Five fears about mass predictive personalization in an age of surveillance capitalism

... Contemporary production and consumption practices are currently being transformed in ways that depart radically from those which characterized the pre-digital, networked age. Indeed, many commentators claim that the ‘New Industrial Revolution’ that is now dawning will provoke changes across every aspect of social life of a magnitude and scale as disruptive and far-reaching as those brought about by the original Industrial Revolution.1 While there are many factors that have contributed to these changes, there is no doubt that technological innovation has played a critical role, particularly the emergence of the Internet, the ability to store digital data on the cloud, and the rise of ubiquitous computing (including the rapid and widespread take up of ‘smart’ connected devices in contemporary industrialized societies). All of these innovations have supported the emergence of powerful technologies currently referred to as ‘artificial intelligence.’ It is these technologies that, in retrospect, may come to be regarded as the 21st-century equivalent of the late 19th-century steam engine, for it is the application of machine learning algorithms applied to massive volumes of digital data, which is powering the transformations in cultures of consumption and production that are currently unfolding.