Video description
We’re living in a cultural moment is obsessed with making predictions. In politics and in business, we’re constantly coming up with ways to collect more data for a singular purpose: to predict what will happen next.
This overwhelming desire for prescience shapes the way we design, measure, and understand everything from products and marketing to politics and movements. Good predictions demand both precision and accuracy. Farrah Bostic (The Difference Engine) walks you through how, in the quest to get more and more granular about how people will behave in the future, in the hopes that we can anticipate or manipulate that behavior, businesses are often tempted to rely on emerging or untested technologies—and sometimes pseudoscience—to get the “data” that fuels those predictions.
While this moment seems to be particularly defined by prediction, the practice goes back to (at least) the first lie detectors and has come to encompass practices like hypnosis, technology like medical imaging, and encoded anthropological approaches like microexpressions. But the implications are worse than wasting money and time. Businesses and brands are sacrificing the opportunity to understand things deeply and are simultaneously creating social negative externalities, like normalizing surveillance and misinformation, undermining public trust and values, and dehumanizing the very people whose behavior we want to predict.
Prerequisite knowledge
- Familiarity with the purpose of typical data collection methods, including basic analytics, surveys and polls, and user interviews
What you'll learn
- Discover how data addiction leads to more faulty data collection methods; how data collection practices normalize surveillance, mistrust, and manipulation; and how (and when) to "get inside people's heads" without violating their privacy or bodily autonomy
This session is from the 2019 O'Reilly Strata Conference in New York, NY.
Product information
- Title: Executive Briefing: Understanding the cult of prediction
- Author(s):
- Release date: February 2020
- Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
- ISBN: 0636920372264
You might also like
video
Executive Briefing: Building a culture of self-service from predeployment to continued engagement
GE Aviation has more than 200,000 tables at its disposal and has made it a mission …
book
Business Report Guides
This book offers tactics for creating business plans as well as research reports. Readers will find …
video
Making the Leap: Creating the Next Generation CIO
Corporate IT functions and IT leaders are entering a radically new era. Major new developments--including cloud …
video
Executive Briefing: 5G—A playground for AI
The advent of 5G promises to change our lives in a radically big way. This revolution …