Kieran Michael’s Random Thoughts on Technology & Marketing

Sorry (to all five of my readers) that I’ve been away.  I’ve been off building a Rube Goldbergian Babbage Engine to generate project leads automagically.  It’s slower than I’d thought it would be; I didn’t factor in Antarctica.

Anyway, trolling metafilter today, as is my wont, I came across this post about new developments in recording cognitive processes, which is of course catnip to this faithless correspondent.  The thrust of the mefi post (containing many excellent links and MeFi’s always-stellar community commentary) is that researchers have been been able to recreate the actual imagery from “inside” a subject’s visual cortex.  Essentially, they reconstructed and viewed what the subject saw “inside their head.”  That is awesome in the true sense of the word.

There are, of course, no practical applications for this – yet.  But I’m concerned about the intersection of cognitive technology and ethics, particularly in security/law enforcement and marketing/sales.  Science like this gets misunderstood – this development in particular has been reported as a “dream recording machine” in the popular press .  I think, slowly, over time these sorts of misconceptions engender a kind of confidence in the technology itself that’s unwarranted.  And that faith in the technology itself can lead to abuse, as was the case in India where a person was convicted of a crime based on fMRI “evidence” or the TSA’s using microexpressions to “identify” potential terrorists.  People put up with this sort of thing because it’s science-based, but people don’t understand the difference between a validated and proven use of science and, well, essentially pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain stuff.

In terms of marketing and sales, we’re not at the point yet that technology can directly discern or mediate our cognitive processes (although there’s a few nascent attempts out there).  However, most of the barriers to employing technology to more directly influence our consumption – or even political opinion – are essentially scaling problems.  And if there’s one thing the history of technology teaches us, it’s that scaling problems are rarely insurmountable.  Already, a good qualitative researcher or CI practitioner can elicit astoundingly personal thoughts from a respondent, and advertising campaigns can sway opinion in entire demographics.  As market researchers, we’re already dealing with the ethics of probing people’s inner lives and using that to our client’s advantage; the ethical problems exist now.  But throwing cognitive technology into the mix- especially considering the public’s trust in technology and the dubious history of how such technology has been deployed – raises the stakes to truly Orwellian (or perhaps Huxleian?) heights.  As the distinction between our public and private actions becomes even more blurred, perhaps we should start thinking now about a potential blurring between our public and private thoughts.

(Apologies to Cheap Trick)