We Are Data - The Future of Machine Intelligence - FT

22/7/2015 We are data: the future of machine intelligence - FT.
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July 16, 2015 1:53 pm
We are data: the future of machine intelligence

Douglas Coupland
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‘The internet is going to do to us whatever it is going to do — and it’s far too

late to stop it’
©Courtesy of The Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
Prints by Douglas Coupland. Acrylic on archival pigment print 49’x37’ (2014)
I look at apps like Grindr and Tinder and see how they’ve rewritten sex culture — by creating a
sexual landscape filled with vast amounts of incredibly graphic site-specific data — and I can’t
help but wonder why there isn’t an app out there that rewrites political culture in the same manner.
I don’t think there is. Therefore I’m inventing an app to do so and I’m calling it Wonkr — which
somehow seems appropriate for a politically geared app. I dropped the “e” to make it feel more
appy.
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22/7/2015 We are data: the future of machine intelligence - FT.com
What does Wonkr do? Primarily, you put Wonkr on your phone and it asks you a quick set of
questions about your beliefs. Then, the moment there are more than a few people around you (who
also have Wonkr), it tells you about the people you’re sharing the room with. You’ll be in a crowded
restaurant in Nashville and you can tell that 73 per cent of the room is Republican. Go into the
kitchen and you’ll see that it’s 84 per cent Democrat. You’ll be in an elevator in Manhattan and the
higher you go, the percentage of Democrats shrinks. Go to Germany — or France or anywhere, really
— and Wonkr adapts to local politics.
The thing to remember is: Wonkr only activates in crowds. If you’re at home alone, with the apps
switched off, nobody can tell anything about you. (But then maybe you want to leave it on . . . Many
political people are exhibitionists that way.)
Wonkr’s job is to tell you the political temperature of a busy space. “Am I among friends or
enemies?” But then you can easily change the radius of testability. Instead of just the room you’re
standing in, make it of the block or the whole city — or your country. Wonkr is a de facto polling
app. Pollsters are suddenly out of a job: Wonkr tells you — with astonishing accuracy — who
believes what, and where they do it.
 . . . 
Here’s an interesting fact about politics: people with specific beliefs only want to meet and hang out
with people who believe the same things as themselves. It’s like my parents and Fox News . . . it’s
impossible for me to imagine my parents ever saying, “What? You mean there are liberal folk nearby
us who have differing political opinions? Good Lord! Bring them to us now and let’s have a lively
and impartial dialogue, after which we all agree to cheerfully disagree . . . maybe we’ll even have our
beliefs changed!” When it comes to the sharing of an ethos, history shows us that the more irrational
a shared belief is, the better. (The underpinning maths of cultism is that when two people with self-
perceived marginalised views meet, they mutually reinforce these beliefs, ratcheting up the craziness
until you have a pair of full-blown nutcases.)
So back to Wonkr . . . Wonkr is a free app but why not help it by

paying say, 99 cents, to allow it to link you with people who
think just like you. Remember, to sign on to Wonkr you have to
take a relatively deep quiz. Maybe 155 questions, like the
astonishingly successful eHarmony.com. Dating algorithms tell
us that people who believe exactly the same things find each
other highly attractive in the long run. So have a coffee with
your Wonkr hook-up. For an extra 29 cents, you can watch
your chosen party’s attack ads together . . . How does Wonkr
ensure you’re not a trouble-seeking millennial posing as a
Marxist at a Ukip rally? Answer: build some feedback into the
app. If you get the impression there’s someone fishy nearby,
just tell Wonkr. After a few notifications, geospecific
algorithms will soon locate the imposter. It’s like Uber: you
rate them; they rate you. Easily fixed.
 . . . 
What we’re discussing here is the creation of data pools that,

