One set of data to rule them all
A look of panic sets across Sheela’s eyes. Her little sister is attempting to put her rainbow shoes on. Sure, Sheela wasn’t using them and wasn’t planning to. But the thought of her sister putting them on is simply unbearable. This must be stopped.
Sheela starts with an innocent question,
“Sonia, those are my shoes. Can you please put them back?”
Couple points of context on Sonia.
Putting on shoes is one of her favorite activities. She loves the feeling of accomplishing a “big-kid task” and will spend 30 minutes taking them on and off. (In case you’re wondering, she does have toys she can play with).
She is single-minded. When she wants to do something, there’s nothing you can say or do to stop her. (In case you’re wondering, I know this very well from personal experience.)
Back to the story. Sonia continues putting the left shoe on, pulling aggressively instead of opening the flap further. She quietly replies, “No.” and finishes strapping the left shoe. Onto the right.
Sheela looks to me for help, but she knows she’s not getting it. (My rule to Sheela: If neither of you can get hurt, solve the problem yourselves).
I watch Sheela as the gears in her head start working in overdrive. She’s wracking her brain to find any way to stop this. She knows resistance is futile and she has to find something Sonia wants more. It couldn’t have been more than a couple seconds, but each moment stretched with the tension of Sonia’s progress.
Finally, Sheela’s memory bank serves up a solution. If there’s one thing even better than putting on other people’s shoes for Sonia, it’s putting on her sandals. Sonia loves her sandals more than anyone else’s shoes. Sheela confidently walks past Sonia, announcing as she strolls by, “I’m putting on SANDALS!”
Sonia stops, her head jerking up. She watches Sheela with the narrow eyes of a bird of prey. Sonia sees this isn't an empty statement. She watches as Sheela makes her way to the sandals. She gives one more look at the rainbow shoes that are almost on and makes her decision. She throws her shoes off, gets up, and starts running to get her sandals.
A couple minutes later, Sonia walks into the room with her sandals on, smiling. Looking past her, I see Sheela appearing as a devil on Sonia's shoulder, much like those pictures of the Taj Mahal in tourists' fingers. Sheela smiles triumphantly as she puts her rainbow shoes away.
Sometimes, we feel like we’ve made a choice.
Sometimes, we feel like we’ve made a choice.
Does the distinction matter?
June 2017
“Everything is going according to plan.”
The men and women in the room looked at the printouts in front of them, a compilation of news reports from the last month.
The most presidential moments…
Why People Can’t Stop Talking About…2020
The marketing savvy in…tour of Average America
Mark sat back in his chair with a look of satisfaction painted across his face. The first big win for big data. Machine learning. Artificial intelligence. To most of the world, they were a set of buzzwords. Not here. It was true, the hype outstripped reality at this point. But this was a sign of the potential.
Of course, this was only the first battle in what would be a long war. But important nonetheless. Mark knew he had image issues – he was too young, too robotic, too distant, too powerful. He didn’t need billions of data points and a team of the world’s most highly-paid computer scientists to tell him that. The real question was how to fix it? How to increase his likability? How to make him electable?
The plan had sounded far-fetched when he first saw the output from the algorithms. A tour across America? Obama’s photographer on tow? Red and blue counties? Learning about the opioid crisis? This was not a case study in subtlety. But the data spoke without reservation: subtlety is overrated. Sometimes, hitting the nail right on the head is exactly what the doctor ordered. As expected, the media coverage spent more time debating the reality of Mark’s Presidential aspirations and his vocal denials. Still, he was being covered in a new light. He was being seen in a new light. And by doing so three years before an election, he had enough time to let the self-aggrandizing elements of the tour fade while his humanity remained. Exactly as the algorithms had predicted. Billions of data points – every like, comment, movement on the Web…analyzed with a purpose. The privacy proponents worried about influencing purchasing habits. They focused on bullets while an atomic bomb was built under their noses.
Mark looked around the table at the people surrounding him.
“We’re on track for 2020. We’ll be ready to take on the Democratic establishment. Use the philanthropy mechanism to continue the efforts. Tread carefully around the criticism – we don’t want them to realize we’ve taken over the world until it’s happened.”
