Executive Briefing: Understanding the cult of prediction

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.