than recommendations from experts or friends. In fact, so many people find these filtered recommendations useful that these kinds of “more like this” offers are responsible for a third of Amazon sales—a difference amounting to about $30 billion in 2014. They are so valuable to Netflix that it has 300 people working on its recommendation system, with a budget of $150 million. There are of course no humans involved in guiding these filters once they are operational. The cognification is based on subtle details of my (and others’) behavior that only a sleepless obsessive machine might notice.
