The verge of suggestions/recommendations engines

I have come early from office today and would be watching my next new series from my recommendation list. I hope I would definitely like it as it is based on my behavioral patterns from my earlier watches.

I thought of buying a new home for me. I would visit a real estate site that runs on machine learning and gives you recommendations based on your web history or your search preferences.

In most of the cases, you would always follow the suggestions/recommendations given by the site or the app which claims that it uses niche machine learning algorithms to fine tune the results based on your behavior. In some cases, you don’t have enough time to go through all the available options and just uses the shortcut to find the best fit for you through the recommendations provided.

What is the point exactly?

Have you ever thought, as a human being that you are missing the element of surprise because of choosing from a pool of suggestions that comes from your past?

Have you ever thought that you are unconsciously being inhibited to think out of the box, given you have lots of suggestions pouring in from everywhere?

This is the point I am trying to make here. Not just machines, machine learning and deep learning are together making you lazy and trying to keep you in the comfort zone always.

What is about to happen?

I wanted to coin a term called “the smartness” here which collectively refers to the intelligent algorithms(ML,deep learning etc.,) and their makers and employers(companies).

Nowadays everything around you is quite smart to make you as lazy as possible. This smartness constantly observes your behavior to give you the best suggestions possible in various ways like personal assistance, shopping assistance, driving assistance, fitness assistance and what not, every possible assistant imaginable.

They altogether are trying to create your own personal space of interests. The interests we are talking about may not be your real interests but you still want to check them as they are easily available without a click and your not inherently opposed to them. As the days move on, they will become usual and you may start to like them or use them in your daily life. Hence machines are slowly influencing your area of interest. In other words, it is as simple as a situation between a actor/actress and his/her fan. Once a person starts to like an actor/actress due to whatever bloody reason, he would start to find the happiness and goodness in his/her films until a day he/she realizes that their acting is really bad. But AI behind this and is smart enough to handle these kind of situations too.

Why do they do it?

While most of us are trapped in their own artificially created crater defined by a coordinated group of machines. Now, the machines can visualize the world in a slightly different perspective i.e as clusters of humans with a specific behavioral profile but not as billions of humans with billions of unique behavioral profiles. By attracting people to particular behavioral profile, the machines are segregating all the humans with virtual boundaries. Did you even notice this? They are simplifying the world to make their calculations easy.

Upcoming generations?

A child starts his day with videos from an online video streaming site and going through all the recommendations and build a mindset as per it. Hence the biggest market players are creating and etching the minds of the next generation of people. We are all aware how hard is to come out of a childhood habit and even harder to realize it until the day you took a very strong blow. By this,they are basically programming and hardwiring certain things in their brain. The sad part is the next generation wouldn’t be able to even recognize this as this is the case with everyone around. The whole generation’s mind is set during their evolution towards something these market players are plotting to.

The algorithms nowadays are capable enough to identify human behaviors by following their online activities with almost cent percent certainty and were able to estimate to whom they are going vote in the upcoming election. We are glad we are not yet programmed since our childhood and everyone has their own unique mindset. But the next generation is going to be easier for the machines as they need not track their behaviors as they have already programmed them. The chances and efforts of someone realizing this and trying to come out of it is going to be 1 against million and they will be flagged anti social and can be easily neutralized.

Making business out of it

Do you think that we will be paying for only recommendations we get. We are about to pay for getting the surprises. The more you pay the bigger surprise you get and it is going to be the best business as we need everyday to be interesting. This is exactly like artificially creating demand and making us pay for it.

Does this really make sense?

Of course it is up to you to make sense of it. I am only trying to give pointers to initiate a thought process and be cognizant before being carried away by this absurd business model by “the smartness”.

I hope everyone is aware of the fact that most of the child prodigies never went to school and never was programmed by the way we were programmed in our schools which is why they are different and thinking out of the box while most of us not able to.