This from a book in the Spenser series by Robert B. Parker - pretty good
books (but Parker is now dead and this one "Wonderland" is by "Ace
Atkins"). Spenser, a Boston PI is discussing a Harvard Business School
Professor and gambling entrepreneur with one of his former graduate
students:
“She tapped her front tooth as she thought. ‘Machiavelli, for one.’
‘That was a business class?’
‘It had a fancier title than that, something like “Machiavelli and
Computational Models for Consumer Behavior” or some kind of junk,’ she
said. ‘It was Harvey Rose’s signature class. We all read The Prince, and
Rose would relate the text to using data to get your consumers to do
what you want them to do.’
‘As in the ends justified the means.’
‘Computational models are not educated guesses,’ she said. ‘Using data
of past behavior, a well-built model allows its user to accurately
predict what consumers will do in any given situation, often more
accurately than the consumer assesses his or herself.’
‘And what does that have to do with The Prince?’
‘It reduces everything to a data set,’ she said. ‘If you think of your
consumers as data sets and not people, it allows you to completely
disengage from morality. Data sets are amoral. If the data says
low-income consumers are more likely to spend that extra fifty bucks
than middle-income consumers, then you target them. You don’t care if
they can’t pay the rent or go to the doctor.’
‘Ah.’
‘And as the model gets better and better, it becomes a manipulation
tool. Based on past behavior, you can set up the optimal circumstances
that pretty much guarantee the outcome. It almost destroys free will. We
can know that they will, and how they will, and for how long, and under
what conditions.’” (p. 154)
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Edmund Chattoe-Brown
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