Patrick Tucker - The Naked Future What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move

IMAGINE waking up tomorrow to discover your new top-of-the-line smartphone, the device you use to coordinate all your calls and appointments, has sent you a text. It reads:

Today is Monday and you are probably going to work. So have a great day at work today!Sincerely, Phone.

Would you be alarmed? Perhaps at first. But there would be no mystery where the data came from. Its mostly information that you know youve given to your phone.

Now consider how you would feel if you woke up tomorrow and your new phone predicted a much more seemingly random occurrence:

Good morning! Today, as you leave work, you will run into your old girlfriend Vanessa (you dated her eleven years ago), and she is going to tell you that she is getting married. Do try to act surprised!

What conclusion could you draw from this but that someone has been stalking your Facebook profile and knows you have an old girlfriend named Vanessa? And that this someone has probably been stalking her profile as well and spotted her engagement announcement. Now this ghoul has hacked your calendars and your phone!

Unsure what to do, lets say you ignore it for the time being. But then, as youre leaving work, the prophecy holds true and you pass Vanessa on the sidewalk. Remembering the text from that morning, you congratulate her on the engagement. Her mouth drops and her eyes widen with alarm.

How did you know I was engaged? she asks.

Youre about to say, My phone sent me a text, but you stop yourself just in time.

Didnt you post something to your Facebook profile? you ask.

Not yet, she answers and walks hurriedly away.

You should have paid attention to your phone and just acted surprised.

This scenario is closer to reality than you might think. In fact, the technology and data already exist to make it happen. We give it away to retailers, phone companies, the government, social networks, and especially our own phones without realizing it. In the next few years that data will become more useful to more people. This is what I call the naked future.

The capital-F Future was born of the Enlightenment-era notion of progress, the idea that the presentin the form of institutions, products, fashions, tastes, and modes of lifecan and must be continually reformed and improved. This is why our interaction with the future as groups and as nations is an expression of both personal and national identity. As a public idea, the future shapes buying, voting, and social behavior. The future is an improved present, safer, more convenient, better managed through the wonders of technology and invention.

But the futurein the form of intentionis also an incredibly private idea. Your future, whether its what youre going to do tonight, next year, or the next time youve got a thousand bucks to burn, is invisible to everyone but you. We are jealous guards of the personal, secret future, and with good reason. Imagine if any act you were going to commit was laid bare before the world, how naked you would feel.

In the next two decades, we will be able to predict huge areas of the future with far greater accuracy than ever before in human history, including events long thought to be beyond the realm of human inference. The rate by which we can extrapolate meaningful patterns from the data of the present is quickening as rapidly as is the spread of the Internet because the two are inexorably linked. The Internet is turning prediction into an equation. Mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, marketers, and hackers are using a global network of sensors, software programs, information collection devices, and apps to reveal in ever-greater detail the effects of our perpetual reform on the world around us. From programs that chart potential flu outbreaks to expensive (yet imperfect) quant algorithms that anticipate bursts of stock-market volatility, computer-aided prediction is everywhere.

Between November 2010 and February 2013, the number of queries related to the term big data jumped by a factor of twenty-nine. That means that if big data were a country that grew every time someone searched for it on Google, it would be the size of the United Kingdom in 2010 and the size of Australia just three years later. Its a hot topic, but its also a phrase that means something different depending on who is trying to sell you what. A couple of years ago, the term referred to data sets so large that the owners of those sets couldnt derive any insight from them. Big data was a euphemism for unstructured and unworkable bits of information locked away in servers, or worse, on paper. This quality of bigness made those little values on spreadsheets effectively valueless. No more. Go to any IT conference today and youll find rooms full of vendors so eager to work with your big data they will be unable to refrain from shoving flash drives into your pockets. Large companies and the government now work with big data all the time.

On February 16, 2012, the phrase big data made an evolutionary leap with the publication of a piece by Charles Duhigg in the New York Times. The article exposed how the retail chain Target used records of millions of transactions (and information from its baby registry) to draw a corollary between the purchase of various common items such as unscented baby lotion and pregnancy. When Target began sending coupons for baby supplies to customers who it had statistically deduced were in a family way, one customers father had a fit, demanded an explanation, and realized that a soulless company with a lot of records had discovered something extremely intimate about his daughter before she had had a chance to break the news to him. The story was picked up on The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, and was repeated on blogs and news stories around the world. Big data went from a boring business idea to a menacing force for evil. It was a secret statistical prescient power that enormous institutions used against the rest of us. The