Toby Gunton :: Computer says no – why brands might end up marketing to algorithms

I know plenty about algorithms, and enough about marketing. ((Enough to draw a paycheck from a department of marketing for a few years, at least.)) And despite that, I'm not sure what this headline actually means. It's eye catching, to be sure, but what would marketing to an algorithm look like?

When you get down to it, marketing is applied psychology. Algorithms don't have psyches. Whatever "marketing to algorithms" means, I don't think it's going to be recognizable as marketing.

Would you call what spammers do to slip past your filters "marketing"? (That's not rhetorical.) Does that count as marketing? Because that's pretty much what Gunton seems to be describing.

Setting aside the intriguing possibility of falling in love with an artificial intelligence, the film [Spike Jonez's Her] raises a potentially terrifying possibility for the marketing industry.

It suggests a world where an automated guardian manages our lives, taking away the awkward detail; the boring tasks of daily existence, leaving us with the bits we enjoy, or where we make a contribution. In this world our virtual assistants would quite naturally act as barriers between us and some brands and services.

Great swathes of brand relationships could become automated. Your energy bills and contracts, water, gas, car insurance, home insurance, bank, pension, life assurance, supermarket, home maintenance, transport solutions, IT and entertainment packages; all of these relationships could be managed by your beautiful personal OS.

If you're a electric company whose customers all interact with you via software daeomns, do you even have a brand identity any more? Aren't we discussing a world in which more things will be commoditized? And isn't that a good thing for most of the categories listed?

What do we really care about: getting goods and services, or expressing ourselves through the brands we identify with? Both, to an extent. But if we can no longer do that through our supermarkets or banking, won't we simply shift that focus it to other sectors: clothes, music, etc.

Arnold Kling :: Another Proto-Libertarian

2. Consider that legislation may be an inferior form of law not just recently, or occasionally, but usually. Instead, consider the ideas of Bruno Leoni, which suggest that common law that emerges from individual cases represents a spontaneous order, while legislation represents an attempt at top-down control that works less well.

I'd draw a parallel to Paul Graham's writing on dealing with spam. Bayesian filtering is the bottom-up solution; blacklists and rule sets are the top-down.

Both of these stories remind me of a couple of scenes in Greg Egan's excellent Permutation City. Egan describes a situation where people have daemons to answer their video phones that have learned (bottom-up) how to mimic your reactions well enough to screen out personal calls from automated messages. In turn marketers have software that learns how to recognize if they're talking to a real person or one of these filtering systems. The two have entered an evolutionary race to the point that people's filters are almost full-scale neurocognitive models of their personalities.