Honey, you don't understand me Im leaving you for my laptop

Do you recall the movie with Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson where the guy falls in love with his computer (HER, 2013)?  Or bicentennial man with Robin Williams where his AI robot character was with a family for multiple generations eventually asking to ‘live’ by being able to die?

There Scarlett is – I look like this in the morning too, when I’m shouting “GO BRUSH YOUR TEETH!”

There is an endless list of things that are being invented in technology these days, that even just a few years ago would have been impossible, but the stuff of films (and dreams!) is becoming more and more of a reality.

Who says love can’t be next? But in the meantime, it’s possibly a bit scarier…

Computers now are better able than your friends and family, at describing what you are like. And you will agree with the computer.

You may scoff and say “of course I can fill in a few forms and it can guess”, but the fact is that in today’s digital world, profiling you is about more than just a few forms or your CV. Computers are capable of collating data from multiple sources and on the back of it, being able to nail what you are like, better than you would expect your close friends and family to – and the implications are huge.

To start with let’s look at the source of this ground-breaking work. For those of you who are interested in start-ups around the world in multiple sectors funded by VC’s (those worth over $1bn on paper are described as ‘unicorns’ – and not the sort from my little pony….). There is a fantastic newsletter from a co called CB Insights. With light humour they’ll tell you about some of the weird and wonder ‘innovations’ coming into the commercial market with everything from smart home software to medical delivery devices.

From one of those I heard about a site called www.almetric.com, which here https://www.altmetric.com/top100/2015/ lists the top 100 academic research articles that caught the public eye in 2015 (i.e. in the whole world – what academic stuff caught our imagination). Here I read about the following;

I’d say that was significant

And taking text directly from the article it has implications for everyday life – like how we go about finding a job which is a pretty important thing for, well, pretty much everyone unless you own lots of google shares…

Copied text…

Automated, accurate, and cheap personality assessment tools could affect society in many ways: marketing messages could be tailored to users’ personalities; recruiters could better match candidates with jobs based on their personality; products and services could adjust their behavior to best match their users’ characters and changing moods; and scientists could collect personality data without burdening participants with lengthy questionnaires. Furthermore, in the future, people might abandon their own psychological judgments and rely on computers when making important life decisions, such as choosing activities, career paths, or even romantic partners. It is possible that such data-driven decisions will improve people’s lives.

However, knowledge of people’s personalities can also be used to manipulate and influence them. Understandably, people might distrust or reject digital technologies after realizing that their government, internet provider, web browser, online social network, or search engine can infer their personal characteristics more accurately than their closest family members. We hope that consumers, technology developers, and policy-makers will tackle those challenges by supporting privacy-protecting laws and technologies, and giving the users full control over their digital footprints.

Popular culture has depicted robots that surpass humans in making psychological inferences. In the film Her, for example, the main character falls in love with his operating system. By curating and analyzing his digital records, his computer can understand and respond to his thoughts and needs much better than other humans, including his long-term girlfriend and closest friends. Our research, along with development in robotics, provides empirical evidence that such a scenario is becoming increasingly likely as tools for digital assessment come to maturity. The ability to accurately assess psychological traits and states, using digital footprints of behavior, occupies an important milestone on the path toward more social human-computer interactions.

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So. Falling in love based on mutual interests and being understood? Not so weird. Having a future employer wanting to ensure you are ‘best matched’ to a role where even your best interview skills and embellishment can’t hide the real you? A Distinct possibility. It brings new meaning to the word privacy, which to a large extent, is down to us as individuals.

Technology is changing lives everyday. For better or worse (which is very much a personal view) there will be implications of our behaviours today that we can’t even comprehend will change our world in a few years time.

This is why I tell my kids not to post anything online ANYWHERE (instagram, dpop, ) unless they think their 25 year old self would be incredibly proud of it. Paranoid me? Nah…….

Get ‘with it’ or ‘get ‘owned’. Whatever that means…. And stick to loving humans.