Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine

by Hannah Fry

It’s what led to the intriguing shopping suggestion that confronted Reddit user Kerbobotat after buying a baseball bat on Amazon: ‘Perhaps you’ll be interested in this balaclava?’11

...welcome to your dystopian future. X

From there it was simple. Target ran an algorithm that would score its female customers on the likelihood they were pregnant. If that probability tipped past a certain threshold, the retailer would automatically send out a series of coupons to the woman in question, full of things she might find useful: nappies, lotions, baby wipes and so on.

It happens because humans’ senses work in relative terms rather than in absolute values. We don’t perceive each year as a fixed period of time; we experience each new year as a smaller and smaller fraction of the life we’ve lived.

Others still, Immanuel Kant among them, have said the truth is something in between. That our judgements of beauty are not wholly subjective, nor can they be entirely objective. They are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once – and, crucially, can change over time depending on the state of mind of the observer.