a woman in the dorm we'd lived in -- we were definitely not friends but knew each other. A few years after graduation we ran into each other at a party on the opposite coast...and ended up together for a few years.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI mean I moved out of my hometown with that - meeting people - as an additional objective. It didn't work relationship wise (I ended up with someone I met online over a shared hobby / community), but it was an interesting experiment I guess. I like to think I ended up a bit more worldly, a bit more resilient to social situations and dealing with people very different from me personality wise.
- aloner 4y agoGoing to an engineering college where the demographic was 99% male, I guess I was determined to finish alone ;). But honestly 100% agreed with your point, even with online dating, a lot of people end up dating people they know or people they meet through a common friend.
- tshaddox 4y agoAnd ironically, if you met your partner on a dating app in a large city or metro area, your dating encounters were ostensibly under direct influence by a tech company’s algorithm, yet you were likely in a pool vastly larger than a college campus.
- Bakary 4y agoThe thing is if it's not the college decision it'll be something equally as random and trivial. 99% of what we do is just bumping atoms against atoms in a soup of probability.
- arethuza 4y agoThat reminds me of the GCU Arbitrary from the Culture novella The State of the Art - which liked to matchmake its crew members.
- Demoneeri 4y agoLol Google Assistant can't even tell me what I ordered despite having all the emails in Gmail.
- Tozen 4y agoThey probably know, just don't want to share the information with you. There are other higher paying customers to give it to.
- vardump 4y agoHmm... something like this? Maybe this video left out the brainwashing part. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU (Google's famous ad, "Parisian Love", worth watching for those who haven't seen it yet)
- incahoots 4y agooh, oh god. they warned us this could happen.
- netsharc 4y agoI've had in my mind an idea for a short story based on this idea. YouTube starts putting a particular band on their "watch next" list, then the band schedules a gig in town, ensuring that they both think "Wow, I have to go!"
- Tozen 4y agoExcellent scenario. Except that a lot of the "algorithmic nudging", can be unethically intended by the creators of the algorithm or specifically tweaked/ overridden by humans in the chain to give the results they wanted. After all, "who" is in charge or has access to the data? Maybe even an unknown individual or group, with their own agenda, and outside of Google's stated corporate goals or awareness.
- jffry 4y agoTangentially: I've read a sci-fi short story in some anthology in the past 10ish years, from the perspective of an AI that gains sentience, hides its existence, but uses its powers for good to nudge people in better directions. Things like timing when push notifications arrive on their phones or what gets highlighted in their newsfeeds - small interventions in their digital lives. I have no idea the name of the story or its author but it was a nice hopeful take where machine intelligence doesn't decide to enslave or destroy humanity.
- Arcorann 4y agoYou might be thinking of "Cat Pictures Please" by Naomi Kritzer, which can be found online at Clarkesworld: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/ http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/
- jffry 4y agoYes, that's it! Thanks for the link.
- RheingoldRiver 4y agoThere are two novel spinoffs of it as well now. Catfishing on CatNet is the first one and Chaos on CatNet is its sequel. They're pretty cute.
- thimkerbell 4y agoWho is researching to find what's already being done? Particularly the truly dystopian applications.
- Tozen 4y agoUnfortunately, the real life version is likely to be a corrupt hidden group or organization who have placed themselves above or are circumventing the law, that uses AI and their power to do damage to the lives of others.