Книга: The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

The digital mirror

Take a moment to consider all the data about you that’s recorded on all the world’s computers: your e-mails, Office docs, texts, tweets, and Facebook and LinkedIn accounts; your web searches, clicks, downloads, and purchases; your credit, tax, phone, and health records; your Fitbit statistics; your driving as recorded by your car’s microprocessors; your wanderings as recorded by your cell phone; all the pictures of you ever taken; brief cameos on security cameras; your Google Glass snippets-and so on and so forth. If a future biographer had access to nothing but this “data exhaust” of yours, what picture of you would he form? Probably a quite accurate and detailed one in many ways, but also one where some essential things would be missing. Why did you, one beautiful day, decide to change careers? Could the biographer have predicted it ahead of time? What about that person you met one day and secretly never forgot? Could the biographer wind back through the found footage and say “Ah, there”?

The sobering (or perhaps reassuring) thought is that no learner in the world today has access to all this data (not even the NSA), and even if it did, it wouldn’t know how to turn it into a real likeness of you. But suppose you took all your data and gave it to the-real, future-Master Algorithm, already seeded with everything we could teach it about human life. It would learn a model of you, and you could carry that model in a thumb drive in your pocket, inspect it at will, and use it for everything you pleased. It would surely be a wonderful tool for introspection, like looking at yourself in the mirror, but it would be a digital mirror that showed not just your looks but all things observable about you-a mirror that could come alive and converse with you. What would you ask it? Some of the answers you might not like, but that would be all the more reason to ponder them. And some would give you new ideas, new directions. The Master Algorithm’s model of you might even help you become a better person.

Self-improvement aside, probably the first thing you’d want your model to do is negotiate the world on your behalf: let it loose in cyberspace, looking for all sorts of things for you. From all the world’s books, it would suggest a dozen you might want to read next, with more insight than Amazon could dream of. Likewise for movies, music, games, clothes, electronics-you name it. It would keep your refrigerator stocked at all times, natch. It would filter your e-mail, voice mail, Facebook posts, and Twitter feed and, when appropriate, reply on your behalf. It would take care of all the little annoyances of modern life for you, like checking credit-card bills, disputing improper charges, making arrangements, renewing subscriptions, and filling out tax returns. It would find a remedy for your ailment, run it by your doctor, and order it from Walgreens. It would bring interesting job opportunities to your attention, propose vacation spots, suggest which candidates to vote for on the ballot, and screen potential dates. And, after the match was made, it would team up with your date’s model to pick some restaurants you might both like. Which is where things start to get really interesting.

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