until recently, have been extraordinarily difficult and
expensive to gather. However, sooner rather than later, we’ll all
be drowning in this sort of data. It will be collected voluntarily
in large doses (using the Wonkr, Tinder or Grindr model) — or
involuntarily or in passing through other kinds of data: your
visit to a Seattle pot store; your donation to the SPCA; the
turnstile you went through at a football match. Almost
anything can be converted into data — or metadata — which
can then be processed by machine intelligence. Quite
accurately, you could say, data + machine intelligence =
‘Let’s Get This Party Cranked Poolside Mama’
Artificial Intuition.
Artificial Intuition happens when a computer and its software look at data and analyse it using
computation that mimics human intuition at the deepest levels: language, hierarchical thinking —
even spiritual and religious thinking. The machines doing the thinking are deliberately designed to
replicate human neural networks, and connected together form even larger artificial neural
networks. It sounds scary . . . and maybe it is (or maybe it isn’t). But it’s happening now. In fact, it is
accelerating at an astonishing clip, and it’s the true and definite and undeniable human future.
 . . . 
So let’s go back to Wonkr.
How much data do I Wonkr may, in some simple senses, already exist. Amazon can tell if
generate just sitting you’re straight or gay within seven purchases. A few simple algorithms
here, doing nothing but applied to your everyday data (internet data alone, really) could
obviously discern your politics. From a political pollster’s perspective,
exist?
once you’ve been pegged, then you’re, well, pegged. At that point the only
Tweet this quote interest politicians might have in you is if you’re a swing voter.
Political data is valuable data, and at the moment it’s poorly gathered and not necessarily well
understood, and there’s not much out there that isn’t quickly obsolete. But with Wonkr, the
centuries-long, highly expensive political polling drought would be over and now there would be
LOADS of data. So then, why limit the app to politics? What’s to prevent Wonkr users from
overlapping their data with, for example, a religious group-sourcing app called Believr? With
Believr, the machine intelligence would be quite simple. What does a person believe in, if anything,
and how intensely do they do so? And again, what if you had an app that discerns a person’s hunger
for power within an organisation, let’s call it Hungr — behavioural data that can be cross-correlated
with Wonkr and Believr and Grindr and Tinder? Taken to its extreme, the entire family of belief
apps becomes the ultimate demographic Klondike of all time. What began as a cluster of mildly fun
apps becomes the future of crowd behaviour and individual behaviour.
 . . . 
Wonkr (and Believr and Hungr et al) are just imagined

examples of how Artificial Intuition can be enhanced and
accelerated to a degree that’s scientifically and medically
shocking. Yet this machine intelligence is already morphing,
and it’s not just something simple like Amazon suggesting
books you’d probably like based on the one you just bought
(suggestions that are often far better than the book you just
bought). Artificial Intuition systems already gently sway us in
whatever way they are programmed to do. Flying in coach not
business? You’re tall. Why not spend $29 on extra legroom?
Guess what — Jimmy Buffett has a cool new single out, and
you should see the Tommy Bahama shirt he wears on his
avatar photo. I’m sorry but that’s the third time you’ve
entered an incorrect password; I’m going to have to block
your IP address from now on — but to upgrade to a Dell ©Courtesy of The Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
friendly security system, just click on the smiley face to the ‘Gorgon HighTech Japanese Trendy Emo
right . . . And none of what you just read comes as any sort of Tomorrow Boy’
surprise. But 20 years ago it would have seemed futuristic,

implausible and in some way surmountable, because you, having character, would see these nudges
as the trivial commerce they are, and would be able to disregard them accordingly. What they never
could have told you 20 years ago, though, is how boring and intense and unrelenting this sort of
capitalist micro-assault is, from all directions at all waking moments, and how, 20 years later, it only
shows signs of getting much more intense, focused, targeted, unyielding and galactically more
boring. That’s the future and pausing to think about it makes us curl our toes into fists within our
shoes. It is going to happen. We are about to enter the Golden Age of Intuition and it is dreadful.
 . . . 
I sometimes wonder, How much data am I generating? Meaning: how much data do I generate just

sitting there in a chair, doing nothing except exist as a cell within any number of global spreadsheets
and also as a mineable nugget lodged within global memory storage systems — inside the Cloud, I
suppose. (Yay Cloud!)
Did I buy a plane ticket online today? Did I get a speeding ticket? Did my
You can still vanish
passport quietly expire? Am I unwittingly reading a statistically
in a windowless cabin
disproportionate number of articles on cancer? Is my favourite shirt
but the path to your
getting frayed and is it in possible need of replacement? Do I have a thing
shack will be on Google
Maps for short blondes? Is my grammar deteriorating in a way that suggests
certain subcategories of dementia?
Tweet this quote

