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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.
Great teachers have a knack for conveying unsavory packages to the unwilling in a way that does not scare them off; great filters can too.
The company talks about increasing the satisfaction of members, but a fair guess is that it is filtering your news stream to optimize the amount of time you spend on Facebook—a much easier thing to measure than your happiness. But that may not be what you want to optimize Facebook for.
Amazon uses filters to optimize for maximum sales, and that includes filtering the content on the pages you see. Not
like to book inexpensive hostels when I travel on vacation, but with a private bath, maximum bandwidth, and always in the oldest
Albert always gets the coolest stuff because I’ve trained him really well. Ever since high school I would spend at least 10 minutes every day correcting his selections and adding obscure influences, really tuning the filters, so that by now, with all the new AI algos and the friends of friends of friends’ scores, I have the most amazing channel. I have a lot of people who follow my Albert daily. I am at the top of the leaderboard for the VR worlds filter.
We are still at the early stages in how and what we filter. These powerful computational technologies can be—and will be—applied to the internet of everything.
In the next 30 years the entire cloud will be filtered, elevating the degree of personalization.
Filtering is a type of censoring, and vice versa. Governments can implement nationwide filters to remove unwanted political ideas and restrict speech.
they usually don’t disclose what they ...
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But even in benign filtering, by design we see only a tiny fraction of all there is to see.
curse of the postscarcity world:
We can connect to only a thin thread of...
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widen the sky of possibilities anothe...
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each day wider filters are needed to access this abundan...
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be remedied only by applying countervailing filters upon it.
Way back in 1971 Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning social scientist, observed, “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.
Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
“In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is h...
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Our attention is the only valuable resource we personally produ...
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wherever attention flows, money will follow.
The estimated average CPM of various media platforms ranges widely. Cheap outdoor billboards average $3.50, TV is $7, magazines earn $14, and newspapers $32.50.
In the coming two decades the challenge and opportunity is to harness filtering technologies to cultivate higher quality attention at scale.
Their AIs seek the optimal ad at the optimal time in the optimal place and the optimal frequency with the optimal way to respond.
It represents an ecosystem of filterings, which have consequences beyond just advertising. Anyone can sign up to be
We are at a threshold of a Cambrian explosion in attention technology, as novel and outlandish versions of attention and filtering are given a try.
attention-focusing ads as they might spend on finding news articles. However, wildly popular ads may not pay
So there will be a trade-off between cool-looking ads
that make no money versus square but pr...
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There are websites today that feature only movie trailers or great commercials, but they don’t earn anything from the sources for hosting them. Soon enough they
Like Uber and other decentralized systems, it takes what was once a highly refined job performed by a few professionals and spreads it across a peer-to-peer network of amateurs. No advertising professional in 2016 believes it could work, and even reasonable people think it sounds crazy, but one thing we know about the last 30 years is that seemingly impossible things can be accomplished by peers of amateurs when connected smartly.
Our brains were not evolved to deal with zillions. This realm is beyond our natural capabilities, and so we have to rely on our machines to interface with it. We need a real-time system of filters upon filters in order to operate in the explosion of options we have created.
Personal coaches dispensing intensely personal attention for a very bodily experience are among the fastest growing occupations.
The funny thing about a whole class of technology that enhances experience and personalization is that it puts great pressure on us to know who we are.
Footnotes, invented in about the 12th century, allow tangential information to be displayed outside the linear argument of the main text.
And bibliographic citations (invented in the 13th century) enable scholars and skeptics to systematically consult sources that influence or clarify the content. Imagine a video with citations.
then the new media fluency means being able to parse and manipulate moving images with the same ease.
holy grail of visuality is findability—the ability to
search the library of all movies the same way Google can search the web, and find a particular focus deep within.
Perceiving movies takes a lot more processing power, in part because there is the added dimension of time (do objects persist as the camera moves?).
The genius of Wikipedia is that it also employs nondestructive editing—all previous versions of an article are kept forever, so any reader can in fact rewind the changes back in time. This “redo” function encourages creativity.
The entire global economy is tipping away from the material and toward intangible bits. It is moving away from ownership and toward access. It is tilting away from the value of copies and toward the value of networks. It is headed for the inevitability of constant, relentless, and increasing remixing. The laws will be slow to follow, but they will follow.
The more powerful the invention or creation, the more likely and more important it is that it will be transformed by others.
There was general consensus that we’d use our whole bodies and all our senses to communicate with our machines. We’d add Africa by standing instead of sitting.
We think different on our
The more interactive it is, the more it should sound and feel beautiful.
Computers have been on a steady march toward
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College, in Texas, invented a supersmart wearable vest that translates one sense into another. The Sensory Substitution Vest takes audio from tiny microphones in the vest and translates those sound waves into a grid of vibrations that can be felt by a deaf person wearing it. Over a matter of months, the deaf person’s brain reconfigures itself to “hear” the vest vibrations as sound, so by wearing this interacting cloth, the deaf can hear.
When the balance between an ordained narrative and freewill interaction is tweaked just right, it creates
the perception of great “game play”—a sweet feeling of being part of something large that is moving forward (the game’s narrative) while you still get to steer (the game’s play).
