I just got fired a month ago. I have not been doing ANY research on the next move but casually talk to my partner about going for a coding boot camp. I haven’t even updated my LinkedIn or anything like that.
Suddenly, I am served coding Bootcamp ads on Youtube, they show up on the little dedicated ads banners on websites and so on.
I am not referring to the more predictable situation where I search for true crime shows or so and have all these streaming services serving me ads based on my search history.
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Machine learning can figure out relationships between things that are way deeper than humans are usually aware of.
For example it may know that you’re recently interested in Terence McKenna because three months ago you bought tickets to a music festival for the first time in your life.
So while you’re talking about Terence McKenna with your parents over dinner, the AI at Facebook Advertising knows to present you with Terence McKenna themed sunglasses because people who go to Burning Man for the first time ever might just end up interested in the man.
It doesn’t know why. It just knows that it happens. There might be other factors too, like for example you’ve been googling up famous painters, and listening to Infected Mushroom, and searching terms like `dark web` and `how to use tor` and `what is monero` and doing deep dives on wikipedia into math and fractals or something.
Maybe you recently bought tickets to Peru, and you canceled a return flight, and rented a llama. It might even be as subtle as you googled `most durable sunglasses` or `what is a chicken bus`.
Long story short, it knows a trillion mathematical correlations, so it can probably predict that you’ll be arguing another Time Wave Zero over the dinner table with your dad who has been googling `military school` and `are bell bottoms still in style` or who’s been spending more money at Taco Bell lately, and your mom has been googling `cute kittens` more often than usual.
Then one day you hit up youtube for `best of Norm MacDonald` and it’s knows the time has come to send you ads for Terence McKenna t-shirts in the style of those Che Guevara pictures.
Before you even realize it, the voice you use to read internet comments becomes Terence McKenna’s voice and you’re not even sure how or when it happened, and you’re just riding the brakes all the way down from that point.
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