Eli Pariser - The Filter Bubble

This kind of approach isn’t a futuristic fantasy. A team led by John Hauser at MIT’s business school has developed the basic techniques for what they call Web site morphing, in which a shopping site analyzes users’ clicks to figure out what kinds of information and styles of presentation are most effective and then adjusts the layout to suit a particular user’s cognitive style. Hauser estimates that Web sites that morph can increase “purchase intentions” by 21 percent. Industrywide, that’s worth billions. And what starts with the sale of consumer products won’t end there: News and entertainment sources that morph ought to enjoy an advantage as well.

On one hand, morphing makes us feel more at home on the Web. Drawing from the data we provide, every Web site can feel like an old friend. But it also opens the door to a strange, dreamlike world, in which our environment is constantly rearranging itself behind our backs. And like a dream, it may be less and less possible to share with people outside of it—that is, everyone else.

Thanks to augmented reality, that experience may soon be par for the course offline as well.

“On the modern battlefield,” Raytheon Avionics manager Todd Lovell told a reporter , “there is way more data out there than most people can use. If you are just trying to see it all through your eyes and read it in bits and bites, you’re never going to understand it. So the key to the modern technology is to take all that data and turn it into useful information that the pilot can recognize very quickly and act upon.” What Google does for online information, Lovell’s Scorpion project aims to do for the real world.

Fitting like a monocle over one of a jet pilot’s eyes, the Scorpion display device annotates what a pilot sees in real time. It color-codes potential threats, highlights when and where the aircraft has a missile lock, assists with night vision, and reduces the need for pilots to look at a dashboard in an environment where every microsecond matters. “It turns the whole world into a display,” jet pilot Paul Mancini told the Associated Press.

This is augmented-reality technology, and it’s moving rapidly from the cockpits of jet planes to consumer devices that can tune out the noise and turn up the signal of everyday life. Using your iPhone camera and an app developed by Yelp, the restaurant recommendation service, you can see eateries’ ratings haphazardly displayed over their real-world storefronts. A new kind of noise-canceling headphone can sense and amplify human voices while tuning other street or airplane noise down to a whisper. The Meadowlands football stadium is spending $100 million on new applications that give fans who attend games in person the ability to slice and dice the game in real time, view key statistics as they happen, and watch the action unfold from a variety of angles—the full high-information TV experience overlaid on a real game.

At DARPA, the defense research and development agency, technologies are being developed that make Scorpion look positively quaint. Since 2002, DARPA has been pushing forward research in what it calls augmented cognition, or AugCog, which uses cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging to figure out how best to route important information into the brain. AugCog begins with the premise that there are basic limits as to how many tasks a person can juggle at a time, and that “this capacity itself may fluctuate from moment to moment depending on a host of factors including mental fatigue, novelty, boredom and stress.”

By monitoring activity in brain areas associated with memory, decision making, and the like, AugCog devices can figure out how to make sure to highlight the information that most matters. If you’re absorbing as much visual input as you can, the system might decide to send an audio alert instead. One trial, according to the Economist, gave users of an AugCog device a 100 percent improvement in recall and a 500 percent increase in working memory. And if it sounds far-fetched, just remember: The folks at DARPA also helped invent the Internet.

Augmented reality is a booming field, and Gary Hayes, a personalization and augmented-reality expert in Australia, sees at least sixteen different ways it could be used to provide services and make money. In his vision, guide companies could offer augmented reality tours, in which information about buildings, museum artifacts, and streets is superimposed on the environs. Shoppers could use phone apps to immediately get readouts on products they’re interested in—including what the objects cost elsewhere. (Amazon.com already provides a rudimentary version of this service.) Augmented reality games could layer clues into real-world environments.

Augmented-reality tech provides value, but it also provides an opportunity to reach people with new attention-getting forms of advertising. For a price, digital sportscasts are already capable of layering corporate logos onto football fields. But this new technology offers the opportunity to do that in a personalized way in the real world: You turn on the app to, say, help find a friend in a crowd, and projected onto a nearby building is a giant Coke ad featuring your face and your name.

And when you combine the personalized filtering of what we see and hear with, say, face recognition, things get pretty interesting: You begin to be able to filter not just information, but people.

As the cofounder of OkCupid, one of the Web’s most popular dating sites, Chris Coyne has been thinking about filtering for people for a while. Coyne speaks in an energetic, sincere manner, furrowing his brows when he’s thinking and waving his hands to illustrate. As a math major, he got interested in how to use algorithms to solve problems for people.

“There are lots of ways you can use math to do things that turn a profit,” he told me over a steaming bowl of bibimbap in New York’s Koreatown. Many of his classmates went off to high-paid jobs at hedge funds. “But,” he said, “what we were interested in was using it to make people happy.” And what better way to make people happy than to help them fall in love?

The more Coyne and his college hallmates Sam Yeager and Max Krohn looked at other dating sites, the more annoyed they got: It was clear that other dating sites were more interested in getting people to pay for credits than to hook up. And once you did pay, you’d often see profiles of people who were no longer on the site or who would never write you back.

Coyne and his team decided to approach the problem with math. The service would be free. Instead of offering a one-sizefits-all solution, they’d use number crunching to develop a personalized matching algorithm for each person on the site. And just as Google optimizes for clicks, they’d do everything they could to maximize the likelihood of real conversations—if you could solve for that, they figured, profits would follow. In essence, they built a modern search engine for mates.

When you log on to OkCupid, you’re asked a series of questions about yourself. Do you believe in God? Would you ever participate in a threesome? Does smoking disgust you? Would you sleep with someone on the first date? Do you have an STD? (Answer yes, and you get sent to another site.) You also indicate how you’d like a prospective partner to answer the same questions and how important their answers are to you. Using these questions, OkCupid builds a custom-weighted equation to figure out your perfect match. And when you search for people in your area, it uses the same algorithm to rank the likelihood of your getting along. OkCupid’s powerful cluster of servers can rank ten thousand people with a two-hundred-question match model and return results in less than a tenth of a second.

They have to, because OkCupid’s traffic is booming. Hundreds of thousands of answers to poll questions flow into their system each night. Thousands of new users sign up each day. And the system is getting better and better.