October 2019
“We have to reprogram the code. This isn’t working.”
He turned off the TV in disgust, tossing the remote onto the couch. Everyone had known the risk of having him testify. Despite the preparations, Mark’s demeanor had never been well-suited to a courtroom spectacle. Still, this had gone even worse than expected. The performance was abysmal. Any thought of a 2020 run was now definitely off the table. Everyone from first-time Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to longtime Congressman Brad Sherman had excoriated him in front of a national audience.
With a heavy sigh of relief, Mark looked around the room to see who would speak up first. The stench of fear in the room was heavy, so much so that he wondered if anyone would have the courage to speak. Finally, one of his underlings piped in with an attempt at reassurance.
“This will wear off. It just means we’ll have to wait till 2024.”
All Mark could do was smirk. Maybe. Maybe not. This type of vitriol usually had staying power, especially if it were to get a lot of play in an election cycle. With the Sanders & Warren-led radical element of the party attacking on one front, it seemed logical that the party was vulnerable to attack from the other front – the centrist, libertarian outsider. The algorithms had given good probabilities for the campaign’s success. But the Democratic establishment was proving to be more resistant than he’d expected.
Mark looked around,
“There’s something we’re not seeing in the data.”
A programmer looked up from the corner of the room. One who usually didn’t speak unless spoken to. At this moment, he had something to say,
“What if we’re chasing the wrong color?”
Looks of confusion greeted him around the room, except for Mark himself, who had a look of deep contemplation.
“Say more.”
The programmer shifted to the edge of his chair, his knee bouncing with the frenetic energy of a pogo stick.
“What if we optimize for red, not blue? We’ve deliberately not affiliated with a political party. We know the Republicans have already voted for an outsider. Sure, we’ll have to wait till 2024, but at this point, we have to do that either way.”
It was brilliant. This is why he needed more than just sycophants in the room.
“Change the optimization parameters from Democratic majority to Republican.”
The confusion had not yet left the faces of others in the room. One of them spoke hesitantly,
“Umm…a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur? Didn’t Peter Thiel already try that?”
They just don’t get it. We should have known better than to think our intuitions could guide the data. Mark knew that, eventually, he would have to leave even the parameter definition to the algorithms. They had made a careless mistake assuming that the path to power was through the left. The right was looking for a change, too.
“Um, there’s more work to do this fully, but at a cursory look, it looks like we’re getting 92.7% probability for 2024. Here are the recommended strategies…”
June 2020
“Don’t worry. It’s too little, too late.”
Mark knew better than to trust the words of people who were paid to tell him what he wanted to hear. He reviewed the coverage himself.
Tech executives speaking out against Facebook. An employee quitting. Concerned scientists, funded through our very own philanthropy. If he had been more naïve, he might have been worried. But this time, his worker was right. It was too little, too late.
The reality was these people were still trapped in a 20th-century mindset. They were trying to convince individuals. He was influencing the collective. They were trying to get out voters. He was maximizing probabilities, even if it meant lower turnout. The algorithms were getting stronger, enhanced by continually improved processing power and billions of additional data points each day. Each decision, each statement to employees, each appearance, made with all the data at hand. 2020 was a Trojan horse; the true power of the work would come to the forefront in 2024. For a smarter being that knows each individual better than they know themselves, individual resistance is futile. Every day, he was getting closer to becoming that being.
An hour later, the girls have gone through three different games. Follow the leader. A dance party. Elefun. They came down the stairs with their play phones, pretending to call relatives. As she reaches the bottom step, Sonia's eyes light up as she catches a glimpse of Sheela’s rainbow shoes in the corner.
In an instant, Sonia remembers everything. Her original goal. The last hour of distraction. She throws her phone aside and plops down on the ground, pulling her sandals off with reckless abandon.
Sheela looks back when she gets to the kitchen to realize her sister is no longer behind her. Sheela sees her sister taking her sandals off and realizes the jig is up. She starts running towards Sonia, the gears in her head cranking again as she thinks of her next plan to stop Sonia.
With her sandals off, Sonia starts walking to the rainbow shoes.