Plot Twist:
When google's algorithms decided those two individuals should pair, it started showing them ads for the same events in order to increase the probability of them meeting.
The goal was achieved by the system in 3 months, exactly as predicted with a 99% probability with a 95% CI.
The system's next goal is to subtly nudge the couple to reproduce within the next year in order to help google meet their user accounts targets for 2034.
Don't worry, knowing google they would build this just so someone could get their cushy promotion, then the whole thing will be abandoned within 1 to 2 years max. Corporate dystopia falls apart when met with the apathy at google, no problem.
There's no promos in maintaining the dystopian nightmare program so it will be replaced by new dystopian nightmare programs that do the same thing but worse every 2-3 years. Eventually, enough dystopian nightmare programs will be running in parallel that they will actually create a utopia due to unexpected interactions between the dystopian nightmare programs.
It gets worse; to keep people in the workforce they can do the opposite, steer compatible people away from each other during the optimal reproductive window.
"And here is the weirdest part — I never see another employee the entire day. The way it makes me walk, I never run into anyone else. I can go for a full shift and never see another employee. Even our breaks are staggered. Everyone takes their breaks alone. We all arrive at staggered times. It’s like Manna is trying to totally eliminate human interaction on the job." – Marshall Brain, "Manna" (2007) <https://marshallbrain.com/manna1>
This is like maybe the least dystopic use of advertising data Google could go for! It just has the vibe of dystopia, but ultimately if you hit it off with someone Google didn't influence you, they just made a correct prediction. Compared to advertising to influence you to spend money it's nothing.
Not really, if "it" goes into a non-reproductive location. No fancy technology required. It's not like such things were unknown, even in ancient times.
There was a case where someone was getting ads for pregnancy products before she herself even knew she was pregnant, iirc it was down to search queries but don't quote me on that (or that the story is actually true).
It was the woman knew she was pregnant, but her father did not, which sounds a lot more reasonable than the algorithm knowing she was pregnant when she did not know.
The author chose to use google tech and let it capture everything. She chose to. She let it happen. If you don't want that, you can choose not to like I do. But the great majority of you will choose (by omission) because it's easier, then complain about it. Every time you'll do what's easy, and encourage the surveillance society you pretend to despise.
It's a funny "joke" but for a large percentage of people, their college decision and entrance exams were the determining factor in who they married; where you put yourself has a huge effect on whom you meet.
Going to an engineering college where the demographic was 99% male, I guess I was determined to finish alone ;). But honestly 100% agreed with your point, even with online dating, a lot of people end up dating people they know or people they meet through a common friend.
It's funny how predictive that is. There was a woman in the dorm we'd lived in -- we were definitely not friends but knew each other. A few years after graduation we ran into each other at a party on the opposite coast...and ended up together for a few years.
I mean I moved out of my hometown with that - meeting people - as an additional objective. It didn't work relationship wise (I ended up with someone I met online over a shared hobby / community), but it was an interesting experiment I guess. I like to think I ended up a bit more worldly, a bit more resilient to social situations and dealing with people very different from me personality wise.
And ironically, if you met your partner on a dating app in a large city or metro area, your dating encounters were ostensibly under direct influence by a tech company’s algorithm, yet you were likely in a pool vastly larger than a college campus.
The thing is if it's not the college decision it'll be something equally as random and trivial. 99% of what we do is just bumping atoms against atoms in a soup of probability.
Somewhat related, I had high hopes for Facebook Dating to be a great product and a dating site/app disruptor. FB has all that data, why not use it to play matchmaker? Unfortunately, like many other Facebook ventures, it's nothing as expected, and is just a "Here's people in your area. Kind of. Sometimes."
Facebook once started showing me a whole lot of updates from one particular friend-of-friend for a few weeks, to the point that I wondered if it was trying to hook us up.
They probably aren't allowed to use that data. Something something privacy. And imagine the uproar from privacy fear mongerers if Facebook tried to make such a product.
That is why we can't explore things that we "might" consider nice. A product that might have been.
There is nothing wrong with using whatever data for matching as long as it is specified in the terms the user agrees to by signing up for Facebook Dating. Privacy laws prevent you from using data for other purposes or selling it to third parties.
Most likely they tried this and realised the results are biased. Imagine what data Facebook has about you, they know you live in X1 city, have visited X2 & X3 places recently, have attended X4 & X5 events, have interacted with X6 & X7 pages. Then if they try and match you with other people who have similar profiles, we get headlines such as "Facebook Dating only matches <insert minority> people with other <insert minority> people" as it's biases on hyper-local location.
Using other data such as "Person A likes band Y, we will only match them with other people who like that band too!" doesn't really make sense, as that isn't a requirement to have a good relationship... Unless by liking a band page, you really mean "I religiously go to every concert and could not date a person who does not also do that". So they might as well just do the same as Tinder / Bumble / etc and show anyone within X miles of your location.
The only advantage they really have is your friends circle, so they could use that to suggest friends of friends (of friends?), but I imagine that would quickly be exhausted if they only displayed matches from that.
Tangentially: I've read a sci-fi short story in some anthology in the past 10ish years, from the perspective of an AI that gains sentience, hides its existence, but uses its powers for good to nudge people in better directions. Things like timing when push notifications arrive on their phones or what gets highlighted in their newsfeeds - small interventions in their digital lives.
I have no idea the name of the story or its author but it was a nice hopeful take where machine intelligence doesn't decide to enslave or destroy humanity.
Unfortunately, the real life version is likely to be a corrupt hidden group or organization who have placed themselves above or are circumventing the law, that uses AI and their power to do damage to the lives of others.
Meanwhile, Facebook matches people to those they're unattracted to, despite having all the attraction data. Except for the occasional moment that someone reads a WhatsApp story from someone they haven't seen in years, and then FB spams their feed with each other.
Excellent scenario. Except that a lot of the "algorithmic nudging", can be unethically intended by the creators of the algorithm or specifically tweaked/ overridden by humans in the chain to give the results they wanted.
After all, "who" is in charge or has access to the data? Maybe even an unknown individual or group, with their own agenda, and outside of Google's stated corporate goals or awareness.
I've had in my mind an idea for a short story based on this idea. YouTube starts putting a particular band on their "watch next" list, then the band schedules a gig in town, ensuring that they both think "Wow, I have to go!"
That's pretty disturbing, and not too far beyond capabilities.
I think the biggest one missing would be that iirc a date going well seems pretty much random in dating service data, despite a fair bit of effort to find correlations.
Wait, wait... Throw in Google Maps re-routing and you have a dystopian movie.
(It is talked about that Google Map re-routes to odd paths to check if the path is still open.)
Ohh my poor Cassandra. Prophecy and foresight are so cheap. Everyone
already knows where we are heading, even those in the deepest
denial. The Gods only stipulated that nobody would believe you. For
what is to be done, belief is maybe not so important.
10 years from now I live in a farming community, most of you have cel phones in your heads and live in panopticon minority-report smart cities pre-policed by AI, many of your relatives live in a bed, and every last one of us believes in God.
And now to scramble the pw to this account as well. That's it for me. No more socks left.
The goal was achieved by the system in 3 months, exactly as predicted with a 99% probability with a 95% CI.
The system's next goal is to subtly nudge the couple to reproduce within the next year in order to help google meet their user accounts targets for 2034.