I've been looking for a new winter jacket, and nothing I've come across so far says "this is it". But I'm counting the days until the shopping process as we know it is history. Instead, a wide selection of perfect-for-you products will be just a click away: from the right brands, in the right colors/sizes/styles, and at the right prices. Here's why:
1. I've just read in Technology Review that two "reality mining" scientists from MIT Media Lab have developed a model for predicting how the rest of your day will go based on your early morning activities. After analyzing 350,000 hours of behavioral data collected from 100 volunteers' cell phones, they're able to forecast where you'll go and what you'll do with 79% accuracy - and how you'll get along with another person or fit into a group with 96% accuracy.
2. Quantcast uses a similar approach to extrapolate the demographic composition of your website's visitors. By comparing the behavior of volunteers with known age/gender/ethnicity/income/etc against millions of anonymous clickstreams, Quantcast can determine how old/educated/wealthy/etc your viewers are by analyzing a sample of your traffic.
3. During my last year at MIT, I worked as a research assistant on a voting analysis project. Our goal was to build a statistical model that could predict county-level voter responses on various California propositions based on demographic data and previous voting records. I remember asking how accurate such a model can be; aren't we unique individuals who make case by case judgments on different issues? My rocket-scientist-smart advisor shrugged. Free will is over-rated, he said. With the right data set, you can extrapolate absolutely anything.
Sooner or later, someone will put the power of statistics behind ecommerce. It should be possible, for instance, to predict what you'll buy next, based on some combination of your age/gender/income, what items you already own, and how you spent the morning? In which case, shopping becomes pointless; you could go straight to the items you're meant to order. You wouldn't even have to feel guilty about breaking your budget, since the purchase will have been 79% predestined.
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