In 1998, I wrote a book in which a character working for the Trojan
Nuclear Power Plant in Oregon is located using a “misspellcheck” programme that learnt how users
misspell words. It could tell my character if she needed to trim her fingernails or when she was
having her period, but it was also used down the road to track her down when she was typing online
at a café. I had an argument with an editor over that one: “This kind of program is simply not
possible. You can’t use it. You’ll just look stupid!” In 2015 you can probably buy a misspellcheck as a
49-cent app from iTunes . . . or upgrade to Misspellcheck Pro for another 99 cents.
What a strange world. It makes one long for the world before DNA and the internet, a world in
which people could genuinely vanish. The Unabomber — Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski — seems like a
poster boy for this strain of yearning. He had literally no data stream, save for his bombs and his
manifesto, which ended up being his undoing. How? He promised The New York Times and
Washington Post that he’d stop sending bombs if they would print his manifesto, which they did.
Then his brother recognised his writing style and turned him in to the FBI. Machine intelligence —
Artificial Intuition — steeped in deeply rooted language structures, would have found Kaczynski’s
writing style in under one-10th of a second.
Kaczynski really worked hard at vanishing but he got nabbed

in the 1990s before data exploded. If he existed today, could he
still exist? Could he unexist himself in 2015? You can still live
in a windowless cabin these days but you can’t do it
anonymously any more. Even the path to your shack would be
on Google Maps. (Look, you can see a stack of red plastic
kerosene cans from satellite view.) Your metadata stream
might be tiny but it would still exist in a way it never did in the
past. And don’t we all know vanished family members or
former friends who work hard so as to have no online
presence? That mode of self-concealment will be doomed soon
enough. Thank you, machine intelligence.
But wait. Why are we approaching data and metadata as

negative? Maybe metadata is good, and maybe it somehow
‘GTO Racer X I Love My Car GoBoy’
leads to a more focused existence. Maybe, in future, mega-
metadata will be our new frequent flyer points system. Endless linking and embedding can be
disguised as fun or practicality. Or loyalty. Or servitude.
Last winter, at a dinner, I sat across the table from the VP of North America’s second-largest loyalty
management firm (explain that term to Karl Marx), the head of their airline loyalty division. I asked
him what the best way to use points was. He said, “The one thing you never ever use points for is for
flying. Only a loser uses their miles on trips. It costs the company essentially nothing while it burns
off swathes of points. Use your points to buy stuff, and if there isn’t any stuff to buy,” (and there
often isn’t: it’s just barbecues, leather bags and crap jewellery) “then redeem miles for gift cards at
stores where they might sell stuff you want. But for God’s sake, don’t use them to fly. You might as
well flush those points down the toilet.”
Glad I asked.
And what will future loyalty data deliver to its donors, if not barbecues and Maui holidays? Access to
the business-class internet? Prescription medicines made in Europe not in China? Maybe points
could count towards community service duty?
 . . . 
Who would these new near-future entities be that want all of your
It may simply be too
late now to change the metadata anyway? You could say corporations. We’ve now all learnt to
reflexively think of corporations when thinking of anything sinister but
future
the term “corporation” now feels slightly Adbustery and unequipped to
Tweet this quote handle 21st-century corporate weirdness. Let’s use the term “Cheney”
instead of “corporation”. There are lots of Cheneys out there and they are
all going to want your data, whatever their use for it. Assuming these Cheneys don’t have the heart
to actually kill or incarcerate you in order to garner your data, how will they collect it, even if only
semi-voluntarily? How might a Cheney make people jump on to your loyalty programme (data
aggregation in disguise) instead of viewing it with suspicion?
Here’s an idea: what if metadata collection was changed from something spooky into something
actually desirable and voluntary? How could you do that and what would it be? So right here I’m
inventing the metadata version of Wonkr, and I’m going to give it an idiotic name: Freedom Points.
What are Freedom Points? Every time you generate data, in whatever form, you accrue more
Freedom Points. Some data is more valuable than other, so points would be ranked accordingly: a
trip to Moscow, say, would be worth a million times more points than your trip to the 7-Eleven.
Well then, what do Freedom Points allow you to do? They

