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On Big Data’s shrinking returns
mostlysignssomeportents: In my new Guardian column, I point out that the big-data-driven surveillance business model is on the rocks. Once upon a time, you could sell soap with a slogan like “You will be clean,” but we become resistant to ads. While Big Data initially generated some promising sell-through results, these days, companies like Facebook…
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A Pepsi commercial on MTV promoting the 1998 MTV music video awards emphasized the fact that the video of the year award would be selected by the viewers through Internet and phone calls live during the show; the commercial dramatized “the power of choice” and reminded us that “you are in charge of your destiny,”…
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It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be…