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He’s smiling as if he’d like to pat me on the head. I ask, “What?” “It’s cute how you talk about this like it really happened and you’re trying to solve it, when you’re the one making it all up. You could have anything happen.” “I could,” I say. “But only one thing did.”
“In a way, the situation we’re facing here is more troubling than what’s happening in China.” He seems to be speaking unironically, so I say, “You’re forgetting the part about how there’s no authoritarian government telling us how to live our lives.” “There’s no need for that. Amazon tells us what we should buy and Netflix tells us what we should watch. These matchmakers, telling us who we should date. Except here we aren’t even aware of how we’re being directed.”
Our vendors’ algorithms preselect our choices and then tell us these are the things we want. Impossible to verify, since we can never know what they failed to show us, and so over time what they do present to us—what they want us to want—does indeed become what we want.
“The power to predict outcomes is inextricably linked to the power to control outcomes…and once you’ve achieved the former, it may be hard to resist trying the latter.”
“Consent is bullshit,” says Becks. “Ninety-nine percent of people have no idea what they’re agreeing to. The remaining one percent don’t like it but say yes anyway.”
“That’s a good one. You should put it on a T-shirt. Any deception was minimal.”
It wasn’t that humans were too sophisticated for the synths. In a way, they weren’t sophisticated enough. They misremembered and miscast events, they changed their minds and believed they had always held those opinions, they acted in ways contrary to their best interests, they had conflicting desires, they didn’t know what they wanted at all. “We realized that a good portion of human inconsistency was simply unverifiable.”
“You’re almost on time,” I say. “What happened?” “Pre–New Year’s resolution.” She dumps two bags of wrapped presents on the couch. “I don’t think I can keep this up. Punctuality is really tiring.”
