Machine Learning the Election

This going to be an abbreviated entry, but I wanted to draw your attention to this translation of a Das Magazin article.

To be honest, I don’t know how to tackle this issue, and I can confidently predict that I will be talking much more about the legal and moral implications of identifying people through big data in future posts.

But frankly, if all that is done with this data is effective marketing, we’ll have gotten off easy. Frankly, I would not be at all surprised if human brains were fundamentally hackable. Obviously, the human brain is an extraordinarily complicated system, but each must still operate deterministically at some level. And, as machine learning and Artificial Intelligence methods improve, consistent and repeatable tricks will be found.

This is not to say, of course, that any one individual trick will work on each brain. But, as the predictive metrics improve, the most effective tricks for each individual brain type will be identified. Is it still free will if your behavior can be reliably predicted?

I’m not sure, but I think we’re going to find out fast.