would allow you to exercise your freedom, your rights and your
citizenship in fresh modern ways: points could allow you to
bring extra assault rifles to dinner at your local Olive Garden
restaurant. A certain number of Freedom Points would allow
you to erase portions of your criminal record — or you could
use Freedom Points to remove hours from your community
service. And as Freedom Points are about mega-capitalism,
everyone is involved, even the corn industry — especially the
corn industry. Big Corn. Big Genetically Modified corn. Use
your Freedom Points that earn discount visits to Type 2
diabetes management retreats.
The thing about Freedom Points is that if you think about them ©Courtesy of The Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
for more than 12 seconds, you realise they have the magic ring ‘She’s Like Mentos Dropped Into Diet Coke When
of inevitability. The idea is basically too dumb to fail. The She Knows What She Wants’
larger picture is that you have to keep generating more and more and more data in order to embed
yourself ever more deeply into the global community. In a bold new equation, more data would
convert into more personal freedom.
 . . . 
At the moment, Artificial Intuition is just you and the Cloud doing a little dance with a few simple
algorithms. But everyone’s dance with the Cloud will shortly be happening together in a cosmic
cyber ballroom, and everyone’s data stream will be communicating with everyone else’s and they’ll
be talking about you: what did you buy today? What did you drink, ingest, excrete, inhale, view,
unfriend, read, lean towards, reject, talk to, smile at, get nostalgic about, get angry about, link to,
like or get off on? Tie these quotidian data hits within the longer time framework matrices of Wonkr,
Believr, Grindr, Tinder et al, and suddenly you as a person, and you as a group of people, become
something that’s humblingly easy to predict, please, anticipate, forecast and replicate. Tie this new
machine intelligence realm in with some smart 3D graphics that have captured your body metrics
and likeness, and a few years down the road you become sort of beside the point. There will, at some
point, be a dematerialised, duplicate you. While this seems sort of horrifying in a Stepford Wife-y
kind of way, the difference is that instead of killing you, your replicant meta-entity, your synthetic
doppelgänger will merely try to convince you to buy a piqué-knit polo shirt in tones flattering to
your skin at Abercrombie & Fitch.
 . . . 
This all presupposes the rise of machine intelligence wholly under the
Everyone wants
access to and control aegis of capitalism. But what if the rise of Artificial Intuition instead
over what we will all blossoms under the aegis of theology or political ideology? With politics
become, both as we can see an interesting scenario developing in Europe, where Google is
physical and metadata by far the dominant search engine. What is interesting there is that
people are perfectly free to use Yahoo or Bing yet they choose to stick
entities
with Google and then they get worried about Google having too much
Tweet this quote power — which is an unusual relationship dynamic, like an old married
couple. Maybe Google could be carved up into baby Googles? But no.
How do you break apart a search engine? AT&T was broken into seven more or less regional entities
in 1982 but you can’t really do that with a search engine. Germany gets gaming? France gets porn?
Holland gets commerce? It’s not a pie that can be sliced.
The time to fix this data search inequity isn’t right now, either. The time to fix this problem was 20
years ago, and the only country that got it right was China, which now has its own search engine and
social networking systems. But were the British or Spanish governments — or any other government
— to say, “OK, we’re making our own proprietary national search engine”, that would somehow be
far scarier than having a private company running things. (If you want paranoia, let your
government control what you can and can’t access — which is what you basically have in China.
Irony!)
The tendency in theocracies would almost invariably be one of

intense censorship, extreme limitations of access, as well as
machine intelligence endlessly scouring its system in search of
apostasy and dissent. The Americans, on the other hand, are
desperately trying to implement a two-tiered system to
monetise information in the same way they’ve monetised
medicine, agriculture, food and criminality. One almost gets
misty-eyed looking at North Koreans who, if nothing else, have
yet to have their neurons reconfigured, thus turning them into
a nation of click junkies. But even if they did have an internet,
it would have only one site to visit, and its name would be
gloriousleader.nk.
 . . . 
To summarise. Everyone, basically, wants access to and control ‘She’ll Make You Try Things You Never Even

Knew Existed’
over what you will become, both as a physical and metadata
entity. We are also on our way to a world of concrete walls surrounding any number of niche beliefs.
On our journey, we get to watch machine intelligence become profoundly more intelligent while, as
a society, we get to watch one labour category after another be systematically burped out of the
labour pool. (Doug’s Law: An app is only successful if it puts a lot of people out of work.)
The darkest thought of all may be this: no matter how much politics is applied to the internet and its
attendant technologies, it may simply be far too late in the game to change the future. The internet is
going to do to us whatever it is going to do, and the same end state will be achieved regardless of
human will. Gulp.
Do we at least want to have free access to anything on the internet? Well yes, of course. But it’s
important to remember that once a freedom is removed from your internet menu, it will never come
back. The political system only deletes online options — it does not add them. The amount of
internet freedom we have right now is the most we’re ever going to get.
If our lives are a movie, this is the point where the future audience is shouting at the screen, “For
God’s sake, load up on as much porn and gore and medical advice, and blogs and film and TV and
everything as you possibly can! It’s not going to last much longer!”
And it isn’t.
Douglas Coupland is currently artist in residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris.
Twitter @dougcoupland
Prints by Douglas Coupland. Acrylic on archival pigment print 49’x37’ (2014); courtesy of The
